

    • About

    • "Theory is a recipe for style" (James Tenney) I'm an experimental composer and theorist. I'm interested in the phenomenon of music to the degree that culture (biology vs environment) can be removed from the musical experience. I don't believe in style, but I engage in it every time I create and think about music. I experiment, explore, improvise, compose, perform, teach, and theorize. Some of my pieces are bizarre, noisy, complex; others simple, ironic, sweet, cliched (though I'm most attached to the ones simple at heart). Atypical and archetypal forms; procedural and intuitive variation and development; various cultural reference points; acoustic/electronic, analogue/digital; spoken word; corporeality, gesture, action at a distance; spectral, vibrotactile, micro sound, microtonality, micro-polyrhythm, resonance, entrainment, emergent phenomena. Activity: King Apparatus (ska, 1990-95); The Artichokes (rock, 95-97); 90-Film/TV Composer (94-2003); Combo Royale (swing, current); Experimental Composer (current); Noiselandia (experimental pop, current); Frankie Foo (ska, current). Mentors: Mitch Girio: producer & song writer, long-time collaborator (King Apparatus) James Tenney: American experimental/spectralist composer (York U.) Glen Halls: A deep and eclectic musical mind (York U.) Bob Gilmore: (Irish avant-garde musicologist) Frank Russo: music cognition (director of Ryerson SMART Lab) Influences (in no particular order) Duke Ellington, Frank Zappa. Claude Debussy, Erik Satie, Carl Ruggles, Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix, The Faces, The Police, Robert Fripp, Roy Buchanan, Ali Akbar Khan, Mick Gooderick, James Tenney, Grant Green, Ornette Coleman, Tuvan and Inuit throat singing, Japanese shamisen, Hindustani classical, ancient Persia, South African Soweto, west African funk; punk, blues, Alvin Lucier Cheap Trick XTC Devo

# Plays Date Uploaded Title Listen
588 12/03/2013 Escher Creak (GS 05a) Listen Close

Gate Study 05a uses samples from the following pieces commissioned by Soundstreams: - Hatch, Peter "Time Zones" (2010) - Hui, Melissa "Fred and John Were Having Tea (When I Dropped By)" (2004) - Ka Nin, Chan "The Charmer" (1994) - Staniland, Andrew "Hex" (2011) Check out http://www.soundmakers.ca