I've been so busy over the past year that I have neglected the New Works section of the site. Since my last post over a year ago I have been busy producing several studio albums: two solo albums, TAO 20 - TREE TEMPLE and departing souls, as well as two releases with my new group Squid in Chains, Sirens of Kyiv, and The Persistence of Memory. These projects all feature my work in electronic music. As I move from software-based electroacoustic music creation to hardware synthesizers, my sound world and working method is changing, as is the sound. Maybe the next step will be an integration of the two, although my objective with hardware is to be performing music in concert in front of a live audience. Stay tuned.

After the great success of my first Isolation Journal album, I phoned some of my long-time collaborators, and introduced each of them to this new way for us to make music together, while remaining apart: they would record themselves performing a solo, which I would then transform into a companion acousmatic soundscape composition…extending, enhancing, and, at times, rearranging and totally recomposing their original recording, all the while respecting and embracing their "creative voice.". The idea blossomed into a series of albums featuring the talent of several remarkable improvising musicians. The first musician to respond "all in" was composer and bandoneon player Douglas Schmidt. He had already begun a series of pieces based on the rhythm of breath a year before COVID hit. When I transformed one of his tracks, he immediately agreed we should make a whole album together. That album came out in May 2021. François Houle was the next artist to embrace the project. His album was released on September 17. Isolation Journal 4 - Friends is scheduled for release on November 5. See more info on my news page

In early 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic set in, I began to think about how this changes the way we make, and share, music, and why I make music. In a time of lack of intimacy, I seek a new collaboration that, in its very concept, is intimate, yet achieved without direct contact. My first call was to my friend Stefan Östersjö, the Swedish guitarist and improvisor who had commissioned my work NO AMBITION in 2011. We had been trying to collaborate again, and so we talked about the isolation time we were in and came up with the idea for Stefan to send me a recording of him playing a 3-stringed Vietnamese lute in the hills above a village in Vietnam. I separated his 30 minute improvisation into four sections, transformed one of them with various electroacoustic processing techniques, and sent the new track back. He loved it. We created the first album in what has become the Isolation Journal series. Here is a link to this first album

Soon after the pandemic began, the Vancouver Inter-cultural Orchestra invited me to form a plucked quartet ensemble consisting of harp, guitar, guzheng, and Persian tar for the purpose of introducing young composers to such an inter-cultural ensemble. VICO also commissioned two pieces from me. Our ensemble, called 88 Strings, recorded several videos for VICO online events. Here is the first of them, called GRADUAL. Watch the video here.

During a tour of Singapore and China as guitarist with the Sound of Dragon Ensemble, I encountered a great trio from Taiwan called 3 People Music. Their ruan player, Dabby Pan, is an amazing musician and composer. Inspired by her, I wrote Red Sun Descending for zhong ruan. You can hear her recording here.

Deep Forest Feeling (Spirit Shield for a world falling apart) was commissioned by Chih-Sheng Chen for the Little Giant Chinese Chamber Orchestra with Financial assistance from the Canada Council for the Arts. The work was first performed by his orchestra on December 11, 2019 at the National Concert Hall in Taipei, Taiwan.

I haven't posted new works here for a couple of years. I've been so busy creating them! So here is the classical guitar news. Summer for 2 guitars (originally for zhongruan and guitar). Steady as the River, and arpeggio study. Aiden's Tune, a piece inspired by travis picking. Watch a video of my performance of Aiden's Tune here.