Travels

Travels is a new project I’m developing, under commission from Ars Nova, and with additional support from The Sundance Institute and The TEAM’s Petri Project. It combines drum machines & synthesizers with narrated stories of global movement. For fun, I sometimes refer to it as a “Techno-Ambient Storytelling Musical.”

While dreaming it up, I’ve been watching a lot of movies by Abbas Kiarostami, Claire Denis, Krzysztof Kieślowski, and Wong Kar-Wai; thinking about story collections by Colette, Roberto Bolaño, Fleur Jaeggy, Abul-Qâsem Ferdowsi, Mariana Enriquez, and W.G. Sebald; the travel writings of Ibn Battuta, as well as the non-fiction of writers Mahmoud Darwish, Mourid Barghouti, and Zora Neale-Hurston; and listening to a lot of house/techno from the US and abroad, a lot of Japanese ambient and electronic music from the 80s and 90s, and, as always, Fela Kuti.

You can see early work I’ve been doing in this style in this video excerpt here, or in this other video I made with JJJJJerome Ellis and Shawn Duan for New York Theatre Workshop.