Works

Drumset Trombone V serves as the finale to my series of electroacoustic works for drumset and trombone. It brings together the groove-based playing that we’ve done in more casual performance settings with the more free and avant-garde improvisation that has been standard in this repertoire.

Drumset Trombone is Henry Samra and Josif Collazo

Remind me not to mention the stars is the title of a Saul Williams poem featured at the ending of Ted Hearne’s masterwork PLACE. I wrote this piece based on that line; to feature all the beauty of the stars with the catharsis of that line in its context.

This is a theatrical score created for the play in collaboration with Indigo Bongwater.

Calumet is about a loss of innocence. During high school, I started biking down south to Calumet Park, the Steel Mills, and other areas around South Chicago. This was a period of immense personal growth and exploring the world for what it truly is. Calumet explores those themes, heading into an intense whirlwind and coming out the other side.

circular resoning explores the cycle of love and romance and the electric feeling that comes from it, as well as the wistfulness that follows. It is a piece about yearning, grief, joy and sadness, expressed through the powerful sound of the accordion, which is a sound that never fails to hold immense beauty.

Over the past year, I’ve been working on this project, Drumset Trombone, as an adventure into writing guided improvisation-focused electroacoustic music. The concept focuses on avant-garde forms, interactivity, and primarily live processing of sound. This fourth installment explores the absurdity of contemporary music and brings it to a comedic extent. It is not an attack on new music but a light critique and parody of some of the different sounds attached to that performance practice.

Friday Night is about the liminal feeling of my own college campus on a particularly active Friday night. There is much catharsis in the event of stumbling around while everyone around you is almost a ghost, invested in their own business without the space of mind to consider anything else. The piece is built from a heavily manipulated studio recording, as well as a bunch of field recordings I took on a Friday night about a year ago.

Tribute is a tribute to the greats of progressive rock: the bands Rush and Yes. This piece is a decomposition of four great works by these bands: Close to the Edge (Yes), Cygnus X-1 Book 2: Hemispheres (Rush), Heart of the Sunrise (Yes), and 2112 (Rush). The main challenge I set was to not do any stem separation of any of the tracks, so everything heard is a clip taken from the original audio file of the song.

I Wish I Could Tell You is a solemn tune about a past relationship, and all the things I wish I could tell her. It’s a goodbye to a time past its prime, and a love letter to a different part of my life. The piece explores the spaciousness of metal mallet percussion and uses live processing to achieve a fuller sound with more sustain.

Between Stars is a piece I wrote for the Musikos Collective’s URANIA stargazing event. It explores a harsher idea of outer space than may be expected, but feels appropriate, as space is scary and uncertain! The piece was one of my first forays into analog synthesis, with the main sound source being the Moog Grandmother synth, along with a whole host of heavily processed accordion samples.

Over the past year, I’ve been working on this project, Drumset Trombone, as an adventure into writing guided improvisation-focused electroacoustic music. The concept focuses on avant-garde forms, interactivity, and primarily live processing of sound. This third installment dives further into these aspects while also exploring each instrument in a more soloistic context as well as experimenting with a live looping and effects pedal setup.

“Muttering” was made as a loose adaptation of a classical guitar piece by Rob Scallon called “Mutter,” and my goal was to expand it into a larger piece with a lot more meaning and personal connection. The piece consists of several percussion instruments placed around the audience: piano, vibraphone, tubular bells, crotales, suspended cymbals, and a gong, all amplified and processed through Chris Poovey’s grainflow sustain. The decision to theme this piece around dreams came from a poem I had written before called “I hope to stay awake.” The text recited by me in the piece is an adaptation and extension of that poem.

Why Drumset Trombone? I think working with unusual combinations of instruments can lead to a lot of creativity. Drumset Trombone I is my first adventure into writing guided improvisation-focused music. This piece focuses on the strengths of each instrument but also plays into the combination’s downfalls, as well as using the instruments in unique ways (such as using the superball mallet with the drumset, or screaming through the trombone).

This piece is themed around soundscapes; specifically, I wanted to create something that felt natural and earth-like but to be a bit too artificial to be earthly. Each movement represents a different planet (hence, Interplanetary). This was also my first full piece for 8-channel audio, which presents a very different workflow in terms of how to express ideas; spatialization comes first and foremost among any other sonic manipulation, especially in an ambient piece.

DREAM MACHINE is a shorter stereo etude I wrote themed around the Sony Dream Machine alarm clock and radio, and my first time really treating stereo spatialization with a lot of care. I wrote this about the feeling of waking up from a dream and then drifting back into sleep, before the alarm clock starts blaring again to prompt a second rise.

Expansion of an idea from Echo Ziemba of my silver lines

My first ever EP, containing 5 tracks of original electronic music.