m3tr0p0lis occupy began with the album bot hits, which Leslie Kneisel asked me to do to accompany a screening of Fritz Lang’s metropolis at an exhibition of her newer and amazing lithographs in atlanta. spacey, sci-fi and house-y were all adjectives she asked for, as she intended to bring out the aesthetic futurism of metropolis. the resulting bot hits is testament to her intention. i lived in berlin when she suggested working together, and thus was inundated by house music. bot hits grooves steadfastly at 107 bpm, which later made editing it much easier, as coincidentally lang’s editor cuts at about this rate also. i intentionally only watched the trailer of metropolis before composing the music, and after completing bot hits, leslie and i began to cull images and compose the adaptation of lang’s opus. we found the original overlong and sometimes tedious, and the soundtrack cheesy. therefore, we created m3tr0p0lis occupy, which takes its name from a triad of factors. metropolis, 300, who is a homeless man i conversed with at length on the street in berkeley, in which he alleged to have been attacked with a hammer at occupy berkeley, and referred to homelessness as ‘the worst punishment you can imagine’. he is also generous and loves to bestow gifts. occupy, the social movement, zeitgeist of 2012, felt closely aligned to much of the sentiment contained within metropolis (and vice versa). at the heart of occupy was an insistence on heart and the recognition of human energy, which is the dominant theme of metropolis (to use the heart to unite the head and hands, thought/love/action). Continue reading →

spectral alphabet was installed at golden parachutes in berlin between july 4 and august 8, 2009. it represents roughly 5 years of my work, and touches on themes of time, space, spirit and the artist. Continue reading →