This summer has been wonderful so far - a road trip that traversed the open, beautiful and sometimes martian-like landscapes of the American West, lots of interesting music being produced by new friends and old, and weather here in Seattle that can really only be described as idyllic. But enough of this petty banter: it's time for The News.
    There are two reviews that showed up for The Box Is Empty show that happened in June - one in I Care If You Listen and another in The Glass. The Box Is Empty played a new piece that they commissioned from me called Hear No Noise. You can have a listen to Hear No Noise here. Last weekend I presented the newest of my time-specific music events, Blue Hour, at Green Lake here in Seattle - I'm presenting it again this coming weekend in Portland.
    In other news of the site-specific sort, I won a call for site-specific scores by the Color Field Ensemble. At their festival in Madison, they'll be doing an iteration of my new piece that will be performed in its entirety in September, Hungry Ghosts. Besides Hungry Ghosts, Nat and Roos will have a sound installation that will run inside a theater for a couple of house in between musical events at Color Field Fest. Also, we have posted a video of the dance performance for All of the Above on YouTube. We did the score for this piece by choreographer Catherine Cabeen. If you enjoy the music in the video, you can buy it on amazon, itunes, or emusic. That's all the news for August - be on the look out for three site-specific music events in September!

Nat and Roos - an ongoing collaboration between myself and Ross Simonini - have two things happening this month! July 13th-19th we'll have a site-specific piece up on the ever-so-ephemeral online exhibition space VioletStrays.com. Make sure to go to violet strays each day to listen and observe as our exhibit changes. The piece, Five Searches, provides an opportunity for people to listen to the online space they are currently in (necessarily in since Violet Strays is online), as well as to our own interpretations of these sounds as they resonate with us musically. Over the course of a week we will collect a series of field recordings while using our respective and various internet-related devices. These field recordings will not be merely the sounds of computers being used but all the sounds that occur or change over time whenever one comes back to the same place - essentially a sonic record of the space one might inhabit to view the online gallery. We will then use these field recordings as source material to create sound and music - sometimes in very literal ways, sometimes as source material for music. Each day will be an evolving record of time in this online space and our response to it - in essence a strikingly banal, but thorough investigation into an often unspoken place we all inhabit. Make sure to check out Five Searches starting July 13th!

In other news, Nat and Roos have just released All of the Above, a score that we did for choreographer Catherine Cabeen earlier in 2012. Like our other dance and film scores, All of the Above is an electro-acoustic work that is composed, performed and recorded by us. This one is especially exuberant and kaleidoscopic - shimmering guitar motives over darting percussive layers, falsetto choirs, field recordings, big gongs and distant conch shell blasts recorded in a parking garage. It was a really fun piece to record and see come together with the dance as well. You can buy the piece at your favorite digital retailer like amazon or emusic, itunes, etc. Have a listen!

    This Thursday (3/22/12) is the debut of a new piece for choreographer Catherine Cabeen at Velocity Dance here in Seattle by my myself and Ross Simonini. Ross and I have been working together under the moniker 'Nat and Roos' since 2006 doing scores for dance, a film score, and currently we're working on music that we'll release as an album and use for sound installations in galleries in the coming year.
    Ross lives in New York, but came out here last fall a couple days before his tour got under way with NewVillager. With a basic framework of ideas we spent two days recording ideas we had been discussing, improvisations, wandering the neighborhood collecting sounds and wondering what the hell we were doing sometimes but making new sounds anyway. We sent a whole heap of sounds off to Catherine Cabeen to get an idea of what she felt might fit her vision for the piece she was working on. After that, Ross did an initial assemblage of sounds and added some tweaked sounds, then I went in and added additional layers of percussion, a five-part falsetto choir, and some conch shell. We passed the track back and forth and kept checking in with Catherine until we felt like it was done, but only knew for certain when I went to a rehearsal a couple weeks ago and observed the incredible clarity and detail with which Catherine had perceived the music and the quartet that she had choreographed in response. It's an honor to be able to collaborate with both Ross and Catherine, and I highly recommend coming out to one of the shows this weekend. For more information on the shows at Velocity Dance click here, and to hear the music we wrote for the dance, see below.