Daniel Corral

composer

Piece Year: 2025

  • Colours

    Colours

    Watch the full video on Music for Your Inbox

    In the 20-minute video work Colours, Daniel Corral explores color through sound, language, and light. The film samples brief moments from popular songs that name a color, pairing each excerpt with the written word as it shifts hue onscreen. Through repetition, the work produces subtle visual and auditory hallucinations that draw attention to each color’s formal qualities: rhythm, tone, and the word itself. The result is a relationship to color that is both internal—the sensations shaped by individual perception—and shared as widely recognizable cultural references.

    Available from Music for Your Inbox from January 1, 2026 to February 28, 2026, paired with mail art from Kate Gorman!

  • Six of Swords

    Six of Swords

  • Colours: Green & Red

    Colours: Green & Red

    • Colours: Green & Red

      Written for and premiered by Splinter Reeds at UCSD’s Conrad Prebys Concert Hall on February 13, 2025.

    Written for Splinter Reeds and part of a larger project. The live ensemble plays along with fixed media. The audio for each piece is a collage compiled from different recordings of the same song—focusing on moments where the lyrics have colors in them. Colours’ visual use of language Is influenced by artists like Ed Ruscha, Glen Ligon, Barbara Kruger, and Jenny Holzer. The music embraces the concept of palimpsest on many levels. The audio collages play with memory and earworms in a minimalist theme and variations, akin to Steve Reich’s work involving pre-recorded audio (Different Trains, It’s Gonna Rain, etc.). The live musicians and singers layer meaning on top of this collaged audio minimalism, focusing the process-driven dispersion of meaning into a coherent dramatic arc. There is also a large influence of experimental film on Colours. In particular, Philip Greenaway’s 70s films Vertical Features Remake and Windows—which adhere to and humorously critique the tenets of structural film and conceptual art.