Artist Statement

​​​

​According to Facebook user Brice Everett Ivan, my practice centers around “devolving the saxophone with attention-seeking gimmicks.” These “attention-seekings” (for brevity’s sake, further notated as “ASs”) are fueled by my desire to redefine the performer-instrumental relationship by inventing scenarios which dismantle tradition and expand music-making into a curiosity-centered, interdisciplinary process. As a composer, performer, and curator, I believe that exploration challenges us to listen and live in radically, healthy ways. 

This ASs has seen me modify instruments with tubes, custom mouthpieces, percussive preparations, and live electronics. 

This ASs has seen me wobble metal construction objects during improvised sonic mating arenas to assert dominance over alpha-male culture. 

This ASs has seen me turn preserved heart specimens into MaxMSP controllers in the middle of anti-capitalist music-theatre factories, adorned in a glitter suit and fake mustache, armed with bubble guns and a band of fellow artists fighting for human rights.  

 

This Ass has seen me perform fake dental surgery on unsuspecting audience members, using real human teeth, to a soundtrack of guitars played with electronic toothbrushes and raucous saxophone multiphonics. 

This ASs has seen me create interactive motion-controlled dance installations and project vintage slides found at thrift stores across America to a soundtrack of divorce and dementia. 

This ASs has seen me melt ice off aluminum sculptures in an art gallery, a church, and the back of a jeep on the side of a highway.  

As a regular performer in the Baltimore noise/experimental improvisation scene, and a founder of the interdisciplinary arts collective, Wieldflower Arts, I exist wholeheartedly embracing exploration as a necessity. I see my work as a way of freeing both performers and audiences from the conventions that limit our self-expression. I believe in artmaking as a humanizing practice, and curate sound in a way that allows us all to exist imperfectly and with open minds. 

​

​