artist statement

I work in order to feel deeply and to create spaces where others can feel deeply too. My work is not made to produce a specific outcome or emotional response, but to hold conditions where deep feeling can arise naturally. I am not interested in directing how someone should experience a piece. I am interested in creating environments where time slows, attention widens, and whatever is present is allowed to be there, to be witnessed. I believe duration is central to this. When enough time passes, the urgency to understand, judge, anticipate, or even intellectualize begins to dissolve. What remains is a shared state of communion, of fullness, of sensitivity. When my work is functioning well in my eyes, both myself and the audience can feel held by the space - feeling both awareness and ease, where the passing of hours feels irrelevant to the present moment.

I work using emotional sparks as a foundation. Often a piece begins with a first line, a location, or an idea of scale. From this comes details, instrumentation and phrasing, and I feel my way through the work organically as it unfolds. I see sound as language, and I see language inversely as sound. As I try to become more articulate with it, I have found that using each as its inverse allows for the expression of feelings that simple spoken language can rarely hold. Even if my music makes little sense, or my poetry can't be understood, what matters to me is the emotion they expose as a whole, and I don't believe those emotions can be cleanly drafted in simple language. Emotion is organic and continually improvised within us as we come into contact with internal and external experiences. Therefore, improvisation for me is not a lack of form or the freedom to play necessarily (though it can be at times). Rather, it is a way of allowing my work to adapt to what is actually happening in the body, in the space, in the relationships between performers and audience, and in my own internal state. If the structure is open enough, emotion, location, and circumstance do not get added onto the work afterward: they become embedded within it. This is why context matters so much to me. Location changes how I feel, and how I feel changes how I play. Even when a recording carries no obvious trace of its environment, the body remembers where it was made, and that memory enters the sound and therefore can transmit to the listener in the shape of something that is felt but cannot be defined or even necessarily made conscious.

It is in this realm that I do not experience my works as isolated projects. I experience many of them as continuations of one another, sharing tunings, internal structures, imagery, or emotional contents. This feels more honest to my process than following a need to produce something entirely new. Of course, as we know, nothing new comes from nothing. Forms evolve, overlap, and carry traces of their origins. In nature, a newborn resembles its parents rather than appearing fully detached from what came before. Because of this, music, performance, and writing in my practice are deeply interconnected and draw from the same internal landscape that is also constantly evolving and being reshaped. If a work is diaristic from a period in the past, those images can become fused with new experiences in the present to propel sonic, emotional language into an entirely new shape.

Much of my work is primarily with acoustic instruments, amplification, and unaltered field recordings; and in the realm of writing or publishing or photography, small editions, analog process, or handmade work. Someone once asked me, "You seem like someone who likes to make things harder for yourself. Why is that?" For me, the limits of breath, pressure, temperature, fatigue, and physical effort are part of the art itself. Sewing a book feels like an act of care and demonstration of slowness rather than a quick staple. It can't always be this way, but the intent can be embedded in the work in a variety of ways. One such for me is tuning and just intonation. The use of just intonation for me is not about purity or perfection. Instead, I am interested in the small variations that arrive within the body when sound feels more resonant, and with this the slow emergence of harmonics that only appear with time and sustained listening. Such sounds can deepen our inner experience, and it is that very subtlety that feeds our inner visions. And on the form of relationality, I am not interested in rigid separations between artist and audience, or in optimizing my work for speed, summary, or instant culture. My hope is simply to create a space where we can be there together intimately and authentically, feeling whatever arises, in our own ways, at the same time. May it show us the shape of our paths to come.