The Spires (2020)
First, there was nothing at all and all the world was dark. And he was cast out, banned from returning and the chaos surrounded him and bound him up so he could never find his way home. So after many long years of torture, to end his despair, desperately he ventured into the void: to the deepest, most hidden, isolated parts of himself.
Way underground where the stones whispered and where they hung and grew from top to bottom, sharp and sudden and all around. They clicked and twisted and battered his body but still he searched - convinced he would end his pain. He searched for years and it felt like an eternity in those deep, agonising caves.
And finally, he came to a clearing - it was blue and white and calm. And he understood everything. So with a single pull he drew out the light and he knew it was the truth. He had decided and with a great rumble he willed the stones who had once whispered and cute him and they bent to his desire.
For days there was an immense cry throughout the land and an empty echo underneath it. And it was done: The Spires wound up from the ground to stand glorious and high. He pulled the light up and made it the sun for all the life to be with and it is said that even though the land is harsh and the air is hard to breathe, it is worth it to wake up every morning and see clearly.
The Wishing Tree
Lucifer's Penthouse
L 'antre de Llyr
2022: Like Waves
This piece was made for a kind of Xenakis tribute concert held at WAAPA in semester 1. It was my first time performing with live diffusion (which is so, so, so fun and it's one of my new favourite things. Also the venue was amazing). The idea for the piece came to me in a dream - I thought it would work really well to have the waves wash from one side of the room to the other. It included percussion performers in the quiet middle section, Defying Gravity played and they were excellent; I was so happy with the result. In hindsight, I feel that it would have been better if I'd instructed them to play throughout the entire piece - to come in and out between the waves, it would have created a fun little interaction between the performers and the track. I hadn't thought of that until after the fact. At any rate though, I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to participate in this and to have had the beautiful performers there to play our pieces.
The Sound of Violence
For Acoustic Box and A Group of People
The basic idea was to create a texture of ripping box sounds in a live setting. As I remember, it turned out really well! This was performed at the scratch orchestra concert in 2019 at WAAPA. This was so fun and I'm very happy to have been a part of it - the performers all put their energy completely into this one and as a result the performance of it was really great. It was a little wasteful but I had the boxes lying around my house after moving anyway, they needed to be disposed. I feel it was still a good use of the materials because I have very fond memories of this one. I recycled as much as I could after the performance.
Score
Sounds in Places
This was actually a first year assignment in 2017 but I thought it was really fun and I'd like to make an updated version someday. I was thinking about this idea of place and sound and if you physically take a sound to a different place, do you change that place? Do you change the sound? The idea was solid but the execution was very poor, basically I took recordings of all these things and played them through different little bluetooth speakers standing on columns - I was trying to make the sounds last for a long time. In hindsight I should have just taken a 20 minute recording of each different place instead of using a bunch of small recordings.
Still, this was really fun and interactive. I remember people picking up the speakers and holing two different places to their ears. The experience for each person was different depending on how they listened/reacted and when. Sadly, all I have left to document this is a quick diagram and the written idea. I was a little idealistic in my thinking about how far the sound would travel in the space - the area you could hear it from was a lot smaller than I'd thought it would be.
Fountain of Stolen Youth
A developmental video piece to reflect the reality of the dairy industry and the destruction our consumption has on the planet we call home.