Then, Again, composed by Justin Wright; performed by Alarm Will Sound and Charlotte Mundy
Justin teamed up with his close friend, 3D animator Max Kaplin, who assembled the slices into 3D models that morph to display different tissue types. Hellbrunn Automatons appears on Justin’s most recent album, A Really Good Spot, released July 8, 2022, on Beacon Sound and First Terrace Records.
In the words of Justin: “I began making this music video as something to keep me occupied during my daily five-hour chemo infusions. I was really determined to make something beautiful out of this whole ordeal, and when I played around with my scans on medical imaging software, I knew immediately that this was how. These images - detailed, thorough, and repetitive - were the perfect representation of one of strongest feelings I had throughout my treatment: the relinquishment of my body to the multitude of experts examining every inch of it, a slightly morbid ego-death where I nearly stopped seeing my body as my own. We lit the 3D models like museum displays, and I used an AI colorizer to color each of the 2D frames however it wanted. The track, Hellbrunn Automatons, was written long before my diagnosis, but its repetition and optimism as it falls apart ended up pairing perfectly with the visuals."
Drone Garden
8 violins, 8 violas, 8 cellos, and one contrabass or extra cello
Composition, programming, design, and cello by Justin Wright
Drone Garden is a composition in the form of a computer application. Multiple home listeners can connect online to wander together through a giant room with 25 pre-recorded audio sources. Through simulated audio spatialization, a listener’s relative proximity to each audio source determines how the aggregate of the parts is perceived, creating a unique experience on every listen.
Eraser, composed by Justin Wright; performed by SO Percussion
Magnetic mallets gradually erase two long tape loops.
What does a bone know?
That grief is a pile of bones laid out by a wooden post
Washed so white by time that only the sea knows its real color
That grief is a rocky island, covered in clouds, made sharp by the wind
Go there, but do not stay.
I, too, have been there, says the bone
Text by Kathy Sirico, read by Talea Lupin
Hellbrunn Automatons, composed by Justin Wright; video by Justin Wright and Max Kaplin
Composer, cellist, and recent cancer survivor Justin Wright presents a new music video for his track Hellbrunn Automatons, created entirely from CT scan slices of the musician’s body during his diagnostic process. While the images initially served a clinical role in letting doctors determine where his cancer had spread, they have now been sequenced into frames in an animation to produce beautiful abstract bursts.
The online version was exhibited at the PHI Centre’s website in summer 2020, and a virtual reality version is exhibited physically as of February 24.
From the PHI exhibition:
How can this pandemic invite us to conceive alternative forms of meeting up and experiencing music together? This question guides the project Drone Garden, a virtual environment designed by Justin Wright to propose a new way of listening and being together. This space…allows you to hear Wright’s original composition, a microtonal work for 25 musicians, in 3 movements that cycle indefinitely…. The online mode, where you can wander around with other users on the platform, offers a digital version of the social aspect of a music concert.