About
This website is a fluid portfolio of my work. I want it to show what I can do with music composition and production, audio engineering, and what it looks like when I hold a camera.
I'm always looking for work, or for things to do. If you find any of what I've made interesting and you wanna contact me, please go to the contact section and shoot me an email!
Audiovisual
Oubliette (June 2026)
This is piece is a community made composition reflecting on the affective leftovers of instruments sitting untouched, in some cases, for over 60 years. Over the course of three months I recorded various Seattle area musicians playing on instruments from the University of Washington Ethnomusicology Instrument Collection. I took these recordings and remixed them into a new musical piece borrowing from modern popular music aesthetics. This was done to provide a template for future student work based around revitalizing the instrument collection. This piece premiered at the 2026 UW Undergraduate Symposium and was written about by Laurel Demkovich.
Lovers - Yan Pol // acoustic ver. (April 2026)
I made this video as an effort to get better at promoting my music on social media, and having two versions of myself on screen at the same time is also something I've always wanted to do.
Digitization Loops (March 2026)
Typewriter AI (March 2025)
Piece of Paper in the Stone Stomach of Portage Bay (February 2023)
Weekend Diary (June 2022)
Music
enamorado in training (April 2026)
These songs started out as nonsense love songs, composed because I had never really a pure love song. Over the last year and change, about how long since I first wrote these, I learned what love means, specifically what an honest and lasting love can look like.
first year chinese love ballads (January 2026)
First of all 我爱罗大佑, but these particular songs aren't really inspired by him. I was listening to a lot of Dou Wei and made these songs inspired by the Chinese Dream Pop style. The lyrics are simple, in broken-chinese, but earnest.
Two Songs About the Same Night (November 2025)
These two songs are about my party years, in many ways. I was obsessed with the freedom and danger that going out gave me, especially when I found myself in afterparties with some great and artsy people. It was my way of meeting in my own terms. Eventually I realized that those party circles lead to more loneliness than I had previously thought, and so retreated from it.
Srepegan Slendro Nem (Winter 2025)
Playing classical compositions through synthesizers is a concept that has been explored extensively in the Western canon of classical music, famously by Wendy Carlos. Indonesian Gamelan has not received the same exploration. Though musicians and groups like David Edren, .gif, and Gamelan Elektronika have explored gamelan music in electronic settings, few have tried transplanting gamelan notation into MIDI and electronic timbres. Furthermore, not much has been done in combining gamelan with rhythms from jungle or reggaeton. In doing so gamelan is brought into a different aesthetic place, nearer to a western listener, and provides a different understanding of the music. If a gong is switched out for a sub-bass + kick would it be seen as foreign at all? By joining modern electronic aesthetics, specifically those created outside of the academy, and traditional gamelan, the question of what makes gamelan sound foreign to the western ears.
The Song of Felicca Lether (Winter 2025)
Ethnomusicological archives should question what should and should not be listened to. The goal of this project is to examine the morally dubious recordings of the past, more recent recordings made in response to those, and how I may interact with both. I will do this by listening to the non-musical aspects of old recordings made by Frances Densmore, programming various transcriptions, like those of Alice Fletcher, in MIDI and then placing the resulting audio within the soundscape of Densmore’s recordings. Influence is taken from Basinski’s Disintegration Loops and I am Sitting in a Room by Alvin Lucier as these are both sound art pieces that treat the space around music with great consideration. The goal is to look for ways to listen to these recordings not just for the preserved music but for the medium itself. This will serve as a good starting point for other projects related to musical archives and instrument collections. Large repatriation projects have been done in the past, but perhaps sound art in this fashion can produce another route for interacting with archives that have an uncomfortable past, but not uncomfortable enough so that prohibiting access is a better option.
Composer for Unplugged (September 2023)
I was contacted to compose the music for this short. It was a fun process of messaging with another Juan and making music for someone else rather than myself. It also had a great time recording Camilo, who's a great pal.
Dashavatara (November 2022)
I made this album with my friend Dhruv Khatwani. It features a lot of the more experimental works I made while working on Canciones de Casa and a lot of great trumpet, harmonium, and mridangam work by Dhruv. It tells the story of the 10 incarnations of Krishna, as told by Dhruv's mother, Radha Govinda, in her book, Lord Appears as a Fish and Other Incarnations.
Canciones de Casa / In a house (October 2022)
This album was written and produced from sometime in 2020 all the way to the summer of 2022. Making this album I explored the kind of music I like, try to make, and want to make. Through its creation its scope changed numerous, numerous times... from singles to an EP to an album and often I would go back and forth between these options. It is, looking back at it now, a reflection on maturing through the lockdown years and in Panama, both moments and spaces that by closing certain doors force you to open others.
Recordings
Steven Wang & Ethan (June 2026)
I first saw Steven when he was busking near my apartment. I liked how he sounded, especially with the double bass, and I thought he would be a good person to record for my portfolio. He kindly agreed and in a couple days he was in my apartment recording some tracks. This was a fun project to record, and we had the time to do multiple takes of the same songs. This meant I got some splicing practice, which I always love to have.
Tracklist:
1. Isn't She Lovely
2. Outta My Mind
3. Fly Me to the Moon
4. Just the Two of Us
Will and Friends (June 2026)
These tracks were recorded in the Ethnic Cultural Theatre. It was the first, to my knowledge, studio recording session held in the space. The total recording sessions took about two hours, including set-up and teardown and I am really happy with what we were able to achieve. The performers in this recording are Will, Saia, Parker, and Amina.
Tracklist:
1. Autumn Comes Around Each Year
2. West Virginia Emptied Out
3. Put Some Wood on the Fire My Dear
4. If You're Gonna Leave
5. Right Back To It
6. You and Me on the Rock
Leela Kathak Showcase (June 2026)
The following is a short segment of Leela Kathak's Annual Student Concert, held in the Ethnic Cultural Center. The first portion is from a vocal concert which opened the night, and the second is from the dance showcase. It was a very fun challenge to mix this group but the musicians and audience helped me out through soundcheck and run of show. The recording is straight from the board, and I feel pretty proud with how it sounds.
Tracklist:
1. Vocal Concert
2. Dance Showcase
Una Clase con Ramón Gutiérrez (11 de marzo del 2026)
Recorded with two Rode M5 in an XY configuration about 2m above and in front the performers.
This sessions looked to recreate some of the experience of having lessons with Ramón. You play a couple of sones, with care, and you come out of the little office with more than what you had when you came in. When recording and mixing the intention was more to have an earnest recording, than one that closely adheres to the perfection that is often sought after in studio recordings. Apart from having Ramón Gutiérrez sing and play the requinto and jarana you can also hear Juan Posada Abal playing the jarana, leona and Rayne Mescallado the requinto.
Tracklist:
1. Currpiti
2. Buscapies
3. Pájaro Cú
4. Chiles Verdes
5. Suite de Requinto pt. 1
5. Suite de Requinto pt. 2
In My Life by the Beatles as played by Zoë and Char (February 2026)
This was my first recording with my new (to me) microphones. Safe to say I had some good fun while making it, and I got to play with splicing when mixing the track later.
Zoë and Juan's recording session (March 2025)
Tracklist:
1. After Hours - Velvet Underground
2. Heroes - David Bowie
3. Why Do I Cry - Margo Guryan
4. Angel From Montgomery - John Prine
Contact
My email is juan@posada-abal.com
Feel free to contact me about work in any of the related fields above. I am always willing to talk shop. I'd like to find more recording work, and I am happy to do any mixing or the like.