A.K. — composer
14 works, 2014–2026
A.K. is a composer. This is everything she has written.
Music made
Fourteen pieces for tape, players and
buildings, written between 2014 and 2026. Four of them can be played on this page.
Music made
of rooms
Fourteen pieces for tape, players and
buildings, written between 2014 and 2026. Four of them can be played on this page.
Every room has a note. Stand still in one long enough and it will tell you what it is.
The catalogue began as an accident: a tape left running overnight in an empty rehearsal hall, recovered the next morning with forty minutes of nothing on it. Nothing turned out to be a slow, unhurried B flat — the building's ventilation, a road two streets away, the tape machine listening to itself.
The works since have been variations on that discovery. Some use players. Some use only the room and a long enough silence. The three Room Tone pieces bracket the whole catalogue, twelve years apart, and are the same piece.
The control panel of a Mercury space capsule, photographed in 1962.
A.K. writes from pictures like this one: the order the switches are arranged in becomes
the order of events in the piece. Every photograph on this site has been reduced to
black and white dots in your browser, which is what gives them the grain.
Four works you can listen to here. Press one to play it.
See all fourteen →
No.TitleWritten forYearLength
011Dissolving Room
orchestra, tape, light20232:50
014Room Tone (III)
tape, silence202622:00
Dissolving Room
The eleventh piece, for orchestra, tape and
light. It gets its own page, because the page slowly comes apart while you read it.
Where this came from
An essay in three parts on how the method
started and what it owes to other people.
Working notes
Pages from A.K.'s notebook, photocopied badly
on purpose. Mostly wrong, kept anyway.