This guy has been an inspiration to me in a bunch of my work.  I never heard, and still haven’t heard anything quite like it.  It’s glitch music, an example of music concrete to a melodic and percussive extreme

https://open.spotify.com/artist/1Yti3CsDazWVjNMXBHx1Af?si=0eZCKyHxRO2SlJqT0h3dfQ

https://oval.bandcamp.com/

Hi ~ Check out my latest release "Something to Believe In," now available on Spotify, Itunes, and all that good stuff.  It's an electronic journey of songs that were written between 2010 - 2017.  It is the start of a new direction that I'm headed.  

These songs are spread between 2010 - 2017.  On the track "Good People," I'd like to thank the talented Chris Williams and Rafael Luna on trumpet and flute respectively.  Giancarlo Arzu also played some heavy-duty bass on "Constant Craving."  Lastly, thank you as always to my friend Nicholas Bach for the cover design!  

I'm proud of the musical journey of this album and hope you all can find the time to take it! Hope you'll like it, and share it if you love it!  

https://barmeyung.bandcamp.com/album/something-to-believe-in-2017

Just re-mastered this electro-pop album thing from my Miami days around 2009. My first band with singer - Katrina Mena Rick! Those were fun times!

https://barmeyung.bandcamp.com/album/beijinhos-2009

As some of you may know, I’ve been doing some soul searching lately and looking back on how my music has progressed over the years.  In that process, I traveled back to the very beginning, to my classical guitar roots.  And I dug up some old performances.  I’ve compiled them into 2 albums which I would like to officially announce.  One is a solo guitar album, and the other is a guitar and flute album performed by me, and my friend, the talented Lauren Bonativicola.  

These songs are composed by giants in the classical world, and I hope that Lauren and I were able to do them justice.  

This music means a lot to me because of how formative it was at such a crucial and vulnerable time.  The recordings are a little messy, no matter how much I tried to remaster and restore them, and the performances are imperfect, but in a way, I feel that makes it honest and charming. 

The title, “The Guitarist,” is a tribute to one of the most important albums to me growing up.  That album is called, “The Guitarist,” created by John Williams (the guitarist / not the film composer). That album introduced me to a new world where I thought, “I never knew a guitar could sound like,” and the rest is history.

I hope you enjoy!

The Guitarist

I'm releasing some old Gamelan music I wrote. I played these compositions with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Javanese Gamelan in 2005. But I produced these versions with virtual sample libraries, and they're totally Westernized-Hollywood injected.. just because

These pieces were actually inspired by the London Suicide Train Bombing on July 7th, 2005. and I used the Gamelan to express my feelings at the time. It reminds me of how sensitive I used to be about those types of things, and how now 13 years later, I really have no sensitivity at all to be honest. I know I'm not the only one. These kinds of tragedies are all too common these days, as if it's just accepted and expected as a part of being an American.. which is just fucking ridiculous.

But perhaps these songs remind me that in the future, I'll work in the only ways I know how, which is to, at the very least, contribute to the healing of others by creating something of remembrance out of it. 

CLICK HERE

This is my blog.  I’m a composer and sound designer, and I find a lot of inspiration from many places, including visual arts.  This is a blog with a bunch of stuff that excites me, and I’d like to share it.  Once in awhile, I might promote myself and things that are happening in my world.  Hope that’s ok!

For now, I have a bunch of new projects in the works..and it’s slowly coming to life.  I recently realized that there’s a huge discrepancy between the amount of music that I’ve written, and the amount of music that I’ve actually released.  Well, I’m gonna do something about that.. and it will come in the form of 6 albums that I hope to finish this year (Yup, 6!!) - an electronic album, a classical guitar album, a chamber music album including a 3 movement symphony, a Gamelan style EP, an album from my very first band “Beijinhos,”and a sound design album.  Some of this music is like 10 years old guys!  It’s an ambitious goal, and the days of killing myself over unattainable goals are over.. so don’t hold me to it if some of this stuff spills into next year.

Perhaps what I’m most excited about is the sound design album.  New sounds is what I’ve been into lately and come to think of it, that’s always been my thing.  I started playing classical guitar because I was like, “I never thought a guitar could sound like that!”

This SD album will be comprised of songs made out of sample libraries that I am creating.  They are sounds of extended techniques of mostly all the orchestral instruments.  Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon, French Horn, Trumpet, Trombone, Tuba, Guitar, Harp, Violin, Cello, Bass.  I think that’s it.  These will be sounds like.. playing a Tuba with a Bassoon reed, the sound of rubbing alcohol scraped against guitar strings, or playing a harp with guitar slides.  It was so much fun making these recordings with the help of the talented folks @ California Institute of the Arts.  Now it’s time for the painful editing and scripting process... 

Argentinean Tango composer and bandoneon player Astor Piazzolla considered this to be his greatest album.  It’s an embodiment of pure passion at its full spectrum.. The bliss, the darkness, the unknown, the sadness, the pain, the euphoria.. 

Amia Yokoyama is a video, performance, an installation artist.  

Her videos are mysterious and hypnotic to state the obvious.  But they’re also.. fun?  This is an artist with a strange sense of destructive humor who is able to create visual stories out of such bizarre objects and movements.  They are anxiously framed through sonic narratives of dizzy and bare electronic pulses.

Check out her website and Instagram.

Jamian Juliano-Villani describes her move to New York to be where all the artists are.  She describes the grind of seemingly do whatever it takes to survive, and to be the artist that she strives to be.  Her journey led her to waitress, kindergarten teacher, worked at a group home, taught gymnastics, organizing books for a marine obsesses with ships.  Eventually she got her own studio, and has been continuing the grind, but in the world of her own work by her own terms.. painting. 

Her paintings are colorful collage painting of illustrations of raunchy cartoon characters.. just doing their thing.

Here is her website, Instagram where she goes by the name Psychojonkanoo where you can clearly peek into her day to day life and her quirky sense of humor. 

Brad Reuban Kunkle is a painter, sound designer, and animator and his work portrays solemn women wrapped in wondrous monochromatic landscapes.  His work has a Renaissance like aesthetic almost, like impressionistic fawns frolicking in forests with gentle erotic beauty.  

His work also provides the tone of the TV series, “Anne with an “E,” and his animation for the opening credits is full of slow-motion mystery, however    juxtaposed with a conflicting feel-good folk singer-songwriter context of “The Tragically Hip,” which frames it with accessible hope, pleasantness, and empowerment.  

You can see more of his work HERE.  and of course, his Facebook and Instagram

It’s always awe-inspiring to see artists who commit their entire lives to something that can be so insignificant to someone else.  Their art, and I would argue one of the defining characteristics of art, has no utilitarian purpose, and instead it is entirely up to the participant to assign their own value.  

Christo and Jean-Claude fall into this category.  For decades their giant sized, conceptual pieces transform islands, buildings, and even pyramids into something entirely different, often by wrapping them or framing them somehow with cloth.  They make possible things that seem impossible.. or just nonsensical.  

They see their process as being equally important as the end result, because the logistics and bureaucratic puzzles are essential in the execution of such massive works.. These hoops serve as a behind the scenes look into how these projects effects those involved.  Check out their website here.  

Bordallo II is a Portuguese artist whose art stems from his connection with the absurdity of modern consumerism, materialism, and greed.  His work is a metaphorical byproduct of those things.  He uses waste and unused objects, that he transforms to create something sustainable and ecological in the form of street art collage of random living creature and farm animals.  His installations are fun, colorful, and incredibly large and bold as if to make his statement as loud as possible. 

And in that statement, there is great sadness in how in each piece, there are two sides of each animal; the one side  that is natural, and the one side that is tainted by colorful waste as the texture of the entire work has the feel of deterioration, effected by the very consumerism that he is trying to be made aware of.  Check it out.