Polyptych (2020) — 15 min.

Three songs from a song cycle in progress.

View score here.

For voices, percussion, and electronics.

Polyptych is an ongoing song cycle about the future, from a loosely microscopic point of view. Each song starts as a slightly undisciplined sonnet. The songs are linked by thematic content, orchestration, and recurring bits of imagery.

Over the course of the project, the songs have been rearranged for live ensemble performance (voices + percussion), solo performance (voice + electronics), and fixed media playback (the recordings included here). Please note that the linked score reflects a triangulation of these versions, and should not be taken as a literal representation of the sounds in the recording.

I. Organelle

pity pity organelle the sea floor kisses

constellation hawks winding upward tangle

coral tissues spiral moons dangle

spilled from foreign ballast tanks abysses

splay the mountainside as membrane glisses

glass fork tines scatter where fish tails wrangle

where once herded ocean tires now strangle

flocks of simple eyes in foaming fields salt hisses

O tendril’s augur O obsidian’s

inhaler O long toothed polyp whipping

rock drawn wind drift now blissful organelle

phosphoresce littoral meridians

shorebirds are together ripping

a crushed galaxy pity this leaky shell

II. MUL.APIN

Calcareous nibbling. Rain on rock faces. 

(Future graffito snaps iris, scans palm.)

Scratched lens of summit. Mineral traces.

(Future graffito taps heart rate to calm.)

Future graffito, whose inscape erases—

(Aeolian etchings. Scar of scarp-column.)

Graffito’s future, via tablet, replaces.

(Tooth-pile of talus. Regolith slalom.)

Styluses of the anthro-chimera

Inscribing (via stylized lions and link-

Bearded bulls) all weather compendia upcoming.

MUL.APIN consulted, scribbled on sclera

(Via mountain-eyes-heaven; via blink

Of graffito)—ephemera, unsheltered, summing.

III. Two Twins

Two twins twisted in the stomach of a tick.

Low winds tumbling a crow that's stumbled sick.

Swimming pools are stagnant. Rabbit fevers

Jump to dogs. Lumps will savage true believers

Who then win seraphim icons from the clique.

Two twins twisted in a self-infecting lick.

Blood lust hounds immunity achievers.

Pigs catch it, too: now a sudden run on cleavers.

Two twins twisted in: a galaxy shot through

And spongy-thin, the amyloid clots blot,

The animals spin, the plasma vial sours.

Shot through two twisted twins: swaths of sinew

With unraveled ends, the telomere sunspot

That split the skin, the zoonotic zodiac flowers.