Creating any work of art that addresses the reality of the Holocaust in a way that does it justice is not only difficult, but impossible. Having struggled with this fact and the truth that, nonetheless, something has to be created – presently – to prevent anything like the Holocaust from ever happening again, I began researching the subject. I found that all over the world – today – innocent people are misled into believing false teachings; they are brainwashed by evil, powerful leaders into hurting, enslaving, and killing others for utterly senseless reasons. Brainwash embodies the journey from the concept of deceptive, seductive perversion of the truth toward that of liberation and grace, guided by the hand of God who offers hope for eventual healing.

This piece is a real-time electronic piece in that the percussionist is in control of every electronic aspect (live) at the performance rather than being at the mercy of prepared electronic accompaniment. Each instrument is an everyday object brought into the musical world through affixing a piezo pickup (a small, flat microphone) to it and filtering the sound it collects through computer software (Pro Tools LE^TM 7). This is how, for example, I have transformed an old rusted mouse wheel into an ominous, frightening, percussive instrument. I have also included in the work two short stereo loops of speech heard in raw form and filtered through the software. Each speech loop is brought in slowly, speaker by speaker, by the percussionist. In this way, the entire piece can be performed differently each time by the percussionist who has control of its every aspect.