By way of a greeting

Welcome friends. You're receiving this communication because at some point you came across my music work on Bandcamp and/or have personally subscribed with your email address to this newsletter. If that is the case, thank you for your support and your attention. Knowing that you are out there sustains me with an ever greater fervor to create and share.

In the wake of spiraling algorithmic context collapse and escalatingly oblique methods of control and interference deployed in centralized social media contexts, I've decided to make an effort to craft a personal newsletter that offers a more fulfilling insight into my praxis, my thoughts on creative endeavor, updates on recent activities, and living a creative life.

An important motivating factor was to make the newsletter self-hosted using an open-source and privacy-aware tech stack, allowing me to extricate myself (and my subscribers' data) from yet another rent-seeking zombie service provider that overcharges and overexerts its influence on this fragile but crucial thing we call communication with one another. The infrastructure is built now, which means that there won't be any intermediary third-party between myself and your inbox: no tracking; no selling of your information. Just direct transmissions from me to you.

Intention behind the newsletter

Newsletter dispatches flow in numbered Issues, and aim to cover an assemblage of my recent music projects, performances, and upcoming engagements, with the occasional musing or announcement intertwined. If you would like to opt-out of receiving future issues of this newsletter, you can unsubscribe at the bottom of this message. \(´༎ຶ‿‿´༎ຶ)/

Current mood

As a reprieve from the hyper-extended and metabolic media-induced attention scattering mindset, given the velocity of information in our contemporary moment, I've been finding new purpose and excitement in instrumental practice, journalling with pen and paper, and reading old books … away from the screen, away from notifications, and away from their concomitant levels of reduced focus. The more I settle into this calm, concentrated work, my listening improves, my technique continues to deepen and grow, and my imagination feels reinforced and activated.

New recordings, a New York premiere, jazz sextets, a continued obsession with the pianists and composers who haunt me, the Subvert Co-op, and OperaFest LA.

1416 m³ · Dia Art Foundation

→ YouTube

On February 10, the JACK Quartet and baritone Jesse Blumberg gave an extraordinary performance for the New York premiere of 1416 m³ at Dia Chelsea. It is a string quartet that I composed following a concept by Argentinian conceptual artist David Lamelas, originally commissioned for the Oberlichtsaal at Kunsthalle Basel, where the gallery's volume became the score's organizing principle: each cubic meter of space filled with sound, the architecture itself dictating duration, density, pitch, register. 

This performance functioned as a prelude to David Lamelas: The Machine, which opened on March 6, co-organized by Dia Art Foundation and the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA).

What compelled me about Lamelas' framework was its insistence that a room is never neutral: to measure a space is an act of interpretation and intervention, and I aimed to honor David's interrogations of time (which are the through line of his artistic output) by making the music feel less like something performed inside the gallery than something the gallery was slowly exhaling.

I also want to highlight the intensity with which the JACK Quartet's and Jesse's listening abilities struck me. Given their proclivities to microtonal repertoire, this deep capacity for listening induced such an incredible impression that it seemed as though that all the instrumentalists' and vocalist's parts, combined with the acoustics of the space, gelled into a single, coherent mass of sonic texture, expertly controlled.

It was an honor to work with these musicians and with Dia's Deputy Director of Program Humberto Moro, Manager of Exhibitions Alexis Pennington-Foster, Curatorial Assistant Ella den Elzen, and the rest of their team to reactivate 1416 m³ at such a high level.

Max Jaffe · You Want That Too!

→ Bandcamp → YouTube

On January 15 at 2220 Arts + Archives we celebrated the release of Max Jaffe's You Want That Too! on Colorfield Records produced by Pete Min. I loved how this particular ensemble held the space between restraint and overflow, something Max has always understood as an expressive rather than a structural question. The sextet featured Meg Duffy on electric and MIDI guitar, Jeff Parker on electric guitar, Daniel Rotem on tenor saxophone, Spencer Zahn on fretless electric bass, and myself on piano and synthesizers, a combination of timbres that should, by any reasonable measure, create chaos, and instead created something more akin to weather.

Tracks on the record that I am featured on include: Gulf Of Mexico, Looking At The Inside Of Your Eyelids, and Ancestral Creeks. Made at Lucy's Meat Market in Eagle Rock, it's one of the best-sounding projects I've had the privilege of being a part of.

The poster and album art for You Want That Too! is by the ever-whimsical and talented Sara McGrath.

Negrón ⎮ Eisler

→ Bandcamp → Subvert → Mirlo

This is a pairing I've been sitting with for years, recorded across two separate sessions in Los Angeles: Hanns Eisler's Klavierstücke Opus 8 in May of 2016, and Angélica Negrón's La Intervención for solo piano in June 2021. The conceptual logic that drew these two composers together for me is something like a shared grammar of displacement. Both are embedded in film-music; both navigate the friction between colloquial idiom and rigorous formal intent; both write from positions of political exposure. 

Eisler was deported from LaGuardia in March 1948, blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and his statement upon leaving:

"I feel heartbroken over being driven out of this beautiful country in this ridiculous way."

… resonates with an almost unbearable precision in the current political climate, and against Negrón's work, which maps its own kind of intervention across a very different hemispheric inheritance.

The cover art is a detail from Marsden Hartley's The Lost Felice, 1939.

Conlon Nancarrow ⎮ Sonatina

→ Bandcamp → Subvert → Mirlo → YouTube

Released in January, this recording is my attempt at sitting with Nancarrow on acoustic piano … away from player pianos, away from the automated impossibility he's most famous for. The Sonatina is compact, irreverent, and full of hidden rhythmic traps.

I've wanted to record it for years. It is the first piece Nancarrow composed after arriving in exile in Mexico City in 1941, and it carries within it the seeds of the impasse he would soon reach: music whose demands on a human performer were so extreme, so fantastically imagined, that the player piano became not a retreat but an expansion, a way of thinking rhythmically beyond the body's negotiable limits.

Playing it as a human pianist means you are continually bridging the audible gap between intention and realization, and I find that tension not only challenging but genuinely illuminating about what notation asks of us. The great Hungarian composer György Ligeti had this to say about Nancarrow:

So for me, that's a subjective judgement … Nancarrow is simply the most important composer in our time. He made something completely original, totally different from what others did, on the highest level, on the level of Johann Sebastian Bach, or late Beethoven.

As before, the Sonatina Series artwork is designed by my dear friend, the brilliant visual artist Ted Nava.

Trichotomy · with Maiani da Silva

→ Bandcamp → Subvert → Mirlo → YouTube

Trichotomy is a three movement work for violin and piano which takes as its point of departure something of an amalgamation of the works by composers Leos Janáček, Arnold Schoenberg, and Claude Debussy. But of course … I'll let you draw your own conclusions on this extremely subjective matter :)

The piece has been brought to life in collaboration with Maiani da Silva, a supremely gifted violinist who is currently a member of the chamber ensemble Eighth Blackbird, and Recording Engineer Lewis Pesacov, a multi Grammy Award nominated producer in the Classical Compendium and Opera categories. This is one of the most gorgeously-captured and exquisitely played records I have ever put out into the world, and I am immensely indebted to the features and instincts that both Maiani and Lewis lent to this recording.

Louis Ng deserves a special thanks as well, for capturing and assembling the video recording we made of the session. It is available on YouTube and I am very grateful for Louis' deftly handled quality and care in putting it together.

Reliquie
a Sonata by Franz Schubert & Ernst Krenek

→ Bandcamp → Subvert → Mirlo → YouTube

A concert film and recording of Franz Schubert's unfinished Sonata in C major 'Reliquie' D. 840, with a completion written by German modernist and 12-tone composer Ernst Krenek in the style of Schubert, composed while he was in Berlin in the year 1921. 

Co-produced & directed by Daniel Anderson, it is the most musicologically ambitious film that I have made, with an opinionated style and approach to Schubert's composition, ambiently and elastically stretching out the sonata to nearly a 1 hour and a half runtime, with short monologues segueing each movement, revealing the story behind this most interesting and obscure work.

It pays homage to the filmmaking style of French director Bruno Monsaingeon, known for his highly sensitive and dramatic concert films of pianists, and the Canadian television broadcasts of Glenn Gould, which featured eccentric and delightful monologues and performances. 

Subvert · A New Co-Operative For Musicians

I have joined the Subvert musician's cooperative as an Artist and after months of effort have finally completed uploading the majority of my music catalog to it, which includes all the releases published under my own name. This amounts to 143 self-released records (Albums/EPs/Singles). Yes you read that right, 143 albums. I believe in the promise of better systems of music distribution, and I am moved by the ambitious aim of Subvert to not only become a Bandcamp successor, but to challenge the conditions under which working musicians in the United States (and globally, as membership spans the entire world) operate. By moving forward with plans to build out the infrastructure to support and nurture our work, the co-op aims to be much more than a digital music platform. In Subvert creator Austin Robey's own words:

Let’s turn this cooperative into a container where we can own every stat of what touches independent music and create a totally alternative economy that is fully worker and artist owned.

The long term vision for Subvert seeks to replicate the success of the Mondragon network of cooperatives in Spain: what started out as a single employee-owned business later expanded into larger collective ventures. In my view, Subvert is poised to step-in as the “pioneer species” for a new ecosystem of organizations supporting musicians and the music industry.

Why I Don't Use Spotify

As you may already know, years ago I took a stand and refused to publish my music on major streaming services (Spotify/Apple/Amazon), which comes at a large personal cost for discoverability and accessibility of my work. However, early on I knew that my principles mattered more than my music being 'accessible', and this was years before, in the case of Spotify's CEO Daniel Ek, we learned of large investments in defense contractors producing advanced weapons systems, I.C.E recruitment ads, and generative fake 'AI' music and fake artists being heavily pushed on the platform.

And while we're on the topic of Spotify exodus, it wasn't the fractions of a penny remuneration per stream; the algorithmic dislocation of an artist's corpus (playlists over albums); the reduction of artistic intent, craft, and genre to 'moods'-driven playlists; the UX's refusal to surface important metadata about the music it is streaming; or the abysmal track-record of the quality of its audio bitrate that pissed me off enough to refuse to participate in it (although these factors did play a part). I actually took more umbrage with a seemingly benign but nevertheless deleterious facet of the platform's success with capturing users: altering the fundamental relationship one has with their music collection. You are no longer a collector with local control over your music. Instead you are now required to rent it, in perpetuity, from a third-party that actively harms and creates precarity in the livelihoods of artists.

You might not be aware of this, given Spotify's scale and dominance in terms of userbase, but as a company they are not profitable. Bandcamp is crushing them in terms of profitability, and their unsustainable business practices could very well one day blowup and take your entire music library down with it, with no recourse. The results of years and years of effort building your digital music library could suddenly vanish. Companies come and go, and there's no guarantee Spotify will survive another decade. The transformation of one of your most personal possessions, a music collection that is all your own, into an ephemeral rent-seeking walled-garden hellscape was the catalyst for my exit, and I never looked back.

Upcoming • Operafest LA

As part of OperaFest LA 2026, I will be working as a video projection designer alongside director Diana Wyenn and Beth Morrison Projects to bring a new iteration of Jodie Landau's autobiographical Performance of Self to life at REDCAT in Los Angeles on May 29-May 30. The show is a touching, funny, and vulnerable examination of family, mourning, sexuality, and self-discovery. I am looking forward to being a part of this creative team.

Tickets are available here.

As always, thank you for your continued support.