Baker Artist Portfolios

2016 was a busy and fruitful year for us. We released our third studio album, toured all over North America and Europe, and played our music on countless stages, both large and small (some very, very small). But now it's time for us to compose all new material and move forward as a band.

Since 2012, we have self-released a series of tapes—dubbed "mixtapes"—which have allowed us to explore new ideas, play with compositional techniques, and ultimately discover new sounds. We treat each tape as both a sounding board for the development of new ideas and a self-contained work unto itself. Starting with Mixtape Volume 1 we began to play with the technique of audio collage, juxtaposing a series of seemingly unrelated musical components into one unbroken stream. This technique became the foundation for future tapes as well as our studio albums.
 

Drawing inspiration from the Memento Mori and Vanitas paintings of the seventeenth century, the subject is a vase of cut flowers.  Images from the Boston Marathon Bombing and a vase of dead and drying flowers are exposed on top of one another again and again to form a shifting stained glass image.

Scintillations I is a short and silent video piece attempting to create a digital contemporary echo of avant-garde experimental 16mm film. With some of the pervasive imaging tools of the day - mobile phone, computer screen, digital SLR - and using transfer and recapture from one to the other, I attempted to create a visual language that evokes the gradual loss and disembodiment of memory and perception, slowly migrating from human capacities, to computer functions. Are we augmenting our senses with technology or are we relying on technology to replace our senses?

Across walls, fences, and alleys, rats not only expose our boundaries of separation but make homes in them. "Rat Film" is a feature-length documentary that uses the rat—as well as the humans that love them, live with them, and kill them--to explore the history of Baltimore. "There's never been a rat problem in Baltimore, it's always been a people problem". 

RAT FILM premiered at the 2016 Locarno International Film Festival and will be distributed by Cinema Guild. The film features an original score composed by Baltimore-based musician Dan Deacon.

Press:

The first sample of  video statements created in 2019, to accompany the thirty-three stream-of-consciousness solo piano improvisations on my 2001 CD, Keyboard Mania.

Royality-free video backgrounds obtained from: Give Me Free Art, Pexels, Pixabay, Videvo.

This could possibly be viewed as an audio component of Surealism:  "a 20th-century avant-garde movement in art and literature which sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind, for example, by the irrational juxtaposition of images."

The third sample of  video statements created from 2018-2019, to help explain the twenty-nine stream-of-consciousness solo piano improvisations on my 2002 CD, "A Glassful of Doubt."

​First and foremost, I am a composer. With the advent of YouTube, it became apparent that adding visual imagery would garner more interest in my work then a static audio presentation. I’d already created a body of photography and visual art that I could draw on for this purpose. To this I added video clips, the purpose of which was to help listeners better understand the context of my vision.

A study of space along the frozen shoreline of Lake Michigan during the spring thaw. Intended for gallery exhibition. Exhibitions include: Light City Baltimore, Taubman Museum at Virginia Tech University, and Tyler School of Art Gallery at Temple University.

Suffering from a rare eye disorder, a man convinces his estranged ex-wife to drive him back to the places from their shared past so he can see them - and her - one last time. Inspired by Ingmar Bergman's "Persona," this experimental narrative serves as a portrait of literal and metaphorical blindness, as the characters' memories of the past overlap with the fragmentary experiences of the present.