Bio
Steven Sehman is a composer/producer combining a background in percussion performance and experimental music, with the technologies and practices of modern electronic music. His work utilizes diverse tools and processes, including analog synthesizers, acoustic instruments, generative and chance processes, found sound, live performance, and video.
Sehman has performed his sound and video pieces at art spaces in the PNW, including Make.Shift, The Alternative Library, and Gallery 1412. As a percussionist, Sehman has performed at prominent venues in NYC including Le Poisson Rouge, Issue Project Room, Galapagos Art Space, Merkin Hall, Symphony Space, and the Park Avenue Armory. Sehman currently resides in Bellingham, Washington where he creates and performs sounds, and teaches at Western Washington University.
Artist Statement
My sound pieces are rooted in the aesthetics of Minimalism, and my core interest lies in elemental structures and textures: fixed pitch sets, single timbres that subtly morph, and unchanging block textures and formal structure. In this way, I conceive of my pieces more with the blocks of shape and color of Barnett Newman and Robert Rauschenberg than I do as time-based musical compositions with a linear structure.
I contextualize my music in two realms that have often been artificially partitioned: Academic, electro acoustic composition; and non-academic, electronic music production. Though thanks to many artists around me now, the divide between these musics is continually being challenged and eroded.
My video pieces utilize collage techniques with images sourced from archival and found footage. I align with Hito Steyerl’s concept of the “poor image,” finding value in the detritus and relics of the vast digital archive that find life after new life, traveling the internet, being used and reused in various contexts.
Academic
I currently teach in the Audio Technology, Music, and Society program at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies (Western Washington University). This interdisciplinary program merges hands-on learning in two professional recording studios with the critical examination of sound, music, and media technologies in culture.
My teaching is grounded in collaborative seminar environments - around the seminar table and in the studio - where students critically engage with each other, academics texts and authors, creative works and their artists, and the local to global cultural contexts where these are born from and exist within.