Live Ballast was an album and live performance piece, by collaborators Julia Barbosa Landois and Erik Sanden (Demitasse, Buttercup). We began the project using dream journals and family narratives of travel from Mexico and Finland. Weaving music, narrative storytelling, surreal imagery and video projections, we aimed to capture the sense of utter displacement that comes with a long journey into new and dangerous environs. “Live ballast” is the use of passengers’ bodies as stabilizing weight to keep a ship upright in challenging seas.

Live Ballast has been performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara and workshopped at the 2014 Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics Encuentro in Montreal. The album was released in 2021 by Bedlamb Records.

This project was made possible by the generosity of: Lila L. Sanden, Paula Cox, Adam Johnson, Paul Sanden, Bill Arning, Ivan Bojanic, Brian & Becky Taylor, Meaghan Solay, Allan Hietala, Hills Snyder, and many others.