Percussionist, Composer, Author
The multi percussion piece to rule them all! XY was the challenge of a lifetime and sort of like a movie where the character has to endure through a hard task to find that afterwards everything makes sense. Only in a movie it takes a montage and in real life it takes a lot of time!
XY is a multi percussion composition by Michael Gordon for 5 drums which focuses on the phasing in volume between your left and right hands. A simple idea, though this is done while playing polyrhythms
The debut of Spankinhide in my time at the Conservatorium! I decided to bring Elliott and Piers, my bandmates from Spankinhide, to play some African drumming in my recital and share a part of my musical background. The great thing about being in my final year at uni was being able to choose what I wanted to play and to play some unconventional things.
It was an out of the ordinary experience as well, because I’d never led any pieces in Spankinhide. I was always playing accompaniment parts
MARIMBICS by Markus Halt is a four-mallet marimba solo that I have interpreted as the ‘Marimba Olympics’. Each section of the piece challenges the performer to play with different technique and cope with changing ‘tonal worlds’. It is a trip down the rabbit hole involving high technical demand and quirky musical ideas.
This was definitely one of the most challenging marimba solos I had played up until this point in uni, in my recital and just in general. The process of choosing
Suomineito is a four-mallet vibraphone solo written by Nebojša Jovan Živković. Suomineito in Finnish, in the language of the "Suomi" people (as the Finns calls themselves) means "Finnish girl". This quiet and melancholic composition was inspired by an original folk song from Finland, called "Heili Karjalasta". In Suomi, this means "a friend from Karelia", a region that used to be a part of Finland.
This is a heart wrenching piece and I loved playing it because of the music and the challenge.
Who knew you could make such beautiful sounds from plastic pipes? Turns out all you need are some specially designed flexible PVC pipes and you've got harmonic whirlies!
About a year ago, I went to a drumming camp with my dad and we started talking to one of the guys (his name was Wayne) there about my idea for a show that involves visual effects. Being inspired by a flexible PVC tube I brought back from the tip shop one day, I told him that I was interested in figuring out how to make tuned,
I had the great opportunity to record with KC Chen and Christina Bollendorf a while ago for the release of their new single 'Feel the Love'. About a month or 2 after, they started planning to film a music video for it!
Naturally, I joined in and had fun helping with choreography and even doing a bit of acting for the music video. I'm glad to have had the opportunity to help KC out with one of his projects like he's helped me with mine! And I'm also over the moon to see a production I was a
I've sold my first composition!!!!
I recently added a new section to the website to sell my compositions and, with the help of my dad Gal Baras (check out his website), I'm really happy with the end product and it's working too!
Not too soon after I finished adding everything I got a message from one of my friend's private students who was looking for a piece to play at his school's percussion soiree. I was really glad that he was interested
My new Body Percussion production 'Up the Body and Down the Page' is complete! Experience the combination of body percussion with visual effects in this synaesthetic experience. It is with great pleasure that I present to you 'Up the Body and Down the Page', another synaesthetic performance combining original music and percussion with visual effects. This is a follow up of my previous production 'Volcano
Check it out! My coming body percussion project 'Up the Body and Down the Page' is almost finished and here's a snippet of the final video!
Once again, it's been fantastic working with great artists and people who are generally great at what they do. A massive thank you to Jonathan Brazil, who sat with me so far for about 7 hours to edit the video not to mention filming the entire production over the past 3 weeks. It got to the point that our minds melted so we decided to take a break and
Check it out! My coming body percussion project 'Up the Body and Down the Page' is almost finished and here's a snippet to show you how it's coming along.
The final video for the piece will involve the four performers standing in the dark and placing their arms and legs into the light as the make sound. This goes with the theme of seeing sounds like my previous production Read More
