http://5of4.com
http://60x365.com
http://www.immigrantbreastnest.com/artists/david-morneau/
a/break machinations Immigrant Breast Nest (IBN009) 2009
Confessions of a Digital Proselyte Immigrant Breast Nest (IBN024) 2011
Abandoned Revolution explores the history of dance in the form of a live video game. This soundtrack was created entirely with a vintage Nintendo Gameboy and Nanoloop 1.3. (conceived and created by Boris Willis)
listen: All Your Dance Are Belong To Us
Relief (originally titled Glitch no.1) was the result of an exploration of glitch sounds and aesthetics. It became the soundtrack for a dance by Erin Tisdale.
A/Break:1 consists of digital audio and video. The music was created from a sample of the amen break that was sliced apart and rearranged using Max/MSP. The video was built using Jitter to manipulate a video loop in realtime to the music. In performance, the video is projected onto the stage and the dancers. (created for Amiti Perry)
listen: A/Break:1
Lifedance (Fragments of Figments) represents my largest work with appropriated music to date. This represents an effort to develop a memoir through sampling. (conceived and created by Amiti Perry)
listen: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
Where Is Tokyo? was a site-specific dance/installation. The soundscape required both music and ambient room sounds. (conceived and created by Esther Palmer)
listen: Where Is Tokyo?
Triage: Part 1 featured a soundscore that was played back through Max/MSP to allow for maximum flexibility in the timing of the work. (conceived and created by Ashley A. Friend)
listen: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5
David Morneau is a composer of an entirely undecided genre. In his work he endeavors to explore ideas about our culture, issues concerning creativity, and even the very nature of music itself. Morneau’s work is characterized by his eclectic interests and collaborative spirit.
Described by Molly Sheridan as a “flashing beacon” of inspiration, Morneau’s eclectic output is best exemplified by 60x365, his “ambitious yearlong musical project” for which he composed a new one-minute composition every day. These “miniature compositions include ambient tracks, found sound, instrumental performances, and plenty of loop and sample-based pieces.” [The Year of Musical Thinking, A Minute At A Time, NPR’s All Things Considered, 6/30/08] Selections from 60x365 have been featured on the Sonoscop festival in Barcelona, Spark Festival at the University of Minnesota, Electronic Music Midwest at Lewis University, in a collaborative dance performance with choreographer Kristin Hapke at Velocity Dance Center in Seattle, Washington, and on Jon Nelson’s Some Assembly Required.
Morneau’s current ambitious composition, Love Songs Project, is a collaboration with eleven poets that combines Shakespeare’s sonnets with contemporary poetry in genre-crossing songs. Each song is composed in a manner that allows for easy adaptation, allowing him to create multiple arrangements for a wider range of performance options. He has been selected as this season’s composer-in-residence with Alphabet Soup Productions, which will feature selections from Love Songs Project on each concert.
Morneau’s first solo album, a/break machinations, fractures, re-sequences, and otherwise manipulates a single drum break, touching on several of electronic music’s finest traditions, such as drum’n’bass, breakcore, trip-hop and jungle. a/break machinations grew out of a collaboration with choreographer Amiti Perry, which was presented in performance at The Ohio Sate University, and in New York City at both the Merce Cunningham Studio and Teatro La Tea. For these dance performances Morneau created video animations with the support of Harvestworks. One of these videos was also featured on SoundImageSound V at the University of the Pacific. a/break machinations was released in 2009 on Immigrant Breast Nest records, where Morneau is composer-in-residence.
Since 2006 Morneau has participated in Robert Voisey’s 60x60. In 2009 he was Music Coordinator responsible for bringing 60x60 Dance, to Columbus, Ohio, for it’s midwest debut. In collaboration with Dance Director Amiti Perry and Columbus Movement Movement, he produced two performances of this “sound-bite performance art” at Wallstreet Nightclub. After the shows in Columbus, Morneau assisted Amiti Perry and Vox Novus with the production of additional performances at Electronic Music Midwest at Kansas City Kansas Community College, New Music Circle at MadArt, St Louis, Missouri, and at World Financial Center Winter Garden, New York City.
Highlights of Morneau’s music with 60x60 include performances of sym5.1 at Electronic Music Midwest at Lewis University and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri; performances of Here, I'll Play It Again at Spark Festival at the University of Minnesota, the Stimultania art gallery in Strasbourg, France, Elektra, a broadcast on French television, the 2008 Alternative Film & Video Festival in Belgrade, Serbia, and 60x60 Dance collaboration with Jeramy Zimmerman at Galapagos Art Space, New York City; performances of Tonight On 60x60 at EARFEST at Stony Brook University, Brookes Oxford’s Sonic Art Festival in Oxford, England, Outside the Box New Music Festival at Southern Illinois University, and 60x60 Dance collaboration with Jeramy Zimmerman at World Financial Center Winter Garden, New York City; performances of Banal Blast on 60x60 Dance collaboration with Amiti Perry at Wallstreet Nightclub in Columbus, Ohio, Electronic Music Midwest at Kansas City Kansas Community College, New Music Circle at MadArt, St Louis, Missouri, and at World Financial Center Winter Garden, New York City, and on 60x60 Video collaboration with Patrick Liddell at University Art Museum, California State University Long Beach, New Music Juke Joint, Mississippi, LOOP Videoart Festival, Barcelona, Spain, and Brookes Oxford’s Sonic Art Festival in Oxford, England; and performances of What Are You Looking At? at 2010 International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) Electronic Music Foundation, New York City, International Electro-Acoustic Music Festival in Chicago, Illinois, The Music Gallery in Toronto, Canada, Taipei Contemporary Art Center in Taipei, Taiwan, and Taukay Edizioni Musicali at Teatro San Giorgio da Udine, Italy.
As a composer of miniatures, Morneau’s work extends beyond 60-second audio works. goodmorning, a set of mini-songs for soprano, baritone, trumpet, and trombone, based on Twitter posts, was selected for the premiere concert of the Green Bay Miniaturist Ensemble. His 100-note Chicago Miniaturist Blues was featured on the premiere concert of the Chicago Miniaturist Ensemble.
As a collaborator, Morneau creates “unusual, esoteric, and offbeat” performances. Along with choreographer Esther Palmer and artist Shana Burns, he is a founding member of Seen Performance. Together they have created a series of performances that “utilize innovative techniques to engage both their audience and their performance space.” [“On the Record” Queens Ledger, 2/24/09] Their most recent pieces are the beginning of a series called The Party Project, which seeks to create performances for small groups in social settings. Box Shy is designed for performance in the midst of an audience, who assist in creating a box around Morneau and Palmer as they perform. Landings embraced the slinky toy, which Burns used to construct a set with a dozen slinks hanging from the ceiling. Morneau’s music imitated the sounds of these toys while dancers moved among them to perform Palmer’s choreography. These pieces have been featured at a number of venues around New York, including Triskelion Arts, Third Ward, Greenspace Studio, Queens Theater in the Park, and Vox Novus’s “Composer’s Voice Series.” Their earlier works, On the other side of the glass plate, she wore nothing, a hour long meditation on fashion and perception that asked the audience to construct the set out of over-sized TinkerToys, and Where is Tokyo?, an intimate, two audience members at a time, performance built into a studio at The Ohio State University, explore the role of an audience in a performance.
Morneau’s many other collaborations include four tracks from songwriter Ed Morneau’s Jacquerie, an album of protest music, I Hate John and Sunshine & Dirt, with choreographer Ashley A Friend, both of which were premiered at Joyce SoHo in New York, The Clone Zone, with Anna Sullivan, which appeared at the 2007 Fringe Festival in New York, Abandoned Revolution, for Nintendo Gameboy with choreographer Boris Willis, and Fragments of Figments, a pop-sample collage for choreographer Amiti Perry.
David Morneau lives in New York City with his wife and daughter.
tags: music composer dance mp3 video