Junk Food of the Sea (2021) highlights an environmental crisis and our unsustainable relationship with ubiquitous, single-use plastics such as bottles, wrappers, and straws. The audio is a mixture of field recordings, layered voices, prepared piano, and plastic objects. The plastic audio samples are processed in several ways to act as sound textures, harmony, and percussion. For creating the sound textures, samples of plastics were processed through a Max/MSP patch that dynamically scrambles and mangles the recorded material. Flittering harmonies are created by blowing across the tops of plastic bottles and then shaping the recordings into a custom instrument by mapping them to a sampler and sculpting their musical characteristics to taste. Visuals are a mixture of video recordings and stop-motion animation that were developed while in residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna, Florida. 

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Michele Cheng - piano
Hassan Estakhrian - voice, plastics, electronics, and video