Ciarán Maher :: rhizomecowboy.com

Hi. I'm very slowly rebuilding this site in the timecracks between other bits and jobs, but here're some bio notes and samples:

I'm an Irish composer and installation artist based in Belfast. My solo work is strongly rooted in a formalist phenomenology (after Tenney and his reading of Cage), and my principal interests are in pitch perception, tuning, stochastics and the exposition of simple perceptible processes. I studied with James Tenney, Bob Gilmore, Frank Denyer, and Ronan Guilfoyle.

My main academic focus has been the music and theory of my friend and teacher, the American experimental composer James Tenney. I recently generated and premiered three new Variations on his Spectral CANON for retuned player piano. You can hear the tests and read my notes here (requires Flash), and there's a live recording of Spectral Variation No. 1 on dnk-amsterdam's site. We're planning to release all of the live recordings in 2009.

I'm also working on a book of Jim's interviews. I hope shortly to publish some interview material in a couple of MusicWorks articles (you can download an earlier article here: "James Tenney on Intention, Harmony and Phenomenology — A Different View of the Larger Picture", MusicWorks Issue 77), and I'll then start to publish further interviews on this site.

For a while now, I've been using Flash to create environments for sound works through the spatial exposition of controlled random processes. Objects in the virtual space interact according to simple rules to produce sound. Recently, I collaborated with the artist David Haughey on a development of this work for the Visonic festival, at the Void Gallery in Derry. You can check out VIsonic here.

In recent years I've been working in a number of collaborations with artists from other disciplines – most significantly with the poet & writer Caroline Bergvall. Together, we fulfilled commissions for MuHKA in Antwerp, the Liverpool Biennial, Spacex Galley in Exeter, and The Text Festival in Bury. We also worked together on her audio piece Via (48 Dante Translations), and on a transorfmation of her data piece Ampersand for the Text Festival and Tate Modern. You can read Caroline's writing on our piece, Say Parsley, in her recent University of Arizona paper, "Social Engagement of Writing," and also in her book FIG. You can find Brian Reed's Jacket Magazine article on Via here, Christine Hume's RAINTAXI review of the Via CD here, and Marjorie Perloff discuses Via in her Jacket article here.

I've just been tweeteing Flash pieces as a correspondent for POST_MOOT : A Radically Inclusive Inauguration Anthology. The site comes down shortly after the inauguration, but you can see two of those pieces below:

reAtLast :: no 1. for #postmoot
spangles with inteventions :: no 4. for #postmoot

I'm gradually putting together recordings of my music which I'll also upload here, and there'll be upcoming events as and when.

My twitter username is @rhizomecowboy, and my last fm username is rhizomecowboy.

You can email me at ciaran@pyxl.org.