ted coffey -> collaboration

work

-> collaboration

more soon. in the meantime...

Ping, 2002-2004 :: by bekah & me

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Low Tones, 2003 :: with Dylan Bolles & Nathan Lynch

This is quiet, low [!], meditative music that I participated in making. The instruments were made by Nathan Lynch and Dylan Bolles, and the music arose organically following that process. The ceramic tubes made by Lynch sound 36 and 54 Hz—so it takes a pretty fine playback system to yield a reasonable representation of the sound. We performed this music in August 2003 at Lincoln Center Out of Doors. Although we did perform onstage, most of the day was spent playing for and talking with small groups of people who circulated around the park-like space. [Note: I engineered the 1999 recording underlying the video. It occasionally features radiators banging around in the Mills College hall, and inhalations whistling through noses.]

Low Tones at Lincoln Center video :: 1'32"

To hear more... Low_Tones.mp3 :: 12'19"

The Dust Bunny, 2004 :: with Grady Klein & Paul Lansky

Composer Paul Lansky provided music for this animation by Grady Klein, and I contributed sound design. I recorded sounds in my house, yard and town, drew from foley libraries on CD, and synthesized a number of sounds from scratch. Without a doubt this was one of the most rewarding and interesting projects I've ever worked on. It was an honor to collaborate with Grady and Paul.

The Dust Bunny, sound design only:
excerpt 1: 2'20" :: excerpt 2: 1'02" :: excerpt 3: 0'40"

Zap, 2002 :: with PPAR Dance

I've made seven pieces over the past seven years for a pair of choreographer-dancers, Paula Plessas and Ann Robideaux. These works have been performed nearly thirty times in their home town of New York, and in San Francisco, where we all first met. [Please refer to my vitae for details.] You can hear more recent ditties in the music section of this site [ellaZ_toes & metro_arc, for example].

Zap accompanies a dance of the same name, choreographed—and here danced—by Paula Plessas and Ann Robideaux. It was originally composed for eight-channel tape, but that version has been performed only twice. The dance gives a poetic treatment to various relationships between the insect and human conditions. The choreography involves a large bug zapper that hangs suspended over the stage at various heights; the dancers' explicit attraction to this prop is meant to suggest the death drive.

After slowly waking up, Zap (the music) unfolds a sequence of discursive sections and blocks of texture. Above all that, discrete gestures evoke the actions and communications of characters—who are sometimes disgruntled, aggressive and prideful, sometimes serene, nostalgic and sweet. Zap's aesthetic is raw, crunchy and 'post-digital'—letting nasty DC offsets through the production process, for example. Through such (lack of) technique, I tried to connect with the more switch-like world of bugs, and the electricity of the scene. This inhumanness is more or less redeemed by a nearly three-minute-long denouement: a gentle texture that closes the piece.

Zap video excerpt :: 1'31"