Artist Statement
I explore new and ancient materials and techniques from around the world, creating a perceptually-based, visceral listening experience, from the simplest melody to the most intricate musical structures. Acoustic and perceptual principles guide my design with the intention to engage the listener. I want my work to intensify the experience of our common humanity. My music typically deals with serious issues, philosophical, moral, spiritual, and existential, and ranges from the dramatic to lyric, ecstatic to placid, tragic to humourous, and can be playful or frightening, cathartic and restorative, restful or stirring, and often invites the listener to reach through a dense and sometimes riotous musical surface to find stillness at the core. I believe in synthesizing the music of the world, past and present, and so my catalogue includes gritty folk/pop/rock-inspired hallucinations (Radioed, 11, Retour, the opera Alternate Visions), post-modern play (Traces, Millennial Moments), spectralism (Prismophony, Gallery, and Unmasking), organic forms (Fields Before Us, From Thunder and Rain…), mythic and socially-relevant subject matter (Creations, Raven’s Cry, en amitié, the opera Guacamayo), minimlist drive (Chase the Money, Driven), and works in which many of these merge (Raven Steals the Light, Forging Utopia, Summer (F)ayre, Sounding Eternal, El Reposo del Fuego, Give Us Peace).
