Join me on MEDITATIVE SOUNDSCAPES for the premiere of CELESTIAL MUSIC BOX. At midnight onJune 20 (The Summer Solstice) EST (NYC Time) I will be playing the entire night sky using the technology behind CELESTIAL MUSIC BOX. From midnight this Friday (EST Time), you can access the sounds of CELESTIAL MUSIC BOX through the exclusive web portal by supporting my PATREON.
CELESTIAL MUSIC BOX is an ambient music experience that immerses body, mind and spirit in the healing energy of the stars. This suite of gentle tones is generated in real time using the night sky above the listener as musical score, to bring the āharmony of the spheresā down to earth. Specifically tuned to healing frequencies, each note is generated by the position, brightness and distance of the stars, showering the listener with a gentle, deeply relaxing, rain of sounds. Listeners can choose to hear the stars from any place on earth and any time in the past or futureāgiving your special place or time a new voice. CELESTIAL MUSIC BOX will be an exclusive listening experience for members of my PATREON. You can support my work for at a minimum of $4.32 per month and receive downloads of my MEDITATIVE SOUNDSCAPE music for meditation, relaxation, sleeping, yoga, listening, being and becoming and of course you will have unlimited access to listen to CELESTIAL MUSIC BOX listening to the night sky as a unique sleeping experience driving by the stars above.
I’m announcing an exciting new sleep music listening experience and I would love if you were a part of it.
In 2016 I started doing Sleep Concerts. During these concerts I play soothing ambient music for 6-12 hours while people sleep. They are very fulfilling and often moving experiences for me, but they are also exhausting often requiring several days for me to physically recover. During once such concert in 2017 in Brooklyn, NY I had an idea: what if something natural could trigger the notes while people sleep? Biorhythm sensors? Air temperature? A music box?! What if the stars in the sky could trigger sounds like raised dots on the metal cylinder of a music box? During the wee hours of the morning while emerged the clear meditative state that often arises from playing controlled, gentle music for so many hours, Celestial Music Box was born. It took several years of thinking and research, but itās finally ready!
Imagine listening to music that uses the coordinates of the overhead sky at night to trigger notes while you sleep. Imagine going back in time and listening to the night sky the day you were born, your child was born, you met you soulmate or someone you loved left this planet? Imagine listening to the night sky over GreenlandĀ the night Amelia Earhart flew over the Atlantic ocean?
WithĀ Celestial Music BoxĀ you can choose the date and location to generate the star map above and listen tot he music that star map generates.
If you are having difficulty sleepingĀ or would like to hear a system of music supported by the sacred geometry of the universe itself, this is for you!
Celestial Music Box will be released on June 20, the Summer Solstice, the longest night of the year. This music will be exclusively available to my Patreon supporters.
So in addition to the free music from Meditative Soundscapes I post there, you will be able to listen to generative sleep music system that I am sure will resonate deeply with many people.
Be a part of the community of Celestial Deep Listeners.
At long last, a project I’ve been working on for over four years has arrived!
Recreating the sounds of extinct animals is a call to listen in the present.
EchozooĀ is an audio portal to the past, an invitation to the present, and an urgent message to the future. Ā Reimagining the sounds of earthās ancient history beyond a human scale, reconstructing the sound of extinct animals and their habitats,Ā EchozooĀ connects listeners with the sounds of the distant past. Created with field recordings of living animals, these are digitally processed to re-create the sounds of their now-extinct relatives and recomposed into immersive audio experiences. These long-silenced voices are re-sounded and heard within an imagined soundscape of their habitats, encouraging us to hear imagined ecosystems together with these ancestors in a powerful meditation on nature and the current loss of biodiversity in our natural world.
Echozoo Promo
Explore the Echozoo Portal here at echozoo.org. You can listen to samples of creatures on the interactive map showing the region where these extinct creatures once lived.
You can support this largely self-financed project by buying one or more of the three-volume collection of extinction songs.
Good morning or evening friends. Below are some events I’m involved with and news about the release of a new Landscapes album. Thank you for your continued support and interest in my musical adventures!
Nora Gibson Contemporary Ballet presents HUMAN
I am really excited for this next chapter in my long collaboration with
one of the most exciting choreographers working in contemporary ballet.
This science fiction influenced ballet has stunning digital video,
beautiful lighting, strong dancers, intricate choreography and an
engulphing score that wraps you up like an electric blanket. Not to be
missed!
April 20, 21, 8:00 PM & April 22, 3:00 PM (with artist Q&A)
Performance Garage
1515 Brandywine Street
Philadelphia, PA 19130 Tickets
What Do Opossums Dreams Sound Like?
I’m happy to be collaborating with an old friend, Liza Goodell from Spiral Q Puppet Theater
on this show. She has built a giant opossum sculpture that people are
invited to lie down in. Inside will be my soundtrack of what I imagine
an opossum’s dreams sound like while he’s “playing dead”. Plus they’ll
be work by Katie Parry, Tom Parry, and Marina Borker.
ST. BERNARD LION: AN ARTISTIC EXPLORATION OF NEIGHBORHOOD FOLKLORE April 20 ā May 18, 2018
Opening reception Friday, April 20th, 6:00 ā 8:00 PM
University City Arts League
4226 Spruce Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104ā More Info
Still from William Fields’ visuals for Landscapes LiveLandscapes 3, Uttarakhand
If you missed myĀ Landscapes show at the Rotunda (see the photo above from the show with William Fields’ brilliantĀ real-time projections) and wanted to hear part of my surrealists’ field recordings creations fromĀ North India, I just released an album on Bandcamp, Landscapes 3: UttarakhandĀ with gorgeous artwork by my fellow PECAH residentĀ Isabel Moreno.
Lastly, for those who are into meditation or would like to learn more, I’ll be teaching four classes at Springboard Studio
this week and next. This is a great class for beginners or experienced
meditators who want to go deeper into the classic Buddhist text of the SatipatthÄna Sutta. Each class will have periods of silent meditation, teaching, and discussion.
SatipattÄna: The Four Foundations of Mindfulness
Wednesday, April 18, 7:00 – 8:30 PM
Sunday, April 22, 7:30 – 9:00 PM
Wednesday, April 25, 7:00 – 8:30 PM
Sunday, April 29, 7:30 – 9:00 PM
Springboard Studio
530 Carpenter Lane, West Mt. Airy
This Wednesday, Thursday and Friday I’ll be doing some live sound design and music for Fran Markey’s new piece At & About the Edge of.
Then next week I have some brand new music in Zornitsa Stoyanova’s Explicit Female.
Also I’m hard at work on several new music / sound projects including Echozoo – my forthcoming iPhone/Android App which plays sonic portraits of extinct animals from your area.
As part of the research for Echozoo, I traveled to the Northwest United
States to do some field recording. The trip was made possible by the
support of the Echozoo Hatchfund
backers (thank you!). My trip took me to Portland, Forks, The Hoh
Rainforest and Turnbull Wildlife Refuge in Washington and the National
Bison Range and Glacier National Park in Montana. I captured a lot of
great ambient sounds of rain, wind, trees, crickets, birds, elk, owls,
squirrels, bison and lots of unidentified sounds for the Echozoo App.
Here’s a Flickr album with some photos from the trip.
Hello and happy holidays! I wanted to thank
everyone for their support of my musical projects throughout 2015. Below
is a recap of projects I worked on in 2015 with some free downloads,
videos and other media.
In a River the Color of Lead
Early this year I released my 8th solo studio album on NOREMIXES.
The album is a continuation of my exploration of the piano as an object
of beauty and noise. It was released digitally and as a vinyl record
(with support from Kickstarter backers). Iām very proud of this work and hope you all got a chance to listen to it.
In February I was delighted to perform with my long-time choreographic partner Nora Gibson and her company Nora Gibson Contemporary Ballet in the premiere of 257,885,161-1. This ballet was a meditation on the mathematical concept of twin primes. The premiere was well received and sounded and looked gorgeous. Excerpts from the premiere can be viewed here on Vimeo.
In 2016 I’ll be working again with NGCB on an even more ambitious project EPHEMERAL, a work about time for dance, light, and environmental sound score.
EPHEMERAL
Christ Church Neighborhood House Theater, Philadelphia
Feb. 19-21
This year I began to really explore the
sound world of actual places through field recording. I published
several works through the brilliant UK based site Cities and Memory. Here are three pieces they published:
Turtle River (Philadelphia) presented on World Listening Day and at the Oxford Contemporary Music Festival.
Corca Dhuibhne (Western Ireland) field recordings and reimagined sounds recorded in Dingle and the Cliffs of Moher.
Utopia part of an international collection of artists who created an imaginary sound world for the Thomas More novel Utopia (1515)
The last piece I wanted to share was from the Papal visit
to Philadelphia in September 2015. The piece contains recordings I
gathered over three days as about a million people descended on center
city Philadelphia to celebrate the historic visit by Pope Francis. As
with many of these recordings, I sought to remove the element of time
and create a shifting landscape of timeless space.
dark matter
This season I am Artist in Residence at <fidget> along with choreographer / artist Zornitsa Stoyanova. In November we collaborated on the performance film dark matter. It was premiered at the <fidget> Fall Experimental Music Festival.
The above photo is by Glenn Benge from the premiere.
In March 2016 I’ll be performing another
concert at <fidget>. This is going to be a 12-hour long concert of
sleep music! Bring a sleeping bag, pillow and blanket, enjoy some dream
tea and snuggle in for 12-hours of dream drones and tape loop
lullabies. I’ll be performing ambient music all night with visuals from
Alex Bond focusing on themes of Bardo, reincarnation, Dream Yoga and
sleep (un)consciousness.
To get a taste of the kind of music you’ll hear, please check out my 2014 sleep music album, Quiescent. It’s an eight hour mix of music for the four sleep cycles.
Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State
March 19 7pm – March 20 7am
thefidget space
Edge of Nostalgia or EON is an interactive album application that I worked on for much of 2012 and 2013. It’s essentially an app that uses the microphone on your iPhone to process the sound world around you in a musical way. It’s a seven track ambient music album that blends the sounds around you into the music. A train rides by, kids playing across the street, the ambient sounds of your office all filter through your microphone and blend in with the music, a new musical creation is born. It’s been very well reviewed (including a feature in Create Digital Music). You can download it from the Apps Store for 99 cents.
ALOTones was an advertising campaign from Agency Magma in NYC. For this campaign I was commissioned to write seven original tracks for the seven flavors of ALO. On the side of each bottle of the drink in stores was a QR Code where the person could scan the code and download an original piece of Mikronesia music that was written to embody that flavor. Hereās a sample track:
As a viral video campaign Agency Magma created some videos of artists drinking the ALO Drink, listening to my music and creating original illustrations in response.
Hereās one of the video experiments:
Hereās a video explaining the whole campaign and the product in more detail:
