Original compositions by Jaimie Lynn Hensley, 2013-2016.
-Acoustic-
A score for a promotional short portraying a competitive video game as an action-packed game of chess.
A minimalist piano piece.
-Audiovisual-
Three Improbabilities is an audiovisual exploration of stories told so many times that no one recalls which parts happened exactly as told and which have evolved through exaggeration. This particular story unfolds through three styles of piano playing. Each movement hints at the next, and, in the spirit of legends or the stories that one friend of yours tells at parties, each contains both probable and improbable events. Improbabilities occur musically as elements that could not be achieved by a human piano player without the aid of electronic embellishment, such as unplayable doublings, ring modulation, and layered delay lines.
-Chiptune/8-Bit-
-Electroacoustic-
In the wind-torn wastelands, a colony of defunct technology falls into disrepair. Years ago, their makers lived alongside them, celebrating their prosperity in the bleak winter months. Now snow blankets the rocky terrain, and the abandoned ones search their corrupt memories for dance commands and distant promises of salvation. Those who can still remember re-enact fragments of the holiday rituals, their looping subroutines a vestige of a time when creator and creation were not so far removed.
A sampling of short, loopable piano-based tracks for menu and event screens.
Regrets, trauma, wrongdoings. There are things we ignore. There are things we want to forget. Effort spent pushing the beast into the darkness feeds it. No matter how tightly it is locked away, it seeps through in our aching throats. Our racing minds. Our turning stomachs.
Permeation is composed entirely from original recordings manipulated in CSound.
Sources of Water began as a project to record the various water sources within my apartment. It became apparent that in a suburban environment, water is available to me in many forms, but all are quite far removed from their original sources within the earth or in the clouds.
I processed the recordings electronically to further remove these states of water from their sources and morph them into something new, yet still connected by their origin to the water in the earth and clouds. I then became curious about disrupting my suburban water sources not electronically, but physically. I filled my bathtub with water, submerged my old student-model plastic clarinet, and began to play and experiment with resonance and multiphonics.
Sources of Water is about simultaneous disconnectedness from and unity with a distant source, and the strange beauty of such a state.
Experiencing a life-threatening pneumothorax (collapsed lung) left me with a profound sense of respect and awe at the miracle of breath so often taken for granted, and the slow-rising fear that accompanies its loss.
The Matter of Breath in a Vacuum is an ambient piece chasing the audible sparkle while exploring breath and slowing things down. The piece includes samples of saxophone, clarinet, and vocal recordings, processed with effects including time-stretching, pitch shifting, convolution, and phase vocoding.
I find slowed playback speeds fitting for the theme of the work, and enjoy exploring the unexpected nuances they bring to focus in the sounds, similar to looking at a slide under a microscope.
This piece explores anxiety and the blurred line between anticipated horror and reality. Frantic alarms, aggressive buzzing, and affricative percussion were derived from experimenting with filters and effects applied to live clarinet recordings.