relationship

At its origin, my work begins with relationship. Not simply between people alone, but between memory and the present moment, between place and perception, between the body and the emotions it produces. Whether through music, poetry, photography, publishing, or organizing gatherings, I am not trying to produce something to be consumed. I am trying to create spaces where something meaningful can happen between us; spaces where time slows, where attention can soften, where we are not required to perform understanding or ignorance, but are allowed to be present with ourselves and with one another. Moments like this are rare, and becoming increasingly so in a world that rewards speed, efficiency, and forms of attention that isolate and divide us further rather than build and nurture our relationships with each other.

time & attention

Sharing work, for me, is not about recognition or affirmation, nor is it about offering entertainment. It is about building a field of attention that alters how we experience time together, and how we experience it within ourselves. When duration extends - when sound or language continues beyond what feels familiar - the urgency to decode or judge begins to loosen, and something quieter emerges. Listening can deepen. The room around us can change. What matters in these moments, I believe, is not symbolism or intellectual framing, but what is felt immediately: the sensations unfolding in the body, the subtle shifts in the space between us. Even when someone is alone reading a book, they are not outside of relationship. We exist in full context of one another regardless of where we are in the world.

improvisation

Much of my music and poetry begin by entering an emotional field, a geographic place, a scale of time, or a simple structural arc. From there, I build through a form of structured improvisation, allowing the work to adapt to what is actually present, whether that presence is the physical environment or the internal condition of my own body. I cannot ask others to be present if I am not fully present myself. Therefore, I must remain aware of my breath, my fatigue, my emotional temperature, and equally aware of the subtle shifts in those listening. If the structure is open enough, I believe that the reality of the moment - including the physical experience - becomes embedded in the work rather than becoming layered on top of it.

collaboration

This experience with improvisation extends to the people I choose to work with. I often collaborate with individuals from various disciplines - historically this has been dance, architecture, installation, and film. These practices are concerned with shaping space itself - arranging bodies, materials, light, and movement within an external field. When sound enters into dialogue with these spatial forms, I've witnessed that something more integrated becomes possible. I am interested in the meeting point between sonic vibration and physical environment, where the body is not separate from the space it inhabits, but actively participating in it. In this sense, collaboration becomes less about combining mediums and more about aligning fields of emotional vision and intent. For me, the goals and essence of the work - the quality of the heart behind it, the energy we are seeking to offer - matter more than disciplinary mastery alone.

This carries directly into my ensemble practice. For performances, I often invite several individuals who do not identify as musicians, but who possess deep sensitivity and compassion. I do this as an affirmation that the qualities they carry are more important to me than technical fluency. Out of respect for this practice, I create custom graphic and text-based scores that both simplify access to the material and prioritize listening to one's inner field before taking action. These scores ask for patience and trust rather than sheer skill, and are often performed on simple instruments with low barriers to entry but strong sonic presence. Teaching someone to sustain a tone or breathe within an ensemble becomes an act of relationship, and demonstrates the flow of trust - that we can believe in each other and make something beautiful together. When performers are aligned in their hearts rather than in skill, the sound carries that alignment. I see this carry over into every medium I work in, and particularly in my work with Tunings and Moon Below the Sun.

field recording & memory

Recording in specific locations is another way I weave relationship into the work. I often choose places because they hold lived memory: a coastline that accompanied grief; a forest that carried my longing; a cave that held my tears, my silence, my rebirth; cicadas in South Turkey that remind me of the summer of 2024. Nature’s irregularity - its fluctuations, its imperfect continuities - mirrors the organic way I want the compositions to unfold. When a field recording exists within a performance, it reconnects me to that moment and merges it with the present field - it creates a flow where past, present and future, where my history and your history, intertwine in a dance without ever knowing how, why, nor the contents of it. It is like opening a photo album without giving any commentary, yet feeling everything. Past and present overlap. We enter the memory together.

just intonation & resonance

My use of just intonation grows from the same impulse toward relationship. When I tune, I am not working towards achieving a form of purity or theoretical correctness. Instead, it is about expanding the field of listening, where specific relationships between frequencies allow overtones, undertones, wild tones to slowly emerge before us. These sounds, however, are not immediately obvious. They reveal themselves only through long-form, sustained listening. What seems simple to us at first - perhaps a fundamental note or theme - begins to unfold into hidden layers above and below the primary tone. The longer we remain attentive, the more interdimensional the sound becomes.

For me, especially with just intonation, placing intellectual frameworks at the center of this process can obscure its emotional origins in my practice. Just intonation allows acoustic instruments to become more responsive, more unpredictable, more organically alive within a space. It mirrors the human experience: light and darkness, tension and warmth, subtle shifts that cannot be fully controlled. I want those temperatures of feeling to be sensed uniquely by each person who encounters the work.

continuity

Over the years, my works have evolved into one another: names change, but have overlapping themes; durations expand or contract; tunings reappear in new forms with subtle alterations; poems borrow from sound works; performances carry emotional residue into future compositions. I do not experience these as separate disciplines because my life and mind do not divide themselves so cleanly. My memory still continues; my experience still evolves; my emotions still encounter unsolvable conflicts. I try to allow my work to behave the way nature and our organic minds do - layered, continuous, permeable, shaped by the relationships that move through them. What forms over time is not a series of isolated projects, but a living cosmology that breathes, remembers, forgets, and haunts and inspires me.

devotion

The value of creating is not simply to satisfy my own internal system, but to me, the meaningful part of it is actually in sharing, creating dialogue, exchange, and experiencing ourselves in spaces where we can exist in communion with one another. In my heart, my work is inherently spiritual and always will be. I don't mean this in a dogmatic, institutional, or disconnected way. I mean it in the sense that creating spiritual work allows us to experience deep feeling, deep relationship, without having to say anything, without having to define or explain, without having to ever know how or why. In this sense, my work is inherently devotional to the experience of being here in this vast and infinite randomness; for the fact that we can be conscious and be witnesses to each other at this brief moment in time. It is the experience alone of being connected to one another amidst all this expansiveness that inspires me and gives purpose to what I do. Without it, I could write my hopes and dreams on a notecard and cast both them and myself to the fire.