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Capped Brood (2023)

These objects emerge from a series of works about honeybees and about the plight of pollinators more broadly. In them, hot beeswax is poured directly onto sounding speakers and the results are captured as both video and audio.

Scorched Honey Archive (2023)

A multisensory meditation on human disruption of pollinator ecology that includes sculpture, immersive sound, and video. A central tapestry of wall-mounted steel plates forms a rough map of US states that are recording bee populations. Eight fragrant beeswax speakers emit the spatialized sound of burning honey – each sizzling sound that emerges, played at a volume that at times teeters on the edge of audibility, links to one of the steel plates which bears the charred honey remains. A peculiar box, lined with orange acoustic foam is, in fact, the small sound stage where the honey was burned and recorded. Finally, in a large video projection, bees crawling across the surface of a hive are reduced to wisps of smoke. The Archive includes comfortable lounging platforms that invite visitors to linger and listen.

Colony (2022)

COLONY is an immersive sound installation that probes the complex relationship between bees and humans. It weaves together recordings of bees with interviews that explore our co-existence with these insects as well as our compulsion to understand them through a human lens. Voices include a blind beekeeper; a social practice artist who created an installation of hives in the shape of the notorious Pruitt Igoe housing complex; an architect designing a bee sanctuary in Tanzania; an author of a book about being raised among bees; and a Michigan beekeeper working in the field. All reverb applied in the work was recorded live in the cold war era surveillance radar station in Port Austin Michigan.

ArtEcho (2021)

A commissioned prototype for Cooper Hewitt Interaction Lab's Activating Smithsonian Access. ArtEcho explores a selection of the museum's artifacts through sound.

Green screen & other exercises

This ongoing series of experiments on a green screen work surface combine sound improvisation with post processed video images.  These sketches are a chance to "limber up" to let ideas happen and then to contextualize them visually after the fact.

Earth’s Centre by Sterling Basement (2020)

Audio work created for Project Inferno, a celebration of the 700th Anniversary of Dante's Inferno presented at Cities & Memory. It explores the idea of gravity and as Dante and Virgil get close to Lucifer at the center of the planet, strange things begin to happen.

The Painlevé Exercises

This was a pandemic activity in which I created soundtracks for the remarkable films of Jean Painlevé. When brain-activity is challenged, let the images suggest the sounds.

Frozen Words at Local Project Art Space (2020)

Multi-channel sound installation. Immersive sound and glass objects forge an unlikely connection between an absurd work of 16th century literature, the ancient pseudo-science of alchemy, and political hate speech.

The Vein Flows below (2018)

Audio work created for the online project Earlid, curated by Joan Schuman that features recordings captured at the Marble House Project in Dorset Vermont, the site of an abandoned marble quarry in a village of abandoned marble quarries.

Stone Cold Groove (2017)

A series of related works created during a Family residency at Marble House Project in July 2017. The title alludes to the three-part structure of the work with each word of the tile acting as an organizing theme.

I am a Radio (2016)

This is a work created for the online sound journal EARLID that hosts a curated…

Lone Isla Craig

Track from the album Songs of the Highlands (Available on the Free Music Archive). The…

John Roach on UBUWEB

Here's one track from a playlist from the collaborative project Simultaneous Translation that is available…

The Dictionary Project (2004)

The Dictionary Project Collaborative sound composition "game" projects.johnroach.net/dictionary Dictionary is a computer-based collaborative compositional environment…

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