About
This website is a fluid porfolio 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.
Beyond it being a portfolio, which brings up some dry and sober images to my head, it should also operate as a blog. All the professional language would go on a LinkedIn profile, once I have the misfortune of making one.
I'm always looking for work, or for things to do. If you find any of what I've made intersting and you wanna contact me, please go to the contact section and shoot me an email!
Saldrá una versión español pronto. Le di prioridad al inglés -- pecado -- ya que vivo en E.E.U.U. y es la luz de alante la que alumbra. Si esperara a publicar esto hasta que la versión es español estuviera lista el sitio web nunca saldría.
Audiovisual
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
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.
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
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.
Esta sesión buscó recrear la experiencia de una lección privada con Ramón. Se tocan un par de sones, metódicamente, y se sale con algo más de lo se tenía al entrar. Al momento de grabar y mezclar se le dió más atención al ambiente relajado que a la perfección que se suela buscar de la grabación moderna y digital. Aparte de estar Ramón Gutiérrez tocando la jarana y requinto también se pueden escuchar a Juan Posada Abal y Rayne Mescallado tocando la jarana, leona, y requinto respectivamente.
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)
Recorded with two Rode M5 in an XY configuration about 1.5m above the performers.
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.
Contact
My email is juan.posadaabal@gmail.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.
I do have a phone, of course, but I am hesitant to put it up online for just anyone to access. My resume gives out enough information already.