grind (2018-19)
for 8.1 or stereo fixed media
Program Note
Approximately five hundred billion plastic cups are used each year, of which roughly six billion end up in landfills. grind attempts to symbolize the faulty business and political ideologies that ultimately contribute to a lack of environmental sustainability through the destructive morphology of a single sound source: a plastic Keurig coffee pod hitting the floor.
Premiere: 11.18.18 | Festival DME | Lisboa Incomum, Portugal
Duration: 8 minutes, 15 seconds
Award: Sound Silence Thought Competition - Finalist (2020)
Cube Fest 2022
Review by DJ Malinowski (MIT Press)
“…grind…” by Ryne Siesky brings environmental waste to the fore. Starting the piece is a large, right-to-left wave made of smaller waves that create an audio spatialization of Zeno’s Paradox, after which my image of the Perform Studio gradually transformed, perhaps through the various 3-D shapes that Siesky adeptly produces, such as sonic holes in the walls sucking into a virtual outdoors, a large distorted flying saucer in the corner of the room, and a vast glacier with spatially nuanced echoes of cracks… to holistically and efficiently prototype temporal and spatial processing of a single K-cup sample.”
On the Road: Cube Fest 2022
Review by Joshua Weatherspoon (Cycling ‘74)
“Another of the interesting performances was a Ryne Siesky piece on pollution using a sample of a K-Cup to literally generate what Tyechia Thompson, co-artistic director of Cube Fest, saw as unsettling sounds. It was interesting… to see people wince and look around as his insect-like sounds came around the room and seemed over people’s shoulders…”
