Joel Rust

Forest (an intertwining) is a sound installation that can also be a backdrop to a live performance, as shown in the above video (featuring Laura Cocks). Visitors to the installation can also participate in it with their mobile devices. The installation creates a forest of sounds; creatures and groups of organisms become music, interacting with each other in an evolving mixture of ways: symbiosis, conflict, indifference, support, imitation, competition.

For more information, and a longer demonstration, see this page.

Pieter Bruegel’s 1562 painting The Fall of the Rebel Angels depicts the conflict between the archangel Michael and the forces of heaven – rendered with white robes, elegant wings, and flowing hair – and Satan’s rebel angels – which have taken all manner of grotesque forms, chimeras of human, animal, and artificial elements – each totally different.

Aside from these strange entities, two things stood out to me. A pillar of angel bodies – innumerable powerful beings locked in a battle beyond understanding – stretching into the distance represents the unfathomable scale of the conflict, of which Bruegel depicts a minuscule slice, in space and time. But, stripped from its narrative context, the painting would become even more bizarre: an expanse of writhing, seething, weird matter. This piece pans between these different layers and characters, bound together by the narrative of the rebel angels’ fall.

The opening quotes Nicolas Gombert’s motet Media vita in morte sumus – ‘In the midst of life, we are in death’ – written at a similar time and place to Bruegel’s painting.

Perusal score available here.

We'll all be gone is a short piece for piano, commissioned by Michael Beckerman to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sample sheet music available here.

A wilding is an uncultivated tree, either growing naturally or seeded by cultivated forests.

Wilding Pine is part of a sci-fi opera I'm currently working on with poet David Troupes, The Conifers, which is set on a forest farm planet undergoing an ecological cataclysm. This piece is a condensed geologic history in sound of the opera's world. It begins with the accretion of material into a planet and its cooling into a barren rock; then, it is terraformed into a vast, monotonous plantation with a minimally constructed ecosystem; lastly, it throws off human influence and grows into its own way of being.

Perusal score available here.

immaterial is a collection of audiovisual pieces completed over the last couple years.

"OBSCURA" was inspired by the beautiful Woven Screens series of sculptures by Rachel Mica Weiss.
"unsung" is a slowly drifting tapestry of words and acoustic and electronic sounds. Huge thanks to Yi-Wen Lai-Tremewan for his recording and mixing on this track!
"Coruscation" was first performed alongside a text by J. Martin Daughtry, focusing on an image of the heat from a crematorium chimney disturbing the air of a brilliant Florida afternoon.
You can purchase the music on Bandcamp.