Score / Music Composition /performance

trans. Navajo. “acting strangely/differently in the company of strangers”

For any large ensemble, preferably a chamber orchestra, but may be performed by non-musicians. Scanning each page from left to right, performers freely interpret the pictograph notations. Instead of agreeing upon meanings for each symbol, performers should solitarily analyze each page in the moment before performing it. The performance of each ordered page is prompted by a conductor. The duration of performance for each page is approximately 1 minute. 15 pages total.

*full score available upon request

Inspired some by Cardew’s Treatise, but more so of course by Navajo and Pueblo iconographies., particularly the ancient petroglyphs carved in the volcanic rock on the west side of Albuquerque. The piece however came about as a reaction to some listeners (or performers of my early works) believing that they should be hearing some kind of “Native American influence” in my music. Whatever that meant (to them). So this piece puts that burden into the hands of white performers, as that is who is the majority in music institutions in this country. There is no instruction or expectation for them to necessarily produce a particular style of music, (not in this piece, nor elsewhere either really), but I wanted to see if they would impose assumptions onto themselves, by being confronted with Indigenous symbols, a Navajo title, and knowing it was made by an Indigenous composer.

Installation: 300-400 custom candle-firecrackers

The first installation in a series that speak to long-form American Indian history, from creation stories to the contemporary world. A site-specific work recognizing each year of encroachment and colonial occupation in a North American location. When each candle burns down, a firecracker is ignited and sounded, representing cumulative generational trauma and subsequent actions of survivance.

Score / Music Composition / Performance

Music composition for 4 performers with each positioned in front of a tam-tam of various size. Each performer rubs on the tam-tam with a superball, while mouthing the heard ‘words’ of the sounds produced by the gestures indicated. The audience or viewer gathers their own version of what is being said.

Installation: Live finches, cage, pitch theremin, speakers

A pair of zebra finches interact with a pitch theremin instrument while situated in a cage. The instrument, being the center of the birds’ home, becomes an encroaching presence that the birds realize can be manipulated over time. Over the course of the exhibition, the birds change the pitch with the placement of their bodies, while harmonizing with the instrument by matching their chirps with its pitch.

The title is based on the Navajo creation story of the hero twins, who fought the monsters who were terrorizing the Dine’ people. In the days after 9/11, I was thinking often of how one (or a group of people) force themselves to harmonize with an encroaching presence while in the position of defense. When backed into a corner, what choreography of response is unconscious reaction, and what is self-determined. What can one do so that their defense is not perceived as aggression and can the presence of the smaller bodies interrupt the invasive force? 

Sound work / Album

An album of 10 new songs composed using audio shards from 140 Beatle songs. Samples of the originally records were chosen for their chord progression, tempo/time signature, lyrical content, harmonic (non-)compatibility, and retrograde inversion. These recordings were originally released as Sicksicksick/Sssk#5 under the pseudonym The Kleptones with two additional songs by ‘member’ Raja Das.

As a very person trying to understand the structures of tonal harmony, I immersed myself in the music of the Beatles. When I had exhausted my ears incessantly listening to their 12 albums and learned what I could from them, I recorded each onto a cassette tape, then proceeded to dismantle the cassette shell until I could remove the tape spool and re-assemble the cassette as a retrograde version of the album. This created 12 ‘new’ albums for me to listen. Ten years later, I returned to these backward versions of these songs, and was inspired to seek other ways to alter the content of the most known of rock bands.

(* Then after this experiment with the band’s catalog, I applied the same reversal process to some of the solo Beatle albums. The title lyric of Yoko Ono’s song, “Kiss, Kiss, Kiss”, resounded as “Sick Sick Sick”, providing a name for my future record label project).

Score / music composition / performance

The origins of this composition are a found cassette on the streets of Albuquerque of a woman giving recorded court testimony or deposition. A large portion of the audio recording contains the woman in a state of sorrowful crying. The crying was transcribed into standard Western music notation for a singer to perform. The original audio cassette has since been destroyed.

Record Label

Started in 2001 to document rural and urban experimental musicians residing in the Southwest United States. Packaging is mostly handmade, sometimes in collaboration with the artist. As of 2018, there are 70 limited edition releases on a variety of formats, from vinyl records, to cassette, to odd CDr media to playable postcards and sound installations.

(Abduction Song)

Mely Mitchell, Rob Valdez, and Raven Chacon

Video on surveillance monitor

An oral account, relayed by my grandfather, Frank Dineyazhe, telling a family story in the Navajo language. As a teenaged girl, my great-great-grandmother was kidnapped by a Mexican man and taken from her home at Dinetah (Navajo homelands) to what is now Albuquerque, NM (Bee’eldiildaahsinil). While filming in restricted areas of Albuquerque International Airport, the camera moves as though it is surveilling the site, creating a disjuncture in time, relaying to a generations old story of abduction while capturing the transit of people in present-day Albuquerque.

Score / Music Composition

Installation: Headphones, audio, photographs, text

Three field recordings of places in the Southwest chosen for their quietness. The recordings, captured on quiet times of day or night, are then amplified to their maximum volume. While seemingly reduced to noise, the recordings magnify revealing colors and patterns, giving new information about the essence of each location.