As a member of the Second Land collective, my role could be best described as "vocalist" although I don't often use my own voice. Second Land is an audio/visual collective. We are Luke H., Curt S., Dani S. , Dylan K. and Aaron L. We use various acoustic and electronic devices to create improvisational performances. To create the "Gertrude Steinbot" routines, I found passages of writing by Gertrude Stein. I recorded text-to-voice renditions of the words and then used the recordings to add atmosphere to the words. Text-to-voice may be considered by some to be an overused technique, but even that seemed appropriate for such repetitive passages. For live performances with Second Land, I do use my own voice to read writings like the one included here entitled "Mick Jagger vs. Gertrude Stein."

Editing recorded words is very much like editing written words. You can add, subtract, rearrange the sounds in very much the same way that you can on the page. With sound there are additional ways to edit. You can revise the speed, pitch, volume, echo and decay. This prompted me to title the album "Strange Punctuation."

“The Doppler Effect” is a short story published in the fifth issue of Seltzer magazine. It’s a story about an urban fire. It’s a story about existential differences. It began as an experimental attempt to write prose without adjectives, an attempt which was only mostly successful.

Original publication: http://www.seltzerzine.com/2013/06/24/the-doppler-effect/

This is a work of spoken word performance art. I think of its script as a Fluxus score and of its performance as a “routine” in the manner of William S. Burroughs. A Fluxus score, like a musical score, is a sort of recipe for a performance, but is not a set of strict instructions. A Burroughs routine, like a vaudeville routine, is a spoken word piece that is theatrical and improvisational, changing with each performance.

I've performed this routine a few times before: first on the Ed Schrader Show, then as a featured performer at “Speak Your Piece” with the use of actual telephones, then in Knoxville, Tennessee, with a larger variety of telephones. With the August 2013 performance, I was able to actually ring the old phones and use an overhead projector for added imagery and atmosphere.

My script calls for a single voice although it depicts multiple conversations. A slash mark “/“ indicates a shift from one telephone conversation to the next. These are snippets of a conversation that happen over and over again forever, each time with only slight variation.

There are two sides to the conversations here. The first: things that a telemarketer would say on the telephone, such as “you’re eligible to be entered into our fifty thousand dollar sweepstakes” and/or “how would you like to buy a subscription to TV Guide?”. The second: a series of responses, like “what’s the catch?” or “I can’t talk now, I’m busy” or “he isn’t here right now. Can I take a message?”

Instructions for the actor are simple:

Pick up a ringing telephone. Say part of the script.
Hang up the telephone.
Answer another ringing telephone. Say more.
Hang up, repeat as desired. Use varying speed and tone.

I am the founding editor of Infinity's Kitchen, a graphic literary journal of experimental and conceptual writing. In it, I seek to publish work online and in print that is experimental or conceptual by nature, work that invents a new recipe for how it is made or work that reinvents an existing recipe in a compelling way.

I would like to thank Tony Venne, Graphic Designer, and Deborah Stein, Associate Editor, for their contributions to this project.

voice recording, found sounds
2013

My 10-minute play entitled “Party Planet” was performed by the Annex Theater as part of Artscape, on July 19-21, 2013. The play is a dark, farcical story about astronauts.

This iteration of the Annex Theater’s 10-minute plays celebrated the short attention span with short plays presented by international and local writers and a host of local talent activating the street space all weekend. The Annex Theater constructed a three-tiered stage on the concourse outside of Baltimore's Penn Station, at the feet of the giant man/woman sculpture there. It was a great place to watch plays: on a stage and on the street at the same time.

My play is based on a script written by the composer Erik Satie entitled Le piège de Méduse. I interpret that Satie, as a composer, was "composing" (not exactly "writing" or "scripting") the sounds and actions of the actors and the interstitial music in order to arrive at the experience, which must have seemed delightfully nonsensical back in 1913. I also suspected that the nonsense was only a side effect of the intended effect, so I sought to borrow his "recipe" so to speak, to make something with only slightly less nonsense involved.