Solo

Instrumentation: solo viola d'amore, fixed media and live electronics

Written for Marco Fusi

Breathless explores an immersive quality of experience in which what is perceived reaches beyond what we could bodily comprehend (i.e. larger than how our senses understand the world as it measures new sensations against our physical body). The primary sonic materials used here are “breath-like” sounds synthesized from human breaths and light bowing strokes across string instruments. These “hybrid breaths” create a symbiotic,  part-human, part-instrumental, part-electronic, sonic space that allows the live performer to articulate and expand on these given environmental cues to find their own paths in and out of the labyrinthine cloud of sound, encircling while slowly thickens and condenses.

Instrumentation: solo percussionist, fixed media and live electronics

Commissioned and Written for Louise Devenish

My practice has been centered around a strong interest in corporeal expressivity of live musical performance, as well as the consonance, and dissonance, between visual and auditory stimulus and perception. This work, Permeating through the Pores of Shifting Planes​, commissioned by percussionist Louise Devenish, is an installation-performance piece that synthesizes this continual exploration in the symbiotic relationship between body, sound, and space. The piece also represents a fondness for expanding a singular idea into a substantial work - in this case, the transference of ​grains​ across different plates, or planes, of timbrel surfaces. Coupling with utilizing musical instruments and found objects alike, the piece also illustrates the dramaturgical possibilities produced through this sonic and performative process.

The piece highlights the unique collaborative between myself and Louise in finding a musical syntax that can be fully expressed through her performative body. Rather than providing her a fixed score which she is to follow every instruction in order to articulate the piece, I wanted to include her humanity into the piece and making her journey in it, the pace that she moves in, the real-time musical decisions she makes, and her navigation within the performance space that is made up of installation of various physical ​planes,​ be the eventual representation of the work itself.

Conceptually, the piece acts as a commentary on shifting landscapes and collapsing (geographical) borders, intended to reference the current global geopolitical instability to which climate change plays a consequential part. The specific reflection and refraction patterns produced by the silver acetate sheets, for instance, cast an oceanic atmosphere around the performer, as if she was underwater, and drifting, on a quest of finding resonances on the various planes she comes across.

Instrumentation: solo flute

Written for Paula Francis

Instrumentation: piano and fixed media

Written for Mari Kawamura

This piece portrays a scenario of an intimate conversation between the pianist and the piano. 

Treated as a big resonating echo chamber, the interior of the piano is tickled, caressed, soothed, inspected and provoked by the various ways the pianist is instructed to articulate the strings. Like a piece of foam soaking in centuries of repertory memory, the piano slowly and gradually awakens to respond to the initiations of the pianist, emerging from a passive state to become a sounding partner to the pianist.

Instrumentation: a solo exercising piccolo player

Instrumentation: solo piano

Commissioned by Royaumont Nouvelle Voix Academy

The piece focuses on the idea of intersecting radiuses from a single source point. Centering around the presence of the pianist, the axes here are presented in forms of pitch relationships, degrees of resonances, the aural and physical spaces within which dialogues are formed in the presentation of these trajectories. In navigating between the delicate fluidity of corporeality and the activation of sound, the piano becomes an instrument of extensions: of the self, the past, the familiar and the uncertainties, venturing through a status of continual renewing. 

Instrumentation: solo piccolo, fixed media

Written for Michael Matsuno

This piece came instinctively as an imagined scenario that is as vividly imprinted in my mind as it is physically felt. A certain timelessness of this environment engulfs one’s sense of a beginning and an end, almost as if one suddenly finds herself surrounded by a vaporous blanket of fog that quietly seeped in, thickens, encapsulates and wraps one within. 

Then the gently burning glows glisten all around, within reach yet not to be captured.  

Instrumentation: solo violin

Commissioned by Sarah Curro