LONG FORM 005 :: Owen Moran

Wednesday, January 7, 2026
169 Bowery NYC
DOORS 7:30p | SHOW 8:00p

Heavy Snow Stood on the Blackened Wall

Program Notes ::

This composition, primarily made of voice, bagpipes, field recordings, and contact microphone feedback invites listeners to find their bearings in an imaginary landscape. This audio collage was made with episodic prose and mythic tales in mind, dense with soaring skyward cries and drones as well as downward-pulling, jagged, and corrosive sonic textures.

“Heavy Snow Stood on the Blackened Wall” was woven together from the physicality and tactility of performances on acoustic instruments such as the bagpipes and voice in addition to experimentation with sculptural contact microphone instruments. I am especially interested in all of these instrument’s capacity for drone, duration, and microtonal shifting because of the way these features challenge the space and attention of the listener.

The sound’s own limitations and points of degradation are on display as well. I am interested in the point at which sounds that were once easily recognizable lose key features or characteristics that place them within a soundscape. My process involves over-driven and distorted signal processing, the chopping and jolting sensation of magnetic tape loops or weak radio signal, and the layered arrangement of recordings positioned outside of their expected contexts. I am inspired by the immortal dance between recorded sound that illustrates the ecosystem the recording was taken from and those that foreground the hand of the artist/recordist. I favor the kind of extended deep listening that is possible within spatial long form works because they enable me to focus on transition points from species to habitat to whole.

Accumulating faster, the drunken sky splits open and pours down, indifferent to the land below. Like star dust, like the spinal vertebra of tiny animals, snow flakes find each other magnetically and join the ocean of their mass. Each grain, whispering landing coordinates, finds rest on the wall. Barely upright, this derelict monolith cannot deny its company and swells, stirs, then simmers.
Some sessions used in this composition were done in collaboration with artist and vocalist Baptiste Leroux.

Owen Moran is a sound artist and educator inspired by the physicality of sound and his work commonly interrogates notions of degradation, growth, and mutation. He uses minimal electronics, microphones and speakers, field recordings, voice, and bagpipes to create installations, performances, and recordings. Moran is interested in making visible the residue of process and the relationships he creates with materials and space. He thinks of his work as composing relationships between significant sites, human performers, and sonic objects. Sculpting sound from a palette of noise and imperfections, he attempts to find moments of balance between chaos and synchronicity, reality and myth.

In 2023, he concluded a MFA degree in Transdisciplinary New Media with an academic monograph concerning educational and artistic commons. Integral to this research was the identification of creative practices that take educational exchange outside of traditional classroom settings and encourage the shared stewardship of ideas and resources. Moran’s 2025 duo exhibition, MUDA, at L’Air Arts Cite Falguière included an immersive video installation with multichannel audio
and treated-wooden sculptures made vibratory and sonorous through the use of contact microphones and transducers. The exhibition meditated on time as a state of constant, imperceptible flux, the shedding of skin, the resounding echos of placemaking. Moran was adjunct facility at the Paris College of Art from 2023 to 2025 creating classes on the moving image, sonic installation art, and experimental composition practices. His current academic research is focused on acoustic ecology and archaeoacoustic spaces and rituals.