Seattle composer/violinist Julio Lopez presents four new small-scale pieces for mixed ensembles, as well as Snakemouth, an extended composition/improvisational form for solo violin and electronics. These pieces are built on a conception of music as a performative engagement with ontological structures of thought. Fueled by questions of identity, subjectivity, empathy, and togetherness, these pieces attempt to seek out radical conceptual spaces of “being” (and performing “being”) as well as ways of inhabiting them with beauty and meaning.