Conlon Nancarrow declared: “Time is the last frontier of music”. I am interested in further developing Nancarrow's numerous temporal experiments and the manipulation of time perception in contemporary performance practice as a composition technique.  I am a composer, improviser, and percussionist, performing and conducting my work from behind the drum kit. My music is informed by an eclectic variety of influences, including collected tone rows (e.g. Alban Berg), harmolodic jazz (Marc Ribot, Jamaaladeen Tacuma), aleatoric comprovisation (John Zorn, John Cage), Krautrock (Malcolm Mooney, CAN) and Malian griot traditions (Abdoulaye Diabaté).

Anatomical Planes, is the latest edition to my chamber music series featuring the Ligeti Quartet which continues to explore concepts from A Gambler’s Hand (2012) and In the Ring (2014), a suite of pieces for amplified string quartet and drums, largely composed but with improvisational sections (third stream uniting jazz and classical forms and approaches), inspired equally by the great string quartet tradition (Beethoven and Bartok in particular).   

Anatomical Planes is a future album release consisting of five suites which employ polytemporal concepts from Conlon Nancarrow's Studies for Player Piano: Study No. 5 (two repeating ostinatos at tempos of 5-against-7) Study No. 11 (an isorhythmic blues on a repeating sequence of 120 chords) and Study No. 20, (a pointillist duration canon of repeating notes within small ranges).  Polytemporal music is composed using two or more different simultaneous tempos or speeds. Henry Cowell first envisioned polytemporal theories of divisive rhythm in his treatise New Musical Resources (1919), discovering a way to structure rhythmic duration in a similar way that had been achieved with harmony, that pitch intervals, and polyrhythms are manifestations of the same phenomenon, differentiated only by speed. This became the main inspiration for Conlon Nancarrow's 50 Studies for Player Piano (1948-92) which synthesized the two main conventions in which rhythm is composed (divisive or additive approaches).

"The drummer and composer Sean Noonan approaches postmodern jazz and world music from the same angle of self-discovery ... he manages to make his pieces speak coherently, and in a unified voice." - Nate Chinen, New York Times