/Sound Art/
Underpass
DEVELOPED BY DUMASTAR
An underpass is a portal into another world. An ambient soundscape built on location-based field recordings that plays with acousmatic space.
Based on recordings taken in Santa Clarita, CA, 34.42638767819953, -118.51215711092898
CHANNELS
Incorporating original field recordings and photography with historic documents, CHANNELS takes you on an immersive journey down the 233-mile length of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. The installation explores the ways humans have continued to reshape and rediscover their own connection to this ever-changing landscape of broken ambition and reckless conquest. Presented at the Wavecave gallery, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA, October 13-17 2025. Sound Recorded and Mixed by Benjamin Norbrook Color Photography, design and construction by Benjamin Norbrook
In Siren's Wake
As a child. I survived a devastating house fire that upended my life. While the effects have lessened with time, the wildfires that tore through Los Angeles in January 2025 have reawakened old memories. I started to wonder—poring through that charred debris washing up on the Santa Monica beach, poring over the debris of childhood memories—whether I could find a way to call out to that lost, frightened kid, and the many children right now who are going through the same thing I did 13 years ago. This concert stands as an attempt to reach out, and as a memorial to what we don’t yet know has passed into ash.
Spiral Memory
The spiral—the spinning propellors of Spitfire fighter planes in WW2, the tumbling journey of sycamore seeds, the unravelling scroll of the Torah—returns again and again in this exploration of the environments of power and politics that sequestered my childhood. Both an attempt to reconstruct these spaces through immersive sound design and a flight of liberation from them, the work examines childhood yearnings and confusions arising from the tangled web of British religion, nationalism and masculinity through collage-like structure of destructive creativity.
DEVELOPED BY DUMASTAR
Deer park
The work I have composed travels through the flurry of this physical world, as illuminating light slowly describes a path to peace and discovery. In creating the form, however, I focused less on the metaphysical aspects of Buddhist teaching and more on the imagery of Wang Wei’s poem. It takes as inspiration for sound the idea of echoes of a forest, and the idea of light streaking through it. In the end, the nature of the journey and its end should be up to the listener to decide.
Sound: Benjamin Norbrook
Dance: Mark Crawley
Part of the 2022 Students Create Festival at the Royal Academy of Music, London