Earlier this year I was invited by Julio Torres to compose the music to his and Martine Gutierrez’s 2026 Whitney Biennial performance Marina, which was to be performed on Little Island. The music is now out on streaming everywhere and Bandcamp.

I’m trying to take the time to commemorate the process of each project on my newsletter, since they are all a tremendous amount of work! So here we are.

Julio and I have now worked on four of his projects together. The first being the A24 film Problemista with Tilda Swinton, the second being his spooky miniseries Fantasmas, and the third being his HBO x Performance Space NY comedy special Color Theories.

The first two of these projects together we developed a sound that was whimsical and fantastical, but also rooted in contemporary classical music and pulling inspiration from anime and 80s camp (does this make sense??). Also having a sense that the sounds were assembled from a children’s messy toy bin (occasionally I use a kazoo and morph my voice into an unrecognizable creature).

Color Theories was in a similar world but a bit of a departure, with less electronic sounds and being scored in a more live early 20th century avant-garde classical sound (it’s still very tonal and whimsical though).

For this fourth collaboration Marina, we both seemed like we were on the same page of craving something darker, more dissonant and monstrous. The story is essentially a cursed rendition of the Little Mermaid, about an underwater creature princess in the Gowanus Canal who catfishes trade on a Samsung phone and murders them when they’re disgusted by her true form. There’s also a film noir detective monologue-ing his way through the play, attempting to solve the murders.

To start this scoring process I hired my friends Yuniya Edi Kwon and Holland Andrews to come to my studio (aka my apartment) and spend a few hours recording sounds. I had a loose list of ideas to record, different operatic wails, rising, falling, shrieking, gremlin/creature sounds, and other slightly more melodic concepts. I honestly don’t know anyone else who could have done this, the two of them are so talented and unique in their art practices. (And not to be missed is the New York premiere if their incredible opera that’s many years in the making, How does it feel to look at nothing, which will be running at BAM Oct 21-25!) DO NOT MISS THIS.

Once I had my operatic and monstrous starting sound bank, I set about pulling samples from online, water splashes that would substitute for conventional drums (a continuous note would be “wetter”), comical toy sounds, metal trash clanks, and anything I couldn’t find I recorded myself, like more gremlin noises, sludgy wet gurgles, and peeing into a toilet to unlock the character Mound’s true abominable form.

Through the process I listened to a lot of Krysztzof Penderecki and Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake (to the point where it was so in my head I even used Swan Lake as an opening to one of my my DJ sets at Paragon). I would write a bunch of music, then take the train to Bowling Green, sit in on the choreography rehearsals, and go back home and rewrite / write more.

Despite taking a massive tonal shift in the sound, we barely had to have a conversation about it. Four projects in together, I think we’ve developed a subconscious aesthetic understanding with each other, which has made collaborating very trusting and easy.

Little Island is situated off the west side (left side in my brain) of Manhattan. It’s a man-made chunk of land that was built fairly recently around 2019, and I remember thinking when I saw the announcement that this was going to be a garish and forced tourist trap devoid of soul. However stepping foot on it for the first time, I had to admit to myself that it’s absolutely gorgeous, with beautiful bathrooms and is free to the public.

So rehearsing and tech-ing on Little Island, despite only getting two or three stressful days to set everything up before our first performance, was a dream. We’d watch the sun set at 7:30 pm while making art outdoors into the late summer night, with colorful boats sparkling in the distance. (though I could do without the helicopters) Also there are many pathways on Little Island that overlook the amphitheater, so we would have up to twenty tourists at a time watching us like we were in a fishbowl rehearse our demented little play.

I am learning I am a water girl at heart.

(Side note: sound checking outdoors with an empty theater, whatever sounds like the right volume needs to be 6 db louder once an audience is there!)

I attended every performance. I loved being on Little Island. And I’m incredibly proud of what we made, the team that Julio assembled including Griffin Stoddard’s production design (Marina’s shell is absolutely a museum-worthy sculpture), combined with Erik Bergrin’s costume design and Nina Carelli’s makeup design seamlessly was awe inspiring. And Lindsay Jones was an incredibly graceful and effective Stage Manager, maybe one of the most difficult jobs I’ve seen. And everyone involved was really lovely to be around <3

It’s also a pleasure to watch Julio’s work grow and evolve. I love in every work, though the medium changes, the heart is always an absurdist adult fairy tale, yearning for a better world. And as a somewhat hermetic and solo creative person, I am learning to collaborate more freely and trust others to use their talents to bring a collective vision to life. It is not going to be perfect and that is okay.

Actually I lied, I didn’t attend the final performance. As a film composer, I’ve found that after working on something for a long time, I have maybe three or four watches before the specific magical feeling starts to fade. The Saturday night before the final show, I watched and had the feeling ‘ok, time to move on’, and so I did.

I set myself one hour to write this and the one hour is 15 minutes past, so it’s time to stop. I hope you enjoyed this little behind the scenes excerpt with me, Lia. Goodbye my newsletter babies.

— lia