Nick Brooke / The Cabinet
2010-2011 Swing Space Resident, 14 Wall Street, Vault
Nick Brooke mixes musical sampling, lipsynching, and theater into a genre all its own. In his works, vocalists and actors are trained to mimic sampled collages of sound effects, pop songs, and musical ephemera, blurring the line between recording and live performance. His work Tone Test, written under a Guggenheim Fellowship, premiered at Lincoln Center Festival in 2004, and recent experimental music theater works have been premiered at Mass MoCA and HERE. Brooke's instrumental works have been performed by Speculum Musicae, the Paul Dresher Ensemble, the Nash Ensemble of London, Orchestra 2001, Dan Druckman, and New York's Gamelan Son of Lion. His work has been featured at the Spoleto Festival, the MATA Series, and at Continuum New Music in Toronto. He has received awards and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, ASCAP, the Rockefeller Foundation, Djerassi, and the MacDowell Colony.
At Swing Space, Nick will be working together with codirector Jenny Rohn on Border Towns, which is in development at the HERE Arts Center. Border Towns explores how recordings have reengineered the psychological landscape of the US, stitching together hundreds of recordings collected along the borders.
