Solo electronics, improvisation and “the p in pattern”, Options Series, ESS, Chicago, 2018. Curated by Andrew Clinkman, Tim Daisy, and Ken Vandermark.

The first, improvised piece shows the expressive range of the circuit bent, no-input feedback, digital delay pedals that I’ve been working with for over a decade (seen in the lower left hand corner of the video). The piece focuses on the percussive hisses, crackles, static washes and high pitched tones and sounds that the pedals emit from specific components on their circuit boards. Over several years of improvising with these instruments, I’ve developed an alphabet and a language with these sounds. The instruments, however, when played with an open and unaltered circuit board, always preserve their own tendencies towards chance.

The second piece, the p in pattern, explores language, noise, and pure tones as compositional materials that subvert listener’s expectations and explore the boundaries between speech, meaning, and sound. This piece takes it’s title from the explanatory pronunciation text that you would see in a foreign language phrase book. The “p in pattern” is how one such phrasebook described the Korean, Hangul consonant ㅃ.