Once Known - Sound Performance (2021)

A performance for home

This is a performance created on a modular synthesizer that I built from scratch in Reaktor 6. One half the synthesizer runs through an arpeggio that builds a lower section of the song, and the other half can be played and manipulated dynamically.

I wanted to create a "song" of sorts that created a sound world surrounding the growth and development of cities, and the subsequent destruction of them by automobiles. I've been doing a lot of research recently and having a lot of conversations about how our cities being built for cars is actually a major detriment to all facets of society. This is because the American urban layout plan isolates people from each other by reducing walkable neighborhoods, making streets more dangerous, making small businesses and cultural institutions less able to attract customers, and lowering tax revenue per square feet by having so much parking. This also ties into my experience in Denver. I've always complained that "Denver doesn't have a culture" and "Denver is very isolating." I've learned since that these feelings come from the very ways in which American cities are laid out, with Denver being a particularly good example of it. The work is also tied to my childhood in St. Louis. There is an image that always persists in my mind when I think of growing up in St. Louis of a child playing in the rubble and bricks of a collapsed building. While I did not live this experience exactly, I mostly walked through rubble when I veered off from my parents, the post industrial historical backdrop and the unaware child nevertheless feels like an image that summarizes my entire young life. I wanted to employ a heavy use of repetition in order to show the construction and de-construction of the city with the melody.