On January 6, 2017, my new electroacoustic composition Cascade was diffused live over 20 loudspeakers at the 2017 San Francisco Tape Music Festival at The Victoria Theater.

On March 17, 2017, Cascade was again diffused over the same CCRMA-hosted speaker network, but this time in its home location at Bing Concert Hall, Stanford University. CCRMA curated the two-night concert. Other composers included John Chowning, Natasha Barrett, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano, Eoin Callery, and co-SF Tape Music Collective members Matt Ingalls, Cliff Caruthers, and Maggi Payne, as well as others.

I performed my improvisation + fixed media composition, Spanish Panoramas – Guided Improvisations with SoundFisher at the 16th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference in Malaga, Spain on October 28, 2015. The concert was held in the 15th Century building that houses the contemporary Sala Unicaja de Conciertos María Cristina. I shared the bill with composers Roger Dannenberg, Nadine Kroher, José López-Montes, Bill Manaris, Takuro Shibayama, Yuri Spitsyn, and Sever Tipei.

A purely fixed media version of the piece will be made available on my SoundCloud page later this month.

sfSound, The San Francisco Tape Music Collective, and Gray Area Arts present:

The San Francisco Tape Music Festival 2016

I’ll be playing a new audio postcard, Spanish Panoramas, at The 2016 San Francisco Tape Music Festival on Saturday January 9th at 8:00 PM.

Friday, Jan. 8 (8:00 PM)
Saturday, Jan. 9 (8:00 PM)
Saturday, Jan. 9 (11:00 PM)
Sunday, Jan. 10 (8:00 PM)

Grand Theater / Grey Area Arts
2665 Mission St.
San Francisco

$15 [$10 underemployed] each concert
$40 festival pass
advance tickets: http://www.ticketfly.com/event/1025355-tape-music-festival-san-francisco/

Lovers parting during a rainy night — symbolizing a musical mode (Lalita Ragini), circa 1700. India; Rajasthan state. Opaque watercolors on paper. Courtesy of Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, Gift of Dr. Narinder S. and Satinder Kapany, 2004.76. Photograph © Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.

Lovers Departing in the Rain — an audio portrait © 2015 by Thom Blum

For the full experience, go to the San Francisco Asian Art Museum’s Picturing Sound, Creating Mood exhibit, through November 22, 2015.

My piece J-Wake was performed at the Hörlursfestival in Solleftea, Sweden, on July 4th.
The theme of the Festival was “water soundscapes” and, according to the organizers, Like Now, the sixth annual Festival took place, “under the dome coupole in Sweden, Västernorrland and live on internet streams” on July 4, 2015, from 13:00 to 21:00.

I am creating some sound portraits to go along with specific paintings in the San Francisco Asian Art Museum’s current exhibition, “Picturing Sound, Creating Mood”, which runs from March 23 – November 22, 2015. The small paintings are from 18th and 19th Century Rajasthan, India. My goal is to create intimate soundscapes that fuse with their paintings and lure a viewer into exploring more of the paintings’ fine and delicate details.

This video, introducing the exhibit, was created by the Museum’s Lorraine Goodwin, Interpretative Media Specialist.

I’ve just completed a new electroacoustic composition that will have its world premiere this Saturday night, January 10, 2015, 8:00 PM at the San Francisco Tape Music Festival. The Festival includes four distinct concert programs and spans three nights (January 9-11). It will feature 32 compositions by as many composers and is a must hear event for any devotee of the artform, as well as anyone with open ears and a mind for an immersive and expansive sound experience.

The March 10, 2014 premiere performance of the Soundscraper project — live-streamed, crowdsourced soundscaping — took place as planned. Over twenty people participated by streaming live sound from their environments. Excerpts from the 90-minute recording of the performance are now available on SoundCloud and at the following Soundscraper post.

The next Soundscraper performance is now being planned. Check out the Soundscraper web site for details.