zines

symbiote zine [editor] (2024) (print)
liquid texture (2023) (print)

a zine composed of poetry and text-based scores. The zine reflects on water as a source of creative inspiration and a means of creating experimental music beyond the boundaries of traditional notion. The poetry and text scores (scores that deploy words instead of notation as inspiration for musicians) serve as inspiration for both of my previous works “we could have been rich” and “drip”. I distributed this zine during a tour performing dance music composed of field recordings of water. In distributing the zine, I hoped to offer others a means of experimenting with form and composition within their creative endeavors. July 2023.

mutual aid and the limits of community (2022) (read/print)
how to scam your way into the music industry [evil dentist] (2022) (read/print)

poems

summer poems (2024)
gunshot fireflies (2023)
for the rage (2023)
3 poems (2023)

academic articles

feeling pain/making kin in the brooklyn noise music scene (2020) current musicology

tiny mix tapes
interview: matana roberts (2019)
review: pharmakon - devour (2019)
review: show me the body - dog whistle (2019)
review: deli girls - i don’t know how to be happy (2019)
review: machine girl - the ugly art (2018)
live blog: SOPHIE (2018)
live blog: mount eerie (2017)

Collections of syllabi and teaching resources I have created.

Syllabus:“Ecstasy and Agony: Queer Electronic Dance Music in New York City”

“Improv Assignment”: An experimental teaching method drawing from sound walking, walking scores, and mindful listening practices.

Syllabus:“Empathy”

Syllabus:“Urbanism and Music”

My work is invested in how the act of listening constructs our ethics, how sound is transformed by attention. recent work has focused on how attention to everyday environmental sounds (dripping water, running streams, bubbling water coolers, and rushing ocean waves) unveils complicated emotional attachments. ongoing work reflects on the property conditions structuring performance. my current work examines echoes.

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summer poems

12 September 2024

a collection of poems from summer 2024

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two hardcores

6 September 2024

It’s hard to know what you mean when you say punk. So, I want to talk about hardcore. There’s hardcore and then there’s hardcore.

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a note on process

12 July 2024

Recently, I was speaking with my mom. She’s been struggling to finish a novel. She faults a mixture of perfectionism and the as-yet-arrived intuition of how to finish the book. I’m trying to embrace intuition.

But I value structure. Creativity flows. It requires points of connection to smoothly move.

I imagine the work as a glass vase held in the dark. The shape is filled with water, but the form is lost in darkness. You can feel that it twirls and twists, but cannot know the spirals. You sense the shape is littered with holes, but you can’t know how close the lips are to the water.

Your hands move around the shape, cautiously stumbling toward the shape you already hold.

When writing, I approach the process through conceptualizing the work as a whole. Put all the documents into one file and read. Gaining a sense of the shape of the writing requires fumbling through the ways you’re failing to express yourself.

It is falling down to learn to dance.

Practically, reading everything you’ve written together as it gestures toward the finished work gives you a better sense of what the work wants to be. The successful and failing forms sit side by side. Together, they clarify the spirit brought forth. You find the spirit through editing, through cutting, through reassessing what you think the whole shape is.

I value structure because of its illusory quality. A vague faith in the whole makes communion more satisfying. The shape is a projection of my desires embodied in the work. These desires are realized through the menial task of trial and error, repeated failing experiments.

When a plan goes completely wrong, you become acquainted with your creativity in stretching it to the point of what you are capable of doing in the moment. When I write a song, it becomes all the skill, inspirations, and performances I possess in that moment. Nothing more, nothing less.

In tracing the limit of creativity, I become aware of my intuition. I can better balance the water within the vase of unknown shape.