Intermediary Sonics: Ambience and the Shadows of Music
PhD dissertation (forthcoming), Department of Music, University of California San Diego. Working title

My dissertation investigates a conceptual and sonic history of ambience, written amid a present fascination with the term and anxieties about its naivety, tweeness, digital platforms and corporatization. Treating ambience as an epistemology, method and practice rather than a genre, it positions ambience as a verdant shadow of music, alongside noise and silence.

It traces the word from the Greek periechon, “that which embraces, envelops, enfolds,” through its Latin and Romance descendants to its emergence as a modern noun in the late nineteenth century, and follows the idea of an environment that holds, situated in vertigo between two infinites, and the intermediary spaces and interstitial travel it opens.

Moving beyond Eno, it centers women composers of the 1950s to the 1980s, among them Éliane Radigue, Beatriz Ferreyra, Alice Coltrane, Daphne Oram, Wendy Carlos and Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, whose music, shaped by shifts in technology, explores natural and synthetic worlds, foregrounds space (inner and outer), and orients toward worlds beyond the audible: the speculative, minute, channeled, and the sacred. Through the acousmate and the enchantment attributed to Saint Cecilia, it asks what it means to listen to sound whose source is unseen. The project considers the affordances, possibilities, and ambiguities of ambience.

Embers of the Twilight Rune: Cotard, the Loop, and Listening Futures
MA thesis, Music, University of California San Diego, 2022

Embers of the Twilight Rune is a portrait of a certain apprehension of time that, since the late 19th century, has treated the future as an already-obliterated rather than as a yet-to-be-realized state of affairs. The text proceeds as an unearthing of this morbid (and loopy!) temporal schematism within an array of novels, films and sonic theoretical treatises: Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York, and MIT Press/Urbanomic's edited volume of sonic and musical oddities, Undead/Unsound.

Coordinating all of these texts is the figure of Jules Cotard, a neurologist whose clinical research came to focus on “delusions of negation” — most notably, the condition of living subjects who reported that they were in fact dead. Instead of balking at this delusion or treating it as a bizarre footnote in a history of madness, the thesis treats it as fully resonant with the economic and cultural logic of modernity, such that Cotard's Syndrome ought to be appreciated as an interpretive key to the present (sensed as a site of foreclosed possibility).

Logics of Sound: From Acoustic Space to Rhythmanalysis
BA Honours thesis, Communication, Simon Fraser University

The thesis brings Henri Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis into conversation with Henri Meschonnic and Émile Benveniste's thinking on rhythm, Marshall McLuhan's acoustic and visual space, and Raymond Williams's structures of feeling, asking how rhythm shapes lived experience. It follows how dominant rhythms naturalize themselves as the “present”, through Lefebvre's eurhythmia, arrhythmia and isorhythmia, and how poetry and art can unsettle them into polyrhythmia. It closes with a rhythmanalysis of digital space, read through the front page of a digital newspaper and Kevin Davies's poetry.

Writing

2025 · The Melancholia of Radiguean Aesthetics ↗
Tempo 79, no. 311, Cambridge University Press. Open access

2024 · Unfathomable Simultaneity
Text/performance for Justin Patterson's Janitor, Gentials. Afternoon Projects, Vancouver

2023 · Elemental Materiality
What Are Our Supports, ed. Joni Low and Jeff O’Brien

2021 · Notes on ‘Ordinary Schizophonia’ ↗
Society for Cultural Anthropology, Visual and New Media Review (collaborative)

2019 · Bad Moon Rising
Exhibition essay for Justin Patterson's solo show. Dynamo Arts Association

2018 · The Kind That Ring
Lyrical response to a performance by Holy Hum. The Cultch, Soft Series

2017 · Tiziana La Melia: Cursing Our Edges
Translation of an essay by Céline Kopp, French to English. Code South Way

2017 · All the Little Objectiles
Lyrical essay / exhibition text. The Western Front

2016 · Fables of a Bunk Future ↗
Multimedia digital chapbook, with Justin Patterson and Michael Loncaric. Small Caps, The Capilano Review

2014 · The Reverse of Remembering is Hallucinating
Exhibition catalogue, Joachim Koester: HOWE. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts