Parirou Djafari / Pamela Rogers

Parirou Djafari, “Ancestral Bloom,” Collage, 2026

Pamela Rogers

“Pick Up Sticks,” audio (mp3), created 2022/composed 2025
“Pick Up Sticks” is a reflection about time and age. The piece uses spectral music concepts, including electronics derived from the timbre of a human voice. The drone throughout the piece contains the first six harmonics of a voice, but as you move through the piece more and more harmonics are layered, representing the weight of experience. The layers build in multiples of six, while the marimba, vibraphone, and stretched voice depict how clock time and felt time intertwine as the self evolves through experience. We cannot escape the weight of time and age, of all of the corrections, validations, rejections, loves, losses, joys, and pains we hold; but, as we age, can we allow ourselves to feel in sync with time, to return home, to remember our six year old self, when we were just beginning to be aware of how clever we truly are?

Pamela Rogers

“Sing a Song of Naughty Boys,” audio (mp3), created 2022
The first known printing of the English nursery rhyme Sing a Song of Sixpence was published in Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book, London, 1744:

Sing a Song of Sixpence
A bag full of Rye,
Four and twenty Naughty Boys,
Baked in a Pye.

Can we move into a new world without knowing why naughty boys became blackbirds? Can we learn to mine the past without letting go of this world? Or will we continue to allow that magpie to peck off our nose? These questions shaped my compositional and sampling choices as I mined the past to create something new. Voice Credits: Chloetta Anderson (my daughter), Age 7, from the kids podcast Buttons & Figs. Tony Schwartz, credited for creating the first socially conscientious ad campaigns for radio, from the audio archives Library of Congress.

Parirou Djafari is a dedicated artist passionate about exploring intersections of abstraction. Away from technology and the cluttered world, she made these collage artworks in memory of young people who were killed for freedom, using paper, magazines, and natural images. Through play, texture, and intuition, she created a space for reflection, healing, and resistance.

Pamela Rogers is an emerging music composer. Her compositions explore conceptual ideas and are marked by the use of found sounds, repetition, time distortion, and sampling. Her compositions weave together layers of sounds that evoke reflections on the paradoxes of life, the subjectiveness of time, and our connections to each other and nature. Her influences include Laurie Anderson, Pauline Oliveros, Meredith Monk, and Holly Herndon.