I Am Full of the Sea is a piece for voice and electronics. It was composed as a collaboration between Iarla Ó Lionárd, who composed and performed the vocal line and recorded the spoken poems; Monica Kidd, who wrote the two poems and made the field recordings; and me. I conceived of the piece idea, arranged the field recordings, and composed and recorded the instrumentals for the backing track.
It was so wonderful to work on a piece this way. I had come across Monica's poems several years ago and had been looking for a chance to work with them. Iarla I met while he was in residency at Princeton. When I contacted Monica about her work, I learned that she makes field recordings, and had some from the same places that she wrote her poems about! I was so happy to get to use these! Monica has a collection of these recordings available online.
To compose my part of the piece I improvised and recorded freely at home on acoustic guitar, laptop, modular synth, and accordion. It felt great to work this way, without worrying about notation or studios.
Iarla premiered this piece in December 2019 in Princeton.