Selected Work

Soundpaper, roll 5: bumbumbumbum

Soundpaper, roll 5: bumbumbumbum is 1 hour and 7 seconds of a burbling stream of repetitive non-repetition, using soft pops that sound a bit like wooden marimba bars, but aren't.

Tested for many, many hours in my own home during a time of intense waiting on both American political and personal family levels.

Labor Day

Labor Day is a new track by The Beverage Station, my synthpop duo with Lainie Fefferman. It's a snapshot of the back-to-school mood, and also an hommage to two of our favorite pieces of early fall music by our friend Andrea Mazzariello: home / body and baby bot.

Soundpaper, roll 4: Tree Waves

Soundpaper, roll 4: Tree Waves is built around one slow ramp-shaped wave that branches into many copies of itself, each at a different related speed (a fifth as slow, three times as fast, etc...). These branched waves each control some aspect of the sound, and together their ever-changing interractions create a rustling canopy of sound-leaves.

One and One

one and one is a new track by The Beverage Station, a new band that Lainie Fefferman and I started in August of this year. More to come!

BounceBounce

BounceBounce is a three track work distilled from a soundtrack to a dance performance I did with the dance duo E/D in the winter of late 2016, and feels like a snapshot of the particular tenseness of that time. There was a lot of high-intensity bouncing in the choreography, and I recorded a lot of bouncing objects as source material for these tracks, using the rhythms to create time-warped quasi-techno accompaniment. Also making an appearance: recordings of smashing glass, a road-sized concrete saw, footsteps, and lots of fx.

Flash Crash

This video was shot pre-pandemic, and premiered in an earlier form in the Novel Stages Virtual Festival in 2020. It changed a bit the year after, and then was never properly released until now.

Thanks to:

• Tsunami Dub Sound System for the location
• Harrison Owen and Lainie Fefferman for camera work
• Michael Gurfield for video editing above and beyond the call of duty
• Eric Hundsader at Nanex for the original stock data I used in the animations

Soundpaper, roll 3

Soundpaper is my series for ambient music to live / work / exist to. This one came out in the post-New Year / return-t-work week, during an unseasonably rainy and warm winter season.

I often wish I had background music that behaved like wind-chimes, so I made this. It isn't meant to be a literal re-creation of wind-chimes — it took too many different turns for that — but it's an homage to the pleasant randomness of notes slowly bumping into each other.

Chords and rainy traffic added to fill out the space and tint the mood a bit.

Soundpaper, roll 2

Soundpaper is my series for ambient music to live / work / exist to. This one has a bouncy energy to it, featuring four-part counterpoint that sounds like American minimalism squeezed through a Nintendo Entertainment System, accompanied by rhythmic puffs of noise. The subtitle — 8-bit elf coffee shop — captures the mood.

late_night_project (2022 -> ongoing)

This is a direct-to-Instagram art project I've been doing with dancer Erin Cairns Cella since February 2022. It's a chronicle of work made when we're awake and alone in the dark hours while others in our houses are asleep, released on a 9-day cycle. It also exists on Vimeo.

There's nothing here... (2022)

Commissioned by the Boston's New Gallery Concert Series, this piece uses uses pixel-level animation and micro-sampling to explore what happens when things are interpreted as... other things.

Paroxysm (2022)

This is my only (so far) video commission - a short video to accompany composer Aaron Jay Myers's piece of the same name. This video is made out of hundreds of photos of NYC walls, sorted by intensity and then used as a kind of visual meter for the intensity of the music.

a tiny piece of anything (soundtrack) (2021)

Over 2021 I made a suite of pieces to accompany a series of dance videos entitled "a tiny piece of anything" by Toronto choreographer Lucy Rupert and her company Blue Ceiling Dance. I mixed synths with samples of things from around my Covid-reduced world: sounds taken from walks, sounds from household applicances, etc...

• #1 - gliding, not flapping
• #4 - phosphorous goes to the prom
• #5 - hydrogen horse
• #6 - coronasulfurus

Split Affect (2021)

An experiment in translation between myself and dance duo E/D: Dages Juvelier Keates and Erin Cairns Cella.

Dages created a silent dance video, I created sound for it, and Erin made a new video hearing only the soundtrack. This is the first in a series...

Split Affect 1 (with E/D) from Jascha Narveson on Vimeo.

solo feedback sets (2021)

For the summer of 2021 I developed a live feedback performance system and played a series of small concerts across several states and one province.

They're the black-and-white albums on my Bandcamp page.

Here's an example:

8'17'' (2020)

A set of two pieces used in Lucy Rupert / Blue Ceiling Dance's evening-length suite of pieces that each last eight minutes and seventeen seconds, which is the time it takes sunlight to reach the Earth.

amplifying the nothing (2019)

Half-evening length score for the E/D dance duo - premiered at Triskelion Arts in Brooklyn on December 19th and 20th, 2019.

animal, vegetable, mineral (2017)

Five electronic pieces commissioned as part of an evening length work by Toronto choreographer Lucy Rupert's project Blue Ceiling Dance. Premiered at the High Park Nature Center in Toronto, April 20th, 21st, and 22nd, 2017.

bounce bounce (2016)

Half-evening-length electronic score for the E/D dance duo - premiered at Triskelion Arts in Brooklyn on December 1st & 2nd, 2016.

Flash Crash (2016)

Commissioned by Ashley Bathgate, this piece uses high-frequency stock-trading data and pitch-sensitive robot synthesizers to drive the accompanyment.

Flash Crash was made possible by a grant from the American Composers Forum with funds provided from the Jerome Foundation.

all i have are sensations (2015)

Half evening-length electronic score for the E/D dance duo - premiered at Triskelion Arts in Brooklyn on December 18th & 20th, 2015.

Igor (2014)

Commissioned by the NUMUS concert series, and premiered by Guy Few at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, on November 28th, 2014.

The Cactus God (2012)

Premiered at Wesleyan University's chapel for "The Second Singularity" concert, September 27th, 2012.

The Dress (2012)

A 10-minute sound collage for choreographer Naomi Goldberg Haas, based on a wonderful recorded recollection from beloved dancer / choreographer Linda Tarnay.

Ones (2012)

A four-movement suite for Dither, NYC's pre-eminent electric guitar quartet, in which I focus on things electric guitars do really well: wah-wah pedals ("The Wah One"), fx and general rocking ("The Driving One"), de-tuning ("The Warped One"), and harmonics ("The Floaty One").

Released on Dither's album Potential Differences (New Focus Recordings, 2019).

The Gaits (2011)

An iPhone-based public sound walk, made for Manhattan's High Line park, in collaboration with composers Lainie Fefferman, Cameron Britt, and Daniel Iglesia. Read the description on the High Line website, which also has video documentation by I Care If You Listen.

Tint (2011)

This piece was written for Danny Holt and his quirkily jaw-dropping one-man piano/percussion project.

In Line (2011)

This piece was workshopped with PLOrk and then perfected as a piece for Sideband.

Sideband: In Line, by Jascha Narveson from Sideband PLOrk on Vimeo.

Burial (2010)

This piece was created for the Floating Points festival at the former Issue Project Room space, back when it was in the Can Factory at 3rd and 3rd in Brooklyn. Composer Stephan Moore has a 3x5 array of hemispherical speakers suspended from the ceiling, and this piece wired up a wooded box with a 3x5 array of contact mics and then recorded it as it was burried under a few feet of earth.

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? (2010)

This was written for the NYC-based ensemble NEWSPEAK in the wak of the American sub-prime mortgage crises. It uses the oringal song as a launching point for a far-flung epic that moves from screaming metal sequences to quiet brooding passages to computer-generated grooves.

tippy toe (2009)

Originally written for the NOW Ensemble.

planet van (2009)

Written for the NYC/SF-based Celestial Mechanics.

wire (2009)

Written for and premiered by tranSpectra.

blocks (2009)

beepsh (2009)

This was written for the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, and turns the group into a large collaborative step-sequencer.

"nice boots" (2008)

This was originally premiered by the NOW Ensemble at Le Poisson Rouge in NYC during the MATA festival 2009.

star car (2008)

This was written for the NYC/SF vocal trio Celestial Mechanics.

ticker (2008)

Written for Ensemble Klang's Princeton residency, and later premiered to the general public on Nov. 18th, 2010 in Eindhoven.

vectors (2008)

For the pre-eminent NYC electric guitar quartet, Dither.

doors (2007)

Dozens of recordings of different doors are woven into an 8' in-the-round experience.

lament for solo computer (2005)

A strangely emotional piece for computer, written entirely in SuperCollider.

It exists on my Bandcamp page:

And also as a recent dance video by Lucy Rupert:

lament for solo computer (2021) created by Lucy Rupert and Jascha Narveson from Blue Ceiling dance on Vimeo.

ripple (2005)

Written for new music pianist Danny Holt, released on his album Fast Jump (Innova Records, 2011)