The work of Seth Horvitz (b. 1973) crosses many disciplines, among them electronic and experimental music, music for film and dance, sound design, visual design, video, and installation art. His recent projects are primarily concerned with the web of relationships between nature, machines, and human perception. Under his own name and various pseudonyms, he has published music on dozens of record labels including LINE, Mille Plateaux, Soul Jazz, The Leaf Label, Creaked, and his own Context Free Media. As a performer, he has appeared at venues across the Americas, Europe, Australia, and Japan. He holds a BA in Cognitive Science from the University of California at Berkeley (1995) and an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College (2010).
Though Horvitz made his foray into music in the early 1990s as a self-taught misuser of electronics and community radio DJ, he has been increasingly drawn towards a studied approach to composition. In 2003, having never learned to play an acoustic instrument, Seth began private instruction in piano performance, harmony, and counterpoint. Five years later, he enrolled in the MFA program at Mills College, where he composed a series of studies for computer-controlled piano among many other projects.
Since completing the program at Mills in 2010 and relocating to the east coast, he has presented his piano music at Stanford University/CCRMA, UC Santa Barbara’s Primavera Festival, the Mutek Festival (Montreal), the White Box Gallery (NYC), Festival Total Meeting (Tours, France), and the Dis-play Festival (Las Palmas, Canary Islands). He has also performed at various venues using an obsolete green monochrome monitor as an instrument, collaborated with visual artist Nate Boyce on Bands of Color and Noise (after Sol LeWitt) (presented at the De Young Museum, San Francisco), composed a six-channel sound work derived from Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate (presented at the Berkeley Art Museum), and provided the musical accompaniment for Belgian choreographer Brice Leroux’s latest work Flocking Trio.