I put on a solo concert at CCRMA. I wanted to primarily center my songs, but wanted to mediate them in all sorts of interesting ways. I ended up building a set that looked like my living room, and asked my colleague-friends to join me on stage at different times during the set to play songs or card games with me. At one moment they sang from the audience, extending the end of my intro tune in time and space. The set involved overhead projection and I addressed the audience via writing and drawing on the paper, sometimes drawing out scenes from my songs in real-time as I sang them. I built an instrument with empty beer cans and capacitive sensors (using a Teensy running a Faust program) to play the song "Flower in Winter" with a bespoke theatrical instrument meant to parallel the song's themes as they relate to addiction.
Thank you to Taylor Goss, Alex Han, Celeste Betancur, Sami Wurm, Hassan Estakhrian, Jenna Przybysz, Munir Gur, Zoe Ryu, Dayshon Mathis, Matthew Gilbert, and Gil Bolster for joining me for this creative moment. I couldn't have done it without you. Thank you also to Constantin Basica for the amazing production and documentation assistance as always.
Performed on June 7, 2024 with Iran Sanadzadeh (performer-composer, music technology researcher) and Luna Valentin (performer, speleoacoustics researcher). Iran and I once played mando and sang in a park in México City while skipping lectures at a NIME conference. We came up with some chords and said we'd finish the song one day... Well, here we were, at Stanford in June with a chance to finish the song we didn't finish. Luckily, recordings of the chords and early materials for the tune were re-discovered amongst old voice memos and messages. In this rendition, we explore textures, resonances, cycles, sustains, and oscillations that reflect and rework this past material in conversation with what has changed since then. By the end, we will have possibly finished the song.
Performed by Ensemble Linea on May 24, 2024. Sometimes I count in my head, around the pace of my heartbeat, up to numbers like the primes, resetting each time I reach one and counting up to the next: 1, 1 2, 1 2 3, 1 2 3 4 5, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11, and so on. As I reach higher numbers, the counting (while still focused) becomes more passive, and I drift towards a meditative, restful state. how i go to sleep is structured in relation to this sequence and the varied musical expressions you will hear represent the counting itself and/or the intrusive, surreal, mundane, or cyclical thoughts that enter and exit the mind as we drift off to sleep...
I had the pleasure of working with the lovely and brilliant Brazilian soprano-performer, Manuela Freua, as I wrote "adding days". We met in the spring of 2023, and immediately resonated on themes of expression and emotionality. After about a year, I had written a piece for us to sing together. We were lucky to get to rehearse and perform the piece at the TANK Center for Sonic Arts in Rangely, Colorado this past May 2024. "adding days" reflects on how life is an accumulation of experiences, always growing, and there need not be a sense that time is running out.
I'm adding days while life allows me.
There is no countdown.
There is no sense that time is running out.
No sense that I am owed anything.
I'll just keep adding days...
I'll grow as old as all the days I add.
Here we are singing the piece at the TANK in early May 2024.
And here we are singing the piece at CCRMA a week later, this time involving some theatrics and new sounds of dropping beads into a vase.
Performed by Carolina Santiago on April 16, 2024 at CCRMA. Piano, preparations, disklavier.
will i rest, or
will i keep going
will i move more slowly
will i relax, or
will i keep up this hurried pace
will i wind down, or
will i wile on
wandering...
and wondering if
i'll ever wind
down
Produced in collaboration with Iran Sanadzadeh for the Lunchtime Concert Series on March 28, 2024 at Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia.
Iran Sanadzadeh and Mike Mulshine's collaborative work focuses on musical expression with new interfaces and draws together songs, community and an expressive relationship with bespoke electronics. This endeavour focuses on affinities that bind art practices across wide distances, and how despite the hyper-connectivity of this era's communication, distance is a strongly felt emotion. This concert follows Mulshine's guest artist residency with the cohort at the School of Music and Performance. Iran is joined by Niran Dasika, Patrick Jaffe and Liam Bailie in this performance.
"This is the new networked music. Not how little latency, or how good is the audio quality, but how meaningful it can be to reach out to friends - online, in music, the closest to being together in real space, realtime. This is what music is for - to bring us together, reminisce, try stuff out, have fun. A remarkable concert experience." - Cat Hope review. Read here.
Written for and performed by Ensemble Adapter on February 11, 2024.
I love being creative and keep myself very busy doing that. When I stop, I feel like I am missing something. Unsure where to direct my passion, I feel empty, dissociated, numb... I realized that maybe this is rest, and I stopped worrying so much.
Special thanks to Ryan Yu for lighting/projection assistance and Dave Kerr and my composition colleagues at CCRMA for documenation assistance.
Performed with Pamela Martinez on February 2, 2024 at Bing Concert Hall, Stanford, CA.
“All Of It” attempts to embrace everything all at once and reacts to a period of hypermobility and parallel re-understandings of notions of home and routine. A process of building and falling apart takes place on stage, suggesting that there is beauty in effort and futility. The piece can look very different depending on its iteration, but generally follows a form of A (movement) - B (building/creating) - C (failure).
The audio for "All Of It" is ever-changing as well, but is comprised of field recordings and voice memos taken by the composer while in transit or working with other musicians over the past few years. It houses a variety of musical styles and structures that sum to a characteristic whole.
Performed by Ensemble Kujoyama on October 14, 2023 at CCRMA. "With careful abandon" explores the interplay of three musical voices, one rigid, one slack, and one emotional. The voices tug and pull at each other, at times coexisting, merging and transforming, or claiming space.
Performed with Pamela Martinez on October 6, 2023 on the CCRMA Stage, Stanford, CA.
“All Of It” attempts to embrace everything all at once and reacts to a period of hypermobility and parallel re-understandings of notions of home and routine. A process of building and falling apart takes place on stage, suggesting that there is beauty in effort and futility. The piece can look very different depending on its iteration, but generally follows a form of A (movement) - B (building/creating) - C (failure).
The audio for "All Of It" is ever-changing as well, but is comprised of field recordings and voice memos taken by the composer while in transit or working with other musicians over the past few years. It houses a variety of musical styles and structures that sum to a characteristic whole.
Performed by Schallfeld Ensemble on September 27, 2023 in Dinkelspiel Auditorium. "Caught in the middle" explores the interplay of disparate styles, embracing and rebranding chaos as coherence to evoke the ethos of performing coexistence. It also explores how relationships with digital technology shape and complicate lived experience and understandings of memory.
"Love More" is a song and ensemble piece written for and performed with members of Distractfold Ensemble (Alice Purton, Daniel Brew, Roćio Bolaños) at IKLECTIK (London, UK) on September 6, 2023.
"Love Stay" explores love and loss in a composition for soprano and harp involving candles and lamps. Performed by Virginie Tarrete and Jasmine Gonnella on July 15, 2023 at the inaugural Academie de Création Musicale in Dijon, France.
"Fail More" explores themes of failure and self acceptance through a hybridized sound installation turned instrumental composition. The piece aims to renavigate and flatten the set of hierarchical relationships between composer, performer, and audience members, as well as blend the social spaces in and outside the concert venue.
As you enter the space, you are encouraged to walk around, explore, and play with the lighting around the performers; in doing so, you become part of the work. I act as a stand-in for the audience in this recording. Check out a live concert recording of the piece here.
Thank you Nina Guo, Weston Olencki, Madison Greenstone, Max Murray, and Mattie Barbier for making this piece a reality. Thank you Zach Miley for recording and editing.
"to the brim" is a reflection on the theme of fulfillment and a realization of the mantra: "Fill your life up, to the brim."
The piece employs a graphic score that asks the performers to navigate a set of paths through musical space. When paths diverge, they may choose which path to follow. Certain concrete milestones are encountered along the way which ask them to perform a pseudo-randomly selected series of musical or physical gestures, or to perform specific actions (like lighting and extinguishing a candle, or pouring and drinking a glass of water). Every performance is uniqe. Check out an alternative performance of the piece here.
Thank you Haruka Fijii and Ray Furuta for workshopping and performing this piece. Thanks Mark Applebaum for providing the opportunity to compose.
In (not so) Alone, At Home, I add a unique vocal sampling instrument to a short live piano/vocals songwriter set featuring the merging of two songs: 1) The Broad Sunshine of Life (unreleased), and 2) Alone, At Home. The tunes explore the difficult act of making the best of loss and solitude.
The vocal sampling instrument was made with Max is interfaced by a Novation Launchpad and a digital keyboard. The Max patch spatializes the samples using ambisonics (spat5) around the audience via a full 24.8 speaker ring called "The Grail." The instrument allowed me to record (live), re-record, and play back each of 16 vocal samples, modify effects applied to them (mostly reverb), loop them pseudorandomly based on chord changes triggered by notes on the keyboard, and change their location in space. The instrument also played prerecorded and spatialized whisper/vocal samples, and these were gated off by playing the keyboard (that is, the whispers get louder when I don't play many notes on the keyboard, and vice versa).
The performance took place on October 8th, 2022, the second night of this year's annual Transitions concert at CCRMA (Stanford University). Thanks to Constantin Basica, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano, and Matt Wright for your assistance at this concert.
"Gemini" explores the vulnerable act of turning yourself inside out, showcasing your inner world for all the world to see.
The piece was originally composed for a traditional jazz trio context (piano, bass, drums), but here is transmuted in to an live electronic music context.
A newly released single that explores finding peace in (or embracing) being alone.
I recorded the song in a couple live takes at CCRMA and creatively mixed/produced around the result. I wanted to avoid the metronome and I hope this imparted a fluid feel to the track.
I have been fascinated by the idea of making art in and for vernacular contexts: parties, meetings, hallway spaces, lobby spaces, possibly services or classes, social gatherings of all sorts.
Through works like this, I aim to blur the lines between art and life and augment, subvert, or just subtly comment on the meaning or feeling of social space.