Essay — three chapters
Lineage, or: where the method came from
A catalogue is a claim about influence whether it means to be or not. This is the version with the working shown.
The tape left running
The first work in this catalogue was not composed. In November 2014 a quarter-inch machine was left recording overnight in a rehearsal hall because someone forgot to stop it. The forty minutes that came back were, by any reasonable account, empty.
They were not. Played loud, the tape holds a ventilation system settling through roughly a semitone as the building cools, a road two streets away thinning out after midnight, and the machine's own transport noise beating against the room's longest dimension. It is a piece. Nobody wrote it.
Everything since has been an argument with that recording — either an attempt to make it again deliberately, which never works, or an attempt to build conditions in which something like it can happen to somebody else.
Twelve years, six hinges
Six works where the method visibly changed. Scroll: the rail fills as you pass through them.
The hinges are not the best works. Three of them are barely performable. They are the ones where something was found out.
Slow Machine (2016) is where the tape stopped being a recording medium and started being a room with a delay in it. The Inventory (2018) is where players were first asked to listen to the building rather than to each other — which they hated, correctly, because it is a bad instruction badly phrased.
A Catalogue of Rooms (2021) abandoned performance altogether for a year. That turned out to be the wrong lesson, and Dissolving Room (2023) is the apology.
Fig. 2 — antecedents and collaborators
Solid: direct working relationship. Dashed: inferred.
The room as instrument
There is a version of this practice that is about architecture, and it is not this one. Buildings here are not subjects. They are simply the largest and least cooperative instrument available, and the only one that was already playing before anyone arrived.
The practical consequence is unglamorous. Most of the work is spent finding rooms, and most rooms are useless — too dead, too noisy, or interesting in a way that is merely picturesque. A usable room has one clear resonance you can tune to and enough silence around it that the resonance is audible. Perhaps one building in forty.
The catalogue is fourteen works and something like four hundred rooms. Interview, 2025
The three Room Tone pieces — 2014, 2017, 2026 — are the same score. Only the room changes. Played end to end they make an argument that nothing in the method has developed at all, which is either a failure or the whole point, depending on the day.