Fall happenings

I had an amazing, performing-filled summer wrapped up by a gig playing Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint with Mark Stewart and Dither Quartet at Lincoln Center Out of Doors and the Ellnora Guitar Festival. It was also my first time in a while without any big looming composing deadlines, so I spent a truly luxurious amount of time chipping away at a piano/electronics piece for my dear friend Paul Kerekes and finishing up a whole new batch of music for a re-formed (not reformed) Marateck. It's Fall now though, and that means it's time to hunker down and write a whole bunch of music.

My next month or two will be hammering out a guitar/electronics piece for my old teacher Jack Sanders for a Feb 2016 premiere, and doing a bunch of planning work for Invisible Anatomy's new show for the National Sawdust in January 2016. I've got one other big project for February that I'll announce properly soon, but it's a doozy and I can't wait. I'll write more about it and the new IA show soon.

Meanwhile, I'll be digging into Anthology, a big, semi-theatrical, electronically-focused piece for the NY-based Soldier's Tale ensemble Exceptet that will be premiered on MATA Interval on March 6. I'm really excited for this piece, as I'm trying to synthesize several ideas I've explored in the past few years – the use of physically demanding music to create inherently dramatic performance situations, the use of simple technology as a musical and dramatic amplifier, and the construction of coherent larger forms out of music whose mid-scale surface elements vary wildly and behave in unexpected ways. In one movement, the violinist will be close-miked, amplified, and asked to play extremely quietly, bringing out the non-violin sounds of her bow on the strings, breath, and singing. In another, the clarinetist will perform wearing muscle activity sensors connected to oscillators that emit sound when he isn’t relaxed enough. I think it'll be really weird and fun. 

On writing breaks this fall, I'll be playing more Reich with Dither in October, a sweet Brooks Frederickson jam in November, and a bunch of stuff on Matt Welch's Stone residency in December. Also, Bearthoven are playing my piece Simple Machine at Shapeshifter Lab on 9/27, and Ken Thompson is doing Nausea on the SONiC Festival on 10/18. To distract myself in the meanwhile, I added a couple recordings from the spring and summer to my Media page. 

Into the vortex...

Invisible Anatomy + early summer performances

Invisible Anatomy is officially a thing - an ensemble with six of my closest friends who are both awesome composers AND awesome performers. After months of planning and ten of the craziest rehearsal days of my life, we put on two concerts in New York, and I've honestly never been happier with a performance. Fay, Dan, Paul, Sam, Ian, and Ben wrote incredible pieces and are a joy to perform with. We spent the time we needed to really learn everything. Solomon Weisbard and Dustin Wills did a stellar job with lighting and staging, transforming a concert into a show. And Shapeshifter Lab and Lex54 Concerts were amazing hosts, dealing with our ridiculous tech needs and generally just being lovely people running great spaces. And thanks a ton to everyone that came to these first shows! You took a chance on us and hopefully it was worth the trek and the ten bucks.

Meanwhile, this summer is shaping up to be the craziest of my life. On May 16, my orchestra piece Indefatigable Optimism will be performed by the Omaha Symphony, followed another IA performance on the Beijing Modern Music Festival on May 31st. I'll be back in Brooklyn long enough to play a Marateck show before heading upstate in July for a monthlong stint with Opera Saratoga playing guitar in Jeremy Howard Beck's new opera The Long Walk (and bizarrely, continuo in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas), before heading back to NYC in early August for an appearance with Dither Quartet performing Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint, and wrapping my head around my next couple pieces. 

See you on the other side. 

A questionable Telecaster (but an amazing time) in Beijing

I spent New Year's in Beijing, which was a slightly overwhelming but almost completely positive experience. I met tons of people, saw some great concerts and checked out venues for my VERY MYSTERIOUS next trip to China in May with my VERY MYSTERIOUS new performance project Invisible Anatomy, saw a lot of the city, ate a lot of amazing food, and between two weeks in Beijing and two weeks after coming home to NYC, have been jetlagged for about a month.

I also played a song by my good friend and spa aficionado Zhang Shuai (along with the lovely and stupidly talented Fay Wang) in the Voice of Central Conservatory competition, on a borrowed Telecaster with perhaps the highest action of any guitar I've ever played. It was all pretty surreal. 

More on China VERY MYSTERIOUS I mean very soon. Meanwhile, ART:

SF always makes me happy

It was an amazing trip back to SF to hear Friction Quartet premiere Juiced. I was halfway sick, extremely sleep-deprived, and probably borderline incoherent, but I didn't even care. The weather was beautiful, I saw many (but not all) of my favorite West Coasters, and Friction played the everloving crap out of Juiced. Particular props to violist Taija Warbelow, who pushed through some freaky shoulder problems that my piece was exacerbating (sorry!), but the whole group really delivered.  

Here's a video:

The show actually got a great review in the SF Chronicle, too. It's nice when that happens.

New digs

After a bit of a lull at the end of the summer, I'm diving into the fall with new pieces, new projects, and a new website. Marateck just finished a weeklong Midwest tour, during which we recorded an EP's worth of material in Chicago, and played in what has to be the coolest garage in existence in Indianapolis with Derek Johnson's Ampersand Blues Band. It was pretty bizarre, but completely awesome. 

Also for the first time in ten years I bought a guitar, a Peavey PT-60, which is apparently "the most underrated guitar ever". Whatever, it plays great and sounds beastly, and it'll make its debut at Marateck's Selective Truths show on 11/7. ALSO ALSO I've got two premieres happening soon - Simple Machine for Bearthoven and Juiced for Friction Quartet. Check out Upcoming for more details.

After finishing my MM I could barely listen to music for a few months, but it's (thankfully) coming back. I've been shaking off my funk with Zu's Carboniferous, Swans' The Seer and Children of God, and Grisey's Partiels.

Only mostly crazy

The spring is kind of a blur. Among other things, there were two short Marateck tours, performances with Kong Must Dead and Dither Quartet in the midwest, the exhausting birth and premiere of East, recording sessions with Arkora, and trips to San Francisco and Shanghai for 4 days each. Somehow I also seem to have managed to graduate from Yale and move to Brooklyn, since I’m now typing this from an apartment in Bed-Stuy filled with what appears to be my stuff.

In the interest of preventing a total dissociative episode, here's a Marateck show video!

The summer has been a weird up-in-the-air time as I’ve stuffed a move and job search into down weeks between travel, but I’ll have a bit to regroup starting in August and finish these ridiculous pieces I’m writing for Bearthoven, Friction Quartet, and A/B Duo. I should have recordings from the spring soon, and I have way too many projects in the works, but I’ll post more details about that I have them.

My spring listening consisted basically of stuff for class, but that said, these piano trios by Ravel and Shostakovich are pretty damn awesome. You should also go listen to Paper Mice, and the new album by Pyrrhon, which has has the metal criticism blogosphere all a-titter. A-twitter? I should probably stop writing now.

Emerging from the cave

It's been an insane fall and winter. Among other things, I wrote this monstrosity:

However, I'm emerging from my cave with a bunch of new music, much of which will be played in public very soon. Most immediately, my band Marateck will be doing a four-date tour of the Northeast from February 21-25, playing with Jonathan Pfeffer and TIGUE.

On March 2, a new arrangement of my piece For Ronny will be getting played on the Hot Air Music Festival in San Francisco. Starting on March 6, Gleb Kanasevich will be touring to support his new album Refractions Vol. 2, which features my piece Nausea. In addition to being an amazing classical clarinetist, Gleb is also sort of internet famous for his clarinet covers of death metal songs, which definitely seeped into the piece I wrote for him. It's for amplified distorted bass clarinet and drum machine, if that tells you anything.

As usual, more details on whens are wheres are in my updated Upcoming page.