Waking up Down at the Bottom of the Sea (2016) 9'
There are two versions of Waking up Down at the Bottom of the Sea. One for Symphony Orchestra and one for string orchestra.
Waking Up at the Bottom of the Sea narrates a common dream where a person wakes up under the sea, later to adapt to breathe and live under water and interact with sea life. In this story, the person experiences the anxieties of asphyxiation, attempts to reach the surface, unexpected breathing under water and diversions into illuminating and pleasant adventures, before reaching the surface.
Rhythms and tropes derived from Latin American music -often in unusual combinations- populate many of those “adventures”, such as South American folk music amalgams, Argentine Tango, and urban hip-hop infused Salsa.
It can be thought, in a narrow sense, that the piece represents the Immigrant Experience: breathing and living in an unfamiliar world until it becomes one’s own. In a wider sense, however, Waking Up at the Bottom of the Sea embodies the act of learning; that initial fear of the unknown being overcome as we see a better version of ourselves emerge at the other end, knowing.
Waking up Down at the Bottom of the Sea, for Symphony Orchestra
Piano Concerto - Cantabile Hop (2014) 15'
The piano concerto can be played with Symphony Orchestra or in a chamber-combo setting. The combo version (Cantabile Hop) calls for piano, bass, drums and viola or cello.
In this Piano Concerto, written for pianist Vincent Van Gelder, World Music, Electronic Dance Music, Funk, and the classical tradition fuse into this one-movement cantabile groove.
The Conscious Sleepwalker Loops (2008) 12'
The Conscious Sleepwalker Loops brings itself about to create a sonic reality mixing truth and fiction as if it were an intense and vivid half-dream. In it, the truth outside enters the piece with the logic of the inner fictional reality. The outside world brings -among other things- some untrue flamenco, a somewhat truer Argentine tango, and multiple sounds and procedures typical of digitally processed music (cut-outs, echoes, reverberation, flanger, etc) deceivingly produced only by acoustical instruments. The genres appearing in the piece are made not true to their origins mainly by means of misquotation, exacerbation and unlikely media.
It is, however, through all these untruths that The Conscious Sleepwalker Loops attempts to bring the energy of flamenco, the sensuality and rhythmic subtleties of Argentine tango, and the exciting awkward mechanicism of electronica, to warmly embrace the delicate, powerful symphony orchestra not in dream, not in reality but in a sharp sleepwalking.