Chaz Underriner

Electronic

We Keep Our Faces Always Toward the Sun

Audio for video installation in collaboration with Leah Sandler.

Leah’s notes on the piece:

We Keep Our Faces Always Toward the Sun
2024
Devised for Solstice 2024, and with consideration of new legislation in Florida preventing local governments from requiring basic heat protection for outdoor workers, this projection and sound piece is an elegy for protection from the sun. A cell phone video of the April 8th solar eclipse shot inside a DIY pinhole viewing device projected onto a circular screen constructed from hand-pulled paper with pulp made from Florida HB 433 (2024), dried in the Florida summer sun, hung by a single roofing nail, is accompanied by a minimal drone score resonant with the frequency of the sun’s vibrations by composer Chaz Underriner. This gesture is a contemplation of Floridian vulnerability and irreverence to the sun. (The human scale of time exists within the geological scale of time.)

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Interaction of Color

For video, electronics, and sustained pitch instruments. Video and composition based on Josef Alber’s “Interaction of Color”. (2024)

Text Score:
Use any sound-making object that can make a long, sustained tone. Play long tones that harmonize with the tones in the tape, usually softly. Once you’ve started on a pitch, don’t change it while playing. Always tune with the tones in the tape to make an interesting interval. Listen more than you play. Take long pauses between each tone.

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Context Collage: Vienna

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For Persimmon

For clarinet, cello, electric guitar, piano, video and electronics (2022)

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Meditations

For 4 vocalists, piano, cello, percussion, and electronics. Composed during residencies at the Atlantic Center for the Arts and the NYU Music Technology studios in the summer of 2021. Recorded for and released on Edition Wandelweiser Records.

Reviewed in The Wire magazine, the Squid’s Ear online magazine.

Radio play on ConcertZender.nl (Netherlands), the RTQE show on WORT (Madison), the Double Bummer show on XRAY.FM (Portland), dublab (LA) Night After Night and more.

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Landscape: Ghost (Home)

Landscape: Ghost (Home) is a recomposition of Landscape: Home for the Ghost Ensemble. This is another step in the ongoing interest I have to create a mimetic version of Haruki Murakami’s “over there” or “other world” in sound and image. I wrote a paper concerning this, “Mimesis, Murakami, and Multimedia Art: Parallel Worlds in Performance,” that was presented at the 40 Years of Murakami conference at Newcastle University, UK and published in Leonardo Music Journal.

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Persona 5 video game score

An example of combining multiple music pieces into RPG gameplay for my Scoring for Multimedia class at Stetson university.

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Instructions for a Home Invasion

Instructions for a Home Invasion is an installation for text, video projections, speakers, and found objects created by Teresa Carmody, Madison Creech, Chaz Underriner and Terri Witek in 2018. The installation is a meditation on the space of the Booker House in response to poetic instructions—we bring objects, sound, and images from our own various houses into this temporarily shared unoccupied space, itself a portion of a much larger university-owned house. Continue reading →

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nocturne series: 8

For violin, tenor sax, electric guitar, percussion, piano and field recording. Commissioned by Gaudeamus for ensemble Kluster 5. Premiered at Gaudeamus Muziekweek 2017.

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Score to the Train Scene from Spirited Away

A film scoring study for the train scene from Spirited Away. Continue reading →

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