Demian Rufus

As a composer/performer Mike Richard's scores are currently presented not as files or traditional paper scores, but as philosophical prose texts on screen, proposing to construct different experimental kinds of cinematic reading experiences for live music events and mental/social/environmental ecologies. Born in Southern California in 1967, and then living in Los Angeles area, Bay Area, Wash Dc, and now based in Portland, Oregon, as a musician, Mike has performed on piano, keyboard, synth, and is a vocal-artist. Mike studied composition at calarts in 1986-87 first with Rand Steiger and then from 2001-2005 with Michael Pisaro. His past live concerts at calarts are currently featured on his bandcamp page with chamber ensemble settings of spoken-sung texts by Deleuze and Spinoza. As an academik deeply committed to the academia lifestyle, [yet who ironically prefers not to currently work as a student or professor, but prefers artistic research and independent studies], Mike's focus is on the areas of speculative pragmatism, speculative empiricism, process philosophies, critical/mixed semiotics, and schizoanalytic, diagrammatic thought: Brian Massumi and Felix Guattari as the primary set of focus, and then following further with Deleuze, Whitehead, CS Peirce, Bergson, Simondon, William James, etc. expanding the speculative pragmatic series as further explained in Brian Massumi's writings, especially with the specific texts presented as a text on screen scores by Mike. As a songwriter [and poetry-of-theory-fiction writer], Mike also sometimes publishes himself as the AKA artist-name, i.e. conceptual persona, Demian Rufus, with his Demian Label & Distro!, and in his past dark-theory-synth band project, struggle at the snuggle factory. With collaborative projects as Demian Rufus, he produced song-cycle settings of two characters, Max Demian and Frau Eva, from Herman Hesse's _Demian_, and Nietzsche's prologue to _Thus Spoke Zarathustra_. The last performance Mike did as a struggle at the snuggle factory collaboration was at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, 2005. this is also when he started experimenting with projecting keynote/powerpoint slideshows of texts and images included with the music performances and alongside a commissioned video artist, the same year he graduated from calarts, where he also performed his compositions, settings texts such as Deleuze's _Le Bergsonisme_ for chamber ensemble also with texts on screen, and a choral setting of _Bartleby_ by Herman Melville. His current project as Demian Rufus is a musical setting of a text he completed writing in 2019, which is a strange, dark, homoerotik follow-up sequel to Herman Hesse's novel, _Demian_, called _Demian 2: a poetry-of-theory-fiction-of-2-Demians_, and after completion is intended to become forthcoming as a music and book mixed set from Demian Label & Distro!.