John Tejada
Faculty - Music
Future Stars class compilation album
John Tejada, a frequent guest on Touched Music compilations, hatched the idea of turning the final project for his CalArts “Advanced Electronic Music Production” class into a compilation album for the established label. John Tejada Presents Future Stars features 15 of Tejada’s students at their best, as well as an exclusive original track by Tejada himself called “NYC83,” which imagines an alternative of a classic b-boy breakin’ tune. Established as a non-profit, the record label benefits Macmillan Cancer Support in the UK among others. Touched Music will release Future Stars digitally on Friday, May 15, 2020, with 100-limited edition CDs to follow shortly after. The best way to support the charity—and the only way to procure the beautiful physical CD—is to purchase from Bandcamp. The release will also be available on Spotify, Tidal, Bleep and many other platforms.
The styles on Future Stars range from ambient pieces such as Evan Sutterfield’s “Quarantine Reflections for Shakuhachi and Electronics,” indie experiments by Hope Sparrow and Mar, house-flavored tracks by Simo and Benneyybeatz, to techno-tinged peak time perfection by tau0n and Ian Ellison, a track made entirely from the sounds of a balloon by Magro, future jazz experiments by Scruffy and everything in between.
Including tracks by:
Antonio Simonneti
Benjamin Schultz
Drake Macdonald
Dylan Marx
Emily Popejoy
Evan Sutterfield
Gabriel Aragao
Gage Winthrop
Gavin Morrison
Ian Ellison
Katelyn Maheia
Max Jaffe
Maxx Bradley
Parinaz Yazdanparast
Scott Cohen
Taliana Katz
Trevor Bock

Jamie Naqvi
Scenes Inspired by film, memory, and collage, “Scenes” uses found and original material to recreate three scenes from its author’s life.
Dongpu Ling
ML Landscape I am interested in the inaccurate and unpredictable result that a machine can make. In order to understand its “mind”, I train the machine using images that have not been cropped, to see how it understands a thing that has not be seen before.
Perry Cook
COVID Pan Drum: A Robot Tongue-Drum Rendering of the SARS-2 COVID Virus Genome I’m building a custom robot to play a little lap-sized tongue (steel) drum. A program will read through the roughly 30k base pairs in the COVID 19 (SARS-2 COVID Wuhan Seafood Market) DNA sequence. Particular (known) functioning segments will be sonified when […]
Alex Cerutti
Change The Game Change The Game is a creative exploration focused on being free, experimental, and self expressive — there are no limits. changethegame.studio
Mia Yao Meng
Hyperreal Gesstures This project is a reflection of the gestures we perform on a routine basis in order to interact (as the trigger and the data input) with networked devices such as smartphones and laptops. These gestures are abstracted/flattened in the design process and transformed into online behaviors. This habit-formation process only takes us a […]
Sungjae Lee
Wind and Wave Drawings is a series of motion drawings that intrinsically shows only one piece of thread; the video describes how the shape of the thread is changed by the wave of water and wind. By gathering these diversified shapes of the original thread, this project challenges the fundamental origin of the world that […]
Jennie Park
Three kinetic sculptures explore relationships between circularity/co-opting/recycling and linearity/polarization/binary-ness, and how personal agency or positionality intersects with these linked mechanics. (They’re NOT “voting machines;” they reflect the operation of many large systems, frameworks and conversations, e.g., the relationship between the DIY ethos and capitalism, between the political far left and far right, and among nested […]
Susana Pineda
The Mermaid is a collaborative music video and one of the 6 pieces of my thesis project “Inner Creatures.” “Inner Creatures” explores the development motivations, characteristics and environments of the different sub-personalities within the psyche. “The Mermaid” is the sub-personality that deals with the emergence of sexuality, sexual identity, femininity and the need for self-determination. […]


