Death in the Urban Jungle finds Lance Austin Olsen exploring the mutable contours of city life through an assemblage of acoustic and electronic sources. Amplified metals, shruti box and processed tapes interact with mezzo-soprano vocalizations and sampled manipulations, sketching a sonic environment alive with suggestion and decay. Olsen’s composition unfolds with patience—passages of near-silence yield to eruptions of texture and oblique melody, each sound both fragile and assertive. The work’s narrative is one of shifting densities: urban noise dissolves into intimate fragments, human presence glimmers through processed artifacts, and all is in tension with the surrounding emptiness. Listeners are invited to inhabit the piece as they would an enigmatic environment, with echoes, voices and objects merging in a slow meditation on process, memory and transformation within the city’s reverberating structures.
