Category Archives: Composition

Sonny Champagne & The BillionAIres

Sonny Champagne and the BillionAIres is a music project centered on documenting and amplifying the environmental rollbacks and irreparable harms being done on the American people through song. Executive Orders since the 47th president’s inauguration in January 2025 have rolled back significant environmental protections. The project aims to write a song for each executive order harming the environment.

https://sonny-champagne.netlify.app/

Heavy Impacts Vol. 1 cover art

Heavy Impacts Vol. 1

Heavy Impacts Vol. 1  is part of the HD Music Now production library on the Lotus Trailer SFX label. The tracks are original sound designed trailer-ready impact hits. From risers and tension swells to reverberant impacts, there are over 100 thunderous hits punctuated by dramatic energy and surrounded by expansive space and tails.

 

Let It Rip!

My son enjoys playing Bey Blades, which are spinning toys that bang and smash into one another within a plastic made arena. I spent countless hours with my son spinning away, where he often cajoled me into playing as a second whenever his friends were not available. Easily enough, I found myself immersed in his imagined world of Beys.

Typical play pits two Beys against each other in a “battle”, where the longest standing wins. Recording sounds from these toys during game play and descriptions my son gave of imagined sound worlds, I curiously followed his interest and the dichotomy between the real and the imaginary. These threads helped form the backbone of the piece, in which I travel back and forth between realistic game play and constructed hyper real sound of cinematic action/tournaments. “Let it Rip” intertwines the playfulness, competitive nature, and the theatre of these toys and their action.

Audio here is a binaural stereo version of the 7.1 multichannel work. Contact for programming the full fixed media work.

Performances

  • New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival (NYCEMF), June 25, 2026.
  • Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS), University of Texas, San Antonio, San Antonio, Texas, May 20, 2026.
  • Electronic Music Midwest (EMM), Lewis University, Romeoville, IL, Mar 13, 2026.
  • Future Music Oregon (FMO), University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, Nov 22, 2025.

Random Playback Vol. 1: Rhythmcremental

Are streaming services ready for dynamic random-order concept albums?

Random Playback is a music album that explores using dynamically looped playback to generate a unique listening experience for your own device (and which never ends). The album leverages streaming technology to randomly playback material endlessly and aims to simultaneously test the boundaries of streaming services’ “gapless playback“ feature. Just hit shuffle, repeat, and play.*

Listen on Spotify.
Listen on Amazon Music.
Listen on Apple.


*phone apps for Amazon Music and Apple services are the most seamless for shuffle playback.

UPDATE 9/21/21: While Spotify is seamless on chronological, non-shuffle playback, Spotify seems to falter if randomizing playback (confirmed by other users). Amazon Music Unlimited, however, seems to handle randomization playback well, nearly seamless (from the phone app). Apple Music also has seamless shuffle playback from the phone app. That said, any browser playback has terrible audio drops between songs on shuffle mode for all services.

The source material was generated and recorded with permission from playing an iOS clicker game, Rhythmcremental, created by Batta (Simon Hutchinson and Paul Turowski). Huge shout out to Simon and Paul. And do check out their game. It’s addictive.

Cover for Sunken Shoreline single

Sunken Shoreline

Sunken Shoreline (edited, mixed, and released 2021) captures a 2014 performance of climate-related tweets from around the world in realtime (#climatechange, #tarsands, #environment,  fracking, #sustainable, among others), the year before the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) formed a “Charter for Sound” to emphasize sound as a critical signifier in environmental health. Mapping characteristics of these tweets to sonic parameters, users from around the world sound out a call for our climate. Here, an array of audio processing submerges these sonic voices under a technological deluge that suggests an Atlantian future should we choose to ignore the calls to action.

Sunken Shoreline was a winner in the International Coastal Futures Ecoacoustic Music Competition held by the Coastal Futures Conservatory at the University of Virginia in partnership with EcoSono not-for-profit.

The competition awarded nine prizes in the areas of field recording, live performance, and sonification, and the competition “aims to discover and recognize new music and sound art focused on the theme of coastal futures.” Sunken Shoreline was one of two awarded in the Sonification category. Winners of the competition were from Norway/UK, Australia, Canada, Portugal, South Korea, and the US.

Listen on Spotify (URL)

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Relay of Memory

The sonic impact of radio on the Americana landscape is profound. Fireside chats, Radio theatre, Payola, DJs, drive-ins, elevator Musak, waiting room noise––the vast consumerism and reach of radio continues to this day. Yet, what happens when we smash two artists (Kenny G and Nickelback) together into one spectral stretched fantasy using the transmission medium that gave life to their careers? Are we doomed to phase out our history with background noise? Or are we undulating with the beat of cultural reclamation and signification? Sending us adrift inside the electrical coils of the radio, Lying in Fireflies Besides Brown Curls and other original compositions attempt to recount a personal connection to memory, lust, and the power of radio to receive a new transmission.

Relay of Memory was exhibited at the Edith Langley Barrett Art Gallery, Utica, NY. The exhibition was supported by funds from the Oregon Arts Commission.