Christi Denton - Biography
Christi Denton is a sound artist, composer, and musician. Her work incorporates homemade instruments, field recordings, and digital processing to create intricate and immersive sonic environments.
She is especially known for her instrument building, including her laser MIDI controller LAMOSO, which allows a choreographer to play the music they move to. She’s also built instruments that react to light, to sound, to soil conditions, and she created the ethanolorchestra, an instrument where sounds change based on how drunk (or sober) the performer is. She often works with multi-channel speaker configurations and has written for Portland Community College's Unity Gain, a 24-channel speaker system. Additionally, Denton contributed a multi-channel audio/visual piece to the permanent exhibit Six Seconds Around Me at the Casoria Contemporary Art Museum in Naples, Italy.
Denton has collaborated with numerous artists and musicians, including creating burnable microphones as part of a multi-artist collaboration led by Portland's Creative Laureate Julie Keefe at Caldera Arts in Central Oregon. She’s also collaborated on pieces with non-artists, for example creating a sound map with geographers working towards their PhDs and working with an invertebrate zoologist to build an interactive musical piece controlled by the movements of a tardigrade.
She studied music composition with Wendy Reid, Pauline Oliveros, and Maggi Payne at Mills College in Oakland, California, and attended the Centre de Création Musicale Iannis Xenakis in France, where she was one of the few musicians able to work with the UPIC (Unité Polyagogique Informatique CEMAMu), a computerized musical composition tool devised by Xenakis in 1977.
From 2019 to 2022, Denton directed the 20-person Sonic Arts and Music Production Laptop Ensemble (SAMPLE) at Portland State University, where she taught students how to write and perform music with laptops and other electronics. When the pandemic shut down in-person lectures, she created an interactive online piece that allowed students to collaborate and hold live performances in real time from their own homes. These performances were some of the only “live” events to occur at the university in 2020 across all disciplines. She sits on the board of Electrogals, an organization that promotes women in electronic music through workshops and festivals.
In addition to her current Paris-based collaborative project earthworm with songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Margaret Fiedler McGinnis, she’s been working with Portland, Oregon filmmaker Pam Minty on an installation that is controlled by and centered around a garden, intertwining nature with film and sound (the haricot project).
Denton was once the subject of a San Francisco Police Department all-points bulletin because she illegally hung large wind chimes in the Castro, she owns Harvey Milk’s record player, and she’s da very slow runner. Since 2006, she has also worked as an environmental analyst and project manager.
Her resume is here.
Random interesting projects and performances include:
- Her piece Untitled (For Musician) was included in 2024'sA Year of Deep Listening: 365 Text Scores for Pauline Oliveros
- Her work is described in 2024's Basta Now. Women, Trans & Non-binary in Experimental Music
- She directed Portland State University's Sonic Arts and Music Production's Laptop Ensemble (SAMPLE) from 2019 to 2022.
- She released a netalbum out on Pan y Rosas Discos in 2018 and Avant Music News (review) put it on their "Best of 2018" list. Captive/ate (from the album) was featured on WFMU:What Was Music? with Marcel M and No Pigeonholes EXP broadcast on KOWS-FM hosted by Don Campau.
- She and iueke did a 2-hour long live improvisation on Rinse FM (France) on Antinote / iueke’s bi-monthly radio show (2017).
- KBOO’s (Portland) Digital Divide interviewed Christi in 2018 discussing music projects and inspirations.
- She created burnable microphones to record fire sounds as part of Julie Keefe’s (Portland’s Creative Laureate) multi-artist project Burn (2014).
- She’s written a composition for Portland Community College’s Unity Gain, a 24-channel speaker system (2017), and she’s written a multi-channel piece that is included in the permanent exhibit Six Seconds Around Me (2008) in the Casoria Contemporary Art Museum in Naples, Italy.
- Her composition, IX Pieces for UPIC (2003), written on Iannis Xenakis’ Unité Polyagogique Informatique CEMAMu, is one of the few pieces written on the instrument in the 21st Century. Le cri du Patchwork (France Musique), used IX Pieces for UPIC in a show about musical instruments and gesture (2014).
- Her instrument, the LAMOSO (a laser MIDI controller) was a finalist in the 2012 international Guthman Musical Instrument Competition (Atlanta, Georgia).
- In 2011 and 2012, her music was featured in collaborative performances for Ten Tiny Dances at the Time Based Art Festival in Portland, where dancers controlled music through light, flex, and trigger sensors.
- She's played in festivals including the Spark Festival of Electronic Music (2008) at the University of Minnesota (Minneapolis) and RENCONTRES 2004 in Paris France.
- She’s written compositions for Klavier Nonette, an installation of Toy Pianos created by Trimpin (2003) and Short Ride in a Fast Chihuahua, an installation of toy chihuahuas, created by Ranjit Bhatnagar (2014).
- Her piece Working Girl, which recorded the sounds of firefighters, chefs, tattoo artists, factory employees, politicians, and many other working women, was played daily for a year (November 2004-2005) on Radio Lavalamp (community radio in Osaka Japan).
- She's worked on installations in San Francisco, including building giant wind chimes in the Castro district as part of 2003's Music for People and Thingamajigs, and amplifying exhibits in the San Francisco Exploratorium as part of their Art Cafe Series ("The Prepared Exploratorium") (2001).
- Her arrangement of Lou Harrison's King David's Lament for Jonathan was performed during Other Minds 9 (2003) by the San Francisco Opera Singers and the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus.
Photo taken by Gene Kunze, 2011, in Christi's studio.
Photo taken of Christi and the LAMOSO by Kristen Larson, 2012, at the 2012 Portland Experimental Film Festival After Party at BOOMBAP.
Photo taken by Jim Leisy, 2014, at Caldera.
Photo taken by Heather Perkins, 2012 at the Wayward Music Series in the Chapel Performance Space.
Photo taken by Heather Perkins at the Electrogals 2011 festival.
Photo taken by Heather Perkins at Electrogals 2008 festival.
Photo taken by Michael Karman at the Electrogals 2008 festival.
Photo taken by Andy Fish at the Electrogals 2011 festival.
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