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.
Hassan Estakhrian is a composer, performer (vocalist & multi-instrumentalist), producer, and intermedia artist. He collides genres of music that span across pop, rock, jazz, and contemporary classical and incorporates extra-musical elements and electronics. His assortment of works include rock operas, chamber-funk pieces, musical games with graphic scores and improvisation, and intermedia stories based in fantasy and science fiction. Hassan writes and records songs under the name— Antenna Fuzz. He is currently a doctoral candidate in music composition at Stanford University.