Listening between four spaces
Drift Choir
This 40-minute composition was formed from thirty days of continuous, multi-camera and microphone recordings (May 1-30, 2025) across four sites— Juan’s studio in Bogotá, Stellage in Athens, Liebig 12 in Berlin, and Various Artists in New York City — and was live-processed and mixed at EMS in Stockholm as a composer-in-residence, June 2025.
The piece exists as a multi-channel sculptural sound and video installation, as well as compositions for binaural and stereophonic listening.
Structured in five movements (Conversations, Disintegrations, Polyphony, Clocks, and Silences), the work explores modes of listening in-between: where voices drift and overlap, where interference and transmission errors become part of the texture, and where silence is charged with the presence of what is barely heard. It is less about achieving clarity or precision than about attunement — to one another, to place, and to the fragile thresholds between sound and its disappearance.
The system amplifies involuntary gestures, ambient interference, and environmental resonance as expressive forms of communication. Sirens, footsteps, fragments of speech, the hum of appliances—these become as vital to the transmission as intentional voices. Through real-time, two-way channels, participants across cities engage in shared live programming and informal, drifting exchanges, forming a distributed intimacy that resists simplification. Here, interruption and distortion are not errors, but vital textures—carrying not just messages, but atmospheres.
As part of the project, "Stay Tuned" assembles a choir of voices between 1000 Hz and 200 Hz. Participants are invited to contribute a single tone within their vocal range. These imperfect, resonant tones overlap with environmental sounds and transmissions, creating an accumulative composition that is both human and planetary in scale. In this thickening sound field, tuning is less about precision than about attention—about attunement to one another and to place.
Drift Choir was exhibited May 1-30, 2025 at: