with gratitude to: Ann, Stan, Kitty, Al, Patty, Bob, Pat, John, Charlotte, Marina, David, Madison, Ellery, Taylor, Natacha, Mario, Bethany, Nina, Hajnal, Eric, Sugar, Weston, and you.

David Bird is a composer, producer, and multimedia artist based in New York City. His work explores the dramatic potential of electroacoustic and multimedia environments, often highlighting the relationships between technology and the individual. His work has been performed internationally, at venues and festivals such as the MATA festival in New York City; the Gaudeamus Festival in Utrecht, Netherlands; the Wien Modern Festival in Vienna, Austria; the SPOR festival in Aarhus, Denmark; the Musica Electronica Nova Festival in Wrocław, Poland; and the Festival Mixtur in Barcelona, Spain. He has composed and collaborated with groups like JACK Quartet, Mivos Quartet, Bozzini Quartet, Yarn/Wire, Talea Ensemble, International Contemporary Ensemble, Mantra Percussion, Black Page Orchestra, loadbang, TAK Ensemble, and andPlay.

Atolls is written for solo piccolo and twenty-nine spatialized piccolos. In performance, the auxiliary performers surround the soloist and the audience in a ring. The pitch material played by the auxiliary performers is derived from the combined spectral analysis of a crash cymbal and Janet Leigh's infamous scream from Alfred Hitchcock’s "Psycho". The work is inspired by Roberto Bolaño's 2004 novel "2666", and excerpts of the text are interspersed throughout the solo piccolo part.

For solo picolo and 29 spatialized piccolos

Bethany Younge’s acoustic and electronic music explores the manifold kinesthetic properties of musical performance. For her, the act of music-making cannot be divorced from the physical presence of the human instigator. Her works often incorporate instrumental deconstruction, exaggerated movement, motion tracking, sounding costumes, and/or other aesthetic devices to sonically heighten corporeal expressivity.  Her works have been featured in the International Summer Course for New Music Darmstadt, MATA Festival, Resonant Bodies Festival, Gaudeamus Muziekweek, The 16th International Young Composers Meeting, and many other festivals. She has been awarded the Stipend Prize at the International Summer Course for New Music Darmstadt in 2016, the 2020 Kanter/Mivos Prize, the 2022-23 Barcelona Festival Mixtur Commission Award, and nominated for the 2022 Gaudeamus prize.

About Oxygen and Reality:

The limitations, the potential, the significance of the lungs and the air that we breathe are made palpable (by way of a convenient visual and sonic aid). A body must know its own limits, or else it's destined to vitiate in space.

For piccolo, balloons, electronics, and hardware

One of the world’s most brazenly experimental composers, Swiss artist Jessie Cox makes music about the universe - and our future in it. Through avant-garde classical, experimental jazz, and sound art, he has devised his own strand of musical science fiction, one that asks where we go next. Cox’s music goes forward. When he describes it, he compares it to time travel and space exploration, likening the role of a composer to that of a rocket ship traversing undiscovered galaxies. Known for its disquieting tone and unexpected structural changes, his music steps into the unknown, and has been referred to by the New Yorker as an example of ‘dynamic pointillism’, a nebulous and ever-expanding sound world that includes ‘breathy instrumental noises, mournfully wailing glissandi, and climactic stampedes of frantic figuration’.

About Spiritus:

I started writing this piece because I wanted to think about and with breathing as a proses entangled with bodies and environments. That breathing is denied to black lives, that breathing is something that also denies individualistic thinking, as one, to a smaller or larger degree, breathes with others. Musical instruments show breathing as something that can conjure other possibilities of hearing what is, while also pointing to the matters involved with and in breathing. - Jessie Cox

For solo flute

DM R (b. 1987 Bogotá, Colombia) is an NYC-based electroacoustic music composer, educator, and a 90s anime aficionado. Her music dwells at the junction of post spectral, ambient, pop culture, Colombian folk, and Rock en Español. You can listen to her work on SoundCloud.

DM R’s flute glissando and electronics piece represents the beginning of her practice in electroacoustic compositions. In sampling sampling Soda Stereo's MTV unplugged version of En la Ciudad de la Furia, she brings Rock en Español into the work—a nostalgic nod to the sounds of her childhood and a way of turning her back on the indoctrination of conservatory. This work is an act of rebellion.

For glissando flute and electronics

Joan Arnau Pàmies is a composer and multi-instrumentalist. He has written pieces for new music specialists Fonema Consort, Ensemble Dal Niente, JACK Quartet, Kathryn Schulmeister, and Jessica Aszodi. His music has been performed at numerous international festivals, including the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, MATA, and Foro de Música Nueva Manuel Enríquez. He has received commissions from the Internationales Darmstadt Musikinstitut, Central Nacional de Difusión Musical, Barcelona’s Liceu opera house, and L’Auditori. Joan Arnau Pàmies also produces music as Inlet Industry, the alter ego through which he performs live electronics and DJ sets.

Produktionsmittel I is the first piece of a three-part cycle of works which explore socioeconomic and science-fiction themes. Produktionsmittel I, for solo flute, aluminum foil, glass bottle, and fixed media, focuses on the limits of production. The flutist is placed in a position where they are overwhelmed by the amount of notational instructions on the score. They are compelled to produce as many sounds as possible, to an extent perhaps humanly impossible. Ultimately, the flutist transcends this scenario and delves into a new plane of existence. Produktionsmittel I is an allegory of the alienation that working people endure under capitalism.

For amplified flute, aluminum foil, glass bottle, and fixed media

Laura Cocks is a flutist who works in a wide array of environments as a performer of creative and experimental musics & “creates intricate, spellbinding works that have a visceral physicality to them” (Foxy Digitalis). 

Laura is the executive director and flutist of TAK ensemble, “one of the most prominent ensembles in the united States practicing truly experimental music” (I care if you listen), and performs regularly as a soloist, an improvisor, and with ensembles such as Talea Ensemble, International Contemporary Ensemble, Wet Ink Ensemble, and many others in NYC and abroad. Laura can be heard on ECM, Centaur Records, New Focus Recordings, Sound American, Denovali Records, Orange Mountain Music, Chambray Records, Amplify, TAK editions, Double Whammy Whammy, Winspear, Supertrain, and Gold Bolus, Sideband Records, Tripticks Tapes, and Carrier Records. 

They have been in residence at institutions such as Harvard University, Stanford University, University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University, the Delian Academy for New Music, and many others. Laura holds a doctorate from The Graduate Center and continues their writing and research in corporeal analyses of art and musical praxis.