In my works, vocalists and actors are trained to mimic sampled collages of sound effects, pop songs, and musical ephemera, blurring the line between recording and live performance. My music is made up of others’ music, and I allow new meanings to grow up around familiar icons.  I remix samples with silence and sound effects, and create an arena in which memory of pop cultural materials are at battle in the audience’s mind.  Basically, I take recordings, and turn them into a live performance.

This process takes place on stage, as the live performer imitates and is seamlessly mixed into the sound score. In working with my ensemble, The Cabinet, the music works in at a deep level, fixing the choreography, singing, sound design, and even props of the piece.  By training performers to closely imitate pop cultural materials, I hope to use experimental theater and sampling to reflect on recording’s place in daily life.

So how do you experience this?  Come to a show.   Sending you a track doesn’t work.  Our rehearsals start with audio—we imitate a mash-up, and move to it.  And if you’ve checked out theater or dance websites, they don’t put many videos online, except an occasional clips preview.

So, if this website or insta or tiktok isn’t the right place to see my work…I can still help explain it.    Here’s 3 examples to give a taste, with soundbites of the music.

In the Psychic Driving project of the 1950s, subjects were force-fed psychedelics and played looped audiotapes as a kind of psychotherapy. However, the experiment actually turned patients into mush—at which point the project was sold to the CIA and became the MKUltra initiative, an inspiration for modern torture techniques. I because obsessed with the use of sound as a non-therapy, and started collecting tunes--including the CIA “torture playlist”. It struck me how many lyrics by Taylor Swift reference torture. As I collected her samples, they spontaneously assembled into a piece, where two people have an eyes-closed, waking nightmare, and wrestle on a mattress, each person restraining the other’s violent reactions to a dream.

In Transcendental Etudes, I got obsessed with phrases we might use in our relationships with each other, and how their meaning can gradually crumble. Take the phrase “I see you”; it’s specific but ambiguous. It might be playful or a line from The Shining. It acknowledges another person, but to what end?  I started collecting jazz standards with those lyrics, including dozens of covers from the 1950s and 1960s. I was interested in how that phrase might transform itself: for example,  “I see you, I can’t see you, I hear you, I can’t hear you…. ““I see you feel I can’t hear you”, and so on.  The piece begins with two people, on a seesaw, parroting the phrase “I see you”, then morphs. I  background the samples with a tempo glissando, an acoustic barber pole that echoes the rollercoaster nature of their seesaw.

In a piece called Border Towns, I became obsessed with how one might speak familiar tunes in tongues, using the fragments of lyrics, but reordered. Part of Border Towns, Ocean Grove uses songs that were historically performed in and around a Methodist revival camp.  One proximate source was Bruce Springsteen. I noticed at how many Springsteen songs use the word “born”. In this piece, people shout bits of that phrase, eyes closed, to passers-by. The entire piece involves a ritual process where blankets are laid out, performers are lowered on to them, and as hands are laid on their forehead, each one spontaneously is reborn as the Boss.

IIf you want a more intricate account of how I create samples together with physical theater, check out my prose pieces THREE CANONS or BREAKDOWN. For Breakdown, It helps if you listen simultaneously to this piece, Etude #8 from Ten Transcendental Etudes: