My installation Extant is on Governor’s Island in NYC all summer, as part of Harvestworks’ exhibition. It’s open every Saturday & Sunday 11am-5pm, and is a beautiful trip. It uses my grandfather’s sextant, which he used to sail off to Tahiti:
“An immersive installation about celestial navigation amidst rising tides. An older mechanism of navigation–the sextant—is wired up to modern sensors and surround sound, to make an audience touch and learn this device.”—Harvestworks
My new dance-interactive piece Hypnagogia will be appearing at the Tanzhaus Zürich this June with choreographer Meret Schlegel. This piece (and it’s technology) has been in development for years. Many of you saw a version of Hypnagogia last February at the Brick with dancers Annie Wang and Maho Ogawa.
“Hypnagogia” refers to a transitional state between sleep and wakefulness, in which sudden “sleep starts”, or bursts of energy through a limb, push one back into a waking state. This collaboration explores the tensions between frenetic activity and placid stasis. In the piece, electronic devices create involuntary movements in the collaborators’ bodies during the performance. These tics are unpredictably generated by the sounds and movement, playing with the borderline between intentional and unexpected, sleep and wakefulness.
My new book SAMPLER is out! It’s on Edition One, and available July 1 through the link below.
Sampler quilts together essays on music, sampling, and reappropriation. There are hundreds of books on Pop Art, but few on musical collage, which dominates recent music—from Charles Ives to Girl Talk, vaporwave to Madlib. As we enter a new era where songwriters get accused of cryptomnesia, or cribbing tunes, Sampler takes a long view back at how musical appropriation has always hummed under the radar---given that much of this collage art is, in 2024, still illegal. The style of Sampler, like the collages it unpacks, stitches together description, analysis, and anecdote.
A one-night show that was on February 12, 2025 at the Brick in Williamsburg, a double bill with the fabulous Paul Pinto. Pieces new and old—from Psychic Driving, last year’s Etudes, and Hypnagogia.
Stay tuned as I archive posts and for upcoming events
ten transcendental etudes
Mass MoCA (march 2024)
HERE performing arts center (april 2024)
new album is out!
Regina, with performances by Bang-on-a-Can All Stars, harmonium, player piano, celesta, prepared piano and a kitchen-sink orchestra. All patriotic. Yeah.
bogliasco residency
My peripatetic pandemic year was spent in Rome, Joshua Tree, the Barbican, in NYC, and in the clifftop octagonal Bogliasco studio.
Working on transcendental etudes and the new album
For prepandemic, check out my works page