Roberto Zucco

My work on Roberto Zucco was intentionally very maximalist. The work was directed by Héctor Alvarez for his MFA graduation thesis at CalArts. I was quite grateful to Héctor for letting me play around with a variety of sonic techniques for his work. Since this was part of my own graduate school experience, I wanted to throw as much of my sonic practice at the work as possible to gain experience applying new techniques and ideas to production. I was interested in combining musical composition, sound design, live mixing with Ableton, and live music all in one neat package. As you can imagine, this was not easy and I had to scrap many ideas along the way, but by the end I was able to create a sonic world for Koltes’s play that involved basically all of these elements.

This was a show that I played live every evening. The soundscape and much of the sound design of the show was triggered on an Ableton live session which hit a surround sound audio system. I also played all of the music live with a mix of Ableton triggers and electronic guitar with a fairly robust pedalboard. Our influences for the work drew on a lot of noise, crust punk, and black metal so the amplified guitar sound worked quite well in the space in combination with some of the more industrial electronics from my Ableton session.

Bernard-Marie Koltés
Playwright
Anna G. R. Miller
Translator
Héctor Alvarez Director
Jalen ColbertSet Designer
Ashley Kae SnyderCostume Designer
W. Alejandro MelendezLighting Designer
Drew Sensue-WeinsteinComposer/Musician
Ying Xin and Nick DePintoCo-Sound Designers