COLLAPSE

“There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn’t end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart [. . .] and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.”  - Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism

Collapse (2025) draws on aesthetic influences from Brutalist architecture, the large-scale concrete and metal artworks of Anselm Kiefer, Urs Fischer’s excavated gallery floors, and Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism. Sonic materials include field recordings of metal drums, pipes, cinderblocks, concrete slabs and other detritus; these were used to generate a collection of phrases via a performable Max patch (a “drunken” Euclidean sequencer of my own design). These phrases were heavily and meticulously chipped away at, like a sculpture emerging from a solid block of concrete, forming gestures that transport the listener through sonic ruins falling apart around them. Additional materials include judiciously filtered electric guitar and noise textures, modular synthesis, and a single drum machine sample. 

RELIC

for electric guitar and electronics.

Relic (2025) is an improvised performance piece that arose from an exploration of the space between musical events. Reflecting my current obsession with astrophysics, the title refers to relic radiation from the early universe. Radio telescopes show what otherwise appears as completely dark space between stars and galaxies to be filled with a background ‘glow’ that is independent of any celestial object: the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). Relic treats compositional space-time as a piece of fabric laid not-quite-flat upon a surface, leaving the performer to explore its textural undulations via infrequent activations of electric guitar processed through various types of delay and noise. 

Relic was adapted for gallery installation to accompany video by Naveen Kishore; exhibited as part of ‘OTHERLAND’ at the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa, India, December 2025. Curated by Ranjit Hoskote.

FRACTURE

for electric guitar, ebow, electronics.

Fracture (2025) began life as an exploratory improvisation drawing on the sonic language of drone metal and electronic music, seeking to discover and inhabit points of collision, collusion, and disintegration within the system that produced it—electric guitar, Ebow, and effect pedals. In its current form, these interstitial interactions enable the performer to build on and navigate from one specific system-state to the next. The title also evokes facture, an attribute referring to the manner of making and execution of an artwork (especially painting—brushwork/materials/texture, etc), which provides another useful frame for conceptualizing the trajectories and textures present in the piece.

Fracture was premiered at The Summit for Adventurous Electric Guitar in the Gulf South at Lousiana State University in March 2025. It was subsequently performed at the Eugene Difficult Music Ensemble’s New Music Festival, where I was a guest artist, and at the University of Virginia’s Digitalis festival. It will be performed next at MOXSonic at the University of Central Missouri in March 2026.

Below: video of my guest artist set at EDME’s New Music Festival, which also includes an early version of Relic.

GAUNTLET

for two electric guitars, Max, and Quad Cortex.

Gauntlet (2024) is a piece for two electric guitars and electronics conceived as an obstacle course; each section is loosely based around common guitar warmups and practice techniques taken to (sometimes ridiculous) extremes. A Max patch generates individual click tracks for each player—these accelerate and decelerate as the piece progresses, moving in and out of sync with each other. The patch also controls the effects processing of each guitar; players will have to contend not just with a changing click track, but with unexpected changes in timbre which become progressively more disruptive. Performers navigate through six sections in this manner, all of which include a set of performance instructions outlining a pool of material to be used in that section as well as how to interact with the click.

premiered by LINÜ (Jiji Kim and Gulli Björnsson), February 2025.

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THIS USED TO BE SOMETHING ELSE (II)

for saxophone, percussion, and performative electronics

Phonetic text scores originally created for exploratory drone improvisation using electric guitar, ebow, and synthesizers are reimagined for saxophone and percussion. Performers interpret short fragments of text as sound, ranging from recognizable vowels to abstract groups of letters, creating textures that offer a different perspective on the idea of the drone.

Premiered by Popebama (www.popebama.com) at the University of Virginia, February 2023. Subsequent performances at SPLICE Institute and Yarn/Wire Institute in June 2023.

Erin Rogers: saxophone + electronics | Dennis Sullivan: percussion + electronics

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E[MYR]GENCE.200

for plate tectonics, evolution, extinction, and climate

E[MYR]GENCE.200 (2022) tracks the last 200 million years of Earth’s geological history—from the breakup of Pangaea to the present—at a scale of 4s = 1 myr (4 seconds = 1 million years).

The piece consists of an 8-channel drone (electric guitar + ebow), with each channel representing a major tectonic plate. Each channel shifts incrementally out of phase and tuning with the others based on the average velocity of the tectonic plate it represents. This evolving drone is punctuated by significant evolutionary, extinction, and climate events in the form of composed musical vignettes created using tape-music techniques and analog synthesis. At the scale of the piece, the last 300,000 years of human history (the time of the earliest known homo sapiens) occur in its final seconds, highlighting humanity’s place in geological timescales. 

THE WAY BACK

The Way Back (2020) is the result of an ongoing process of reconnection—navigating out of debilitating pandemic-induced stasis and rediscovering moments of joy in the creative process. It also embodies the re-forging of my relationship with my primary instrument—electric guitar.

BESŹELCOMA & DRONETICS, VOL. 1