Jake Sokolov-Gonzalez
Disintegration Aesthetics explores the repetitive behavior associated with Autism known as "stimming," or "stereotypy." The compositional strategy embraces repetition as it takes musical form to be an emergent property of attention. The performance is a series of "stereotypic" scores: a suite for solo cello with live electronics, followed by a suite for community ensemble involving sound, movement and projection.
Disintegration Aesthetics also includes installations, a dissertation, and a film. The installations merge machine learning, digital signal processing, and vintage mechanical devices. A short film documenting the project is linked below, and a peer-reviewed article is forthcoming in Critical Studies in Improvisation.
DI opened at Pyxis, a community run, sound oriented third space that I co-founded and continue to operate.
Essential Tremors uses an archive of testimonial recordings of my grandfather, a Cuban national turned CIA asset, pertaining to his involvement in the Chilean coup on September 11th 1973. The story is centered on a phone call between my father and his father as the coup took place, and unwinds into a reflection on the materiality of copper and its entanglements. Treating the call's distortions as epistemic conditions that unsettle distinctions between signal and noise, truth and fiction, the work develops a vibrational epistemology that hears instability itself as a mode of knowledge. In reframing sonic failure as a site of knowledge, the project proposes vibration itself as a method for engaging the affective and material residues of the coup's enduring reverberations. Partially fixed media, partially read aloud, and partially improvised, the project unfolds as an intermedia performance that integrates archives, animations, live sound processing, and critical historiography to examine how sound, memory, and material infrastructure converge in the intergenerational transmission of political trauma. Performances of the film have been presented by Brighton University (UK) and by The Rubin Foundation (USA). A written chapter, that is itself a sort of "performance" of the work, was solicited, peer-reviewed, and accepted in an edited volume forthcoming from Routledge, Sonic Rebellions II.
Tremologies features a reading voice and a soundscape for 42 speakers in ambisonic formation. The soundscape mimics a haptic topology. Shifting zones throughout the space are marked by simple tones whose interference produces utterly local ecotonalities: third-tones of latent partials and rhythmic beating. There is no sweet-spot. One could, hypothetically, rhythmically migrate along these tremological tension lines. Instead, the zones shift and mimic a rhythmic migration as the haptic map moves around the listener—creating the illusion of movement as the environment slides by, around, beneath, and above us.
Built in Max/MSP, the total movement of the system follows an eco-logic as its parts are in constant flux while the overall structure of the system remains static—a vibrational terrarium. The modulation of the zones is driven by equal phase divisions of a single low frequency oscillator such that a given frequency range is always equally divided and the total motion of the system remains constant, even as the zones perpetually migrate.
Raina and I have released 10 singles, an EP and two albums that, together, have accumulated over one million organic streams.
Audio web apps prototyped using natural language prompting with LLMs and coding agents. Both are currently spatialized in the stereo field, and I am working towards a native implementation of B-format ambisonics so that they can be plug-and-play for all ambisonic systems.
Generated using sound-synced stable diffusion workflows prompted with text pulled from my peer-reviewed essay "Stimming and Stereotypy: Situated Improvisation at the Margin of Sensibility" forthcoming in Critical Studies in Improvisation.
Our project takes as its point of departure the melancholia inherent to postcolonial theory. It takes the epistemic tool of colonial oppression par excellence, the written word, and explodes and regresses and reorganizes it. Ideally, this process queers the edifices of knowledge forged by, and for, colonialists: those who have made, and keep rendering, postcolonial subjects into the Other, or perhaps Objects.
"To be Opaque" remixes two juxtaposed texts — a graphic from Denis Diderot's 1765 Encyclopédie that fabricates a genealogy of knowledge itself, and a fragment of text from Édouard Glissant's 1989 Caribbean Discourse that works through his notion of opacity. We regressed and processed the texts through diverse mediums — we used photocopiers, digital softwares, laser cutters, sanders, pens, scissors, and steel saws to ultimately create woodblock prints that were used in a community printmaking workshop where participants had the opportunity to physically print and rearrange the texts as they saw fit.