Eggs N’ Sassage
This short music video was written and directed by myself, for a track produced in collaboration with pianist Derrick Butler and trumpeter Kenneth Brown. It was inspired by my experience during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown, and reflects the diverse and musical nature of my home neighborhood of View Park, Los Angeles. The experience I had working on this project was one of connection; the crew was a conglomerate of childhood friends, new friendships made in college, and family, coming together to bring the project to life. Artist Stella Guggenheim provided the album art.
May Contain Adventure
I was the co-writer, assistant director, and composer for this official advertisement for JanSport, alongside writer and director Chase Hirt. Our pitch to the brand was an ad-campaign “by young creatives, for young creatives.”
For the majority of the films I’ve worked on, film composition is relegated to the last step. This project was a unique opportunity for the music to be a part of the storytelling from the very beginning, influencing the creative development, and allowing my role to become much more collaborative. The photos to the right show Chase and I editing and composing alongside each other.
Money Trees
This song is from my unreleased “Olympiad” EP. Money Trees was written during the 2020 lockdown amidst the George Floyd protests, and re-samples a track used in Kendrick Lamar’s Money Trees. His music has backdropped a lot of my own identity searching, and it felt fitting to reference him to underpin the political and racial discourses that thematize the piece. I have poignant memories of my younger brother and I blasting Alright from a Bluetooth speaker and leading marches down the streets of LA, and wanted to capture the emotions we both felt during that time. Photos to the right are selected from my brother’s series taken during the protests, which visualize the experience that inspired the work. Album and track list art was provided by photographer Connor Silver.
A Picture Of My
Neighbors Garden
This is the first song from my Rain Clouds and Music For Headphones thesis composition. I wrote a collection of poems and proses, and then developed the score Sketches For Headphones off of them. The selected score to the right is the first of nine sketches, and is the basis for, and sampled in “A Picture of My Neighbors Garden”. I sought to represent the augmented reality headphones users occupy when navigating urban spaces.
Feeling Alone In A
Crowded Place
This piece from Rain Clouds and Music For Headphones pairs recordings of radio and the Los Angeles metro train stations with a modular synthesizer, treated with a LFO modulated granular synthesizer. Beeps, swooshes, and clicks in train stations epitomized a feeling of movement between places, while the inaudible chatter of radio felt comparative to the complexity of loneliness. The irony of how even in the most crowded, dense, and populated urban environments, and on the most hyper-connected social media platforms, we can still feel the most desolate. In both, innumerous voices are completely unaware of our existence.
