Lucian Parisi produces ethereal art-rock and composes granular chamber music. The California-based multi-instrumentalist work ranges from lush, psychedelic experiences to mixed-media, location-based environmental soundscapes. Aside from recording, composition, and audio engineering, his research interests lie in bio-acoustics and digital signal processing for immersive media.
His music seeks to capture intangible atmospheres and uncommunicable experiences. Much of his work is inspired by hallucinatory outdoor wanderings, bizarre travel and lived experiences, surfing, and near-death nature experiences. His latest of 4 albums, Riparian Forms, is an exploration of soundscape ecology and eco-acoustics through the lens of coastal California. Each piece is inspired by acoustic or biological phenomena taking place on research field stations operated by the University of California Natural Reserve System. These happenings were captured as sheet music sketches and audio field recordings, then later turned into avant-garde chamber recordings in Parisi’s studio at the Oasis, located in Isla Vista.
After years of training on violin and piano beginning at age five, Parisi lost interest in music. As a teenager, his interest in composition blossomed due to a renewed passion for guitar, drumming, keyboard, and sound. Early in the Pandemic, he recorded his first experimental-rock album, Sustained Frequencies, which served as a jumping-off point for artistic development and a love of sonic experiences. His early work centered around simplistic piano, electric guitar, synths, samples, and vocals. Parisi has used the time since to develop his compositional palette, as well as his production and engineering skills.
His current work experiments with many techniques, including feedback manipulation and resampling, live layered granular performance, Max MSP systems, field recordings and spectrograms, sound sculptures and manipulation of physical materials, landscape composition, data sonification, generative midi, unique approaches to spatialization and filtering, microtonality, looping and cell-based composition, among others.
He has several upcoming projects relating to site-specific sound sculptures, audio-reactive chamber performance, nomadic desert wandering music, and granular soundscapes.
Lucian Parisi is pursuing a Master of Science in Media Arts and Technology at UCSB. He currently studies under Dr. Joann Kutchera-Morrin and Dr. Karl Yerkes. He previously studied music composition under Andrew Watts, Leslie Hogan, Andrew Tholl, and Deniz Caglarcan at UC Santa Barbara. Parisi has worked under Richard Burke of Future Phonic Studios, located in Amsterdam, focusing on audio engineering and production.
