“Collected Breath”

I love collaborations that evolve over time and after working with someone enough, things just start to fall into place and there is an ease of ideas that occur. That’s how it’s been with my friends and colleagues RAWdance. We just premiered another piece “Collected Breath” together but it debuts in a very different way: over 11,000 LEDs lit across the highest building in San Francisco, the Salesforce tower. What’s unique about this piece is that if you’ve lived or visited San Francisco in the last few years, you will have noticed these projections while looking out at the building after midnight. This is the first piece that has incorporated sound and it’s synced with the images in a 10 minute loop so you have 6 chances to watch it each night. What I most love about the piece is that it mimics the way we breathe: sometimes slow or fast, other times breathing is a labored. Breathing can even be euphoric…

The majority of the piece was written on my modular synthesizer and then edited and arranged in Ableton Live. A few days before I sent over the music, I got some footage from one of the tests they were doing at the tower. When I dropped the music in, I was so pleased how it flowed. The music really does come to life when you see it moving in tandem with the visuals. You can see a small example of it in a recent post I made on Instagram.

I am forever grateful when I get to work on projects of this scale. They are once in a lifetime and an absolute dream. You can learn all about the piece here.