Music often tends to fall into two categories: art and entertainment. This isn't to say that the line is never blurred; in fact, it often is. However, most of us view music as entertainment, as merely a money-making commodity. As a result, music has become disturbingly mundane. The same ideas are rehashed and repackaged, and our aesthetics have suffered significantly.
I prefer to approach music as an art. I'm often looking to new or unusual approaches for composition. Much of my work involves the use of stochastic or aleatoric processes. Typically, I allow for these random procedures to be part of the score so that each performance turns out a little differently, without necassarily turning out to be a different piece altogether. Though these may, at times, result in sounds that may seem aesthetically unpleasing or challenging to listen to, as a subscriber to the John Cage philosophy that everything is music, I think these challenges give us a better appreciation for the world around us. If everything is music, everything can be enjoyed as such. With that said, enjoy...
Faceless
This piece was an attempt at blending some of the metal style
I've been doing for years with the newer electronic techniques I've
been working with lately, particularly vocal synthesis techniques and
stochastic drum patterns. The
end result turned out to be more metal than I had envisioned, but it
still turned out pretty well.
Symbiotic Violence
This was done for a class at Berklee as an experimentation
with Logic's Environment. I focused mainly on making the drums more
interesting by getting Logic to "improvise" them. For the main drum
sections, I performed a few bars and cut them up into regions of
individual measures. I was then able to get Logic to randomly choose a
region on each measure so that it doesn't seem like a repeating loop.
This also results in a new performance each time the sequence is
played; in effect, each bounce results in a new take.
Refragment [bang(
This is a generative piece composed and performed using Pd.
Each chord has a bank of one-beat melodic fragments associated with the
cello and violin that are randomly chosen on each beat. The percussion
is generated using a probabilistic sequence, and the pads are run
through a simple random arpeggiator.