Biography

Nisi Jacobs is a songwriter/composer and video/sound editor specializing in immersive 3D. Feels Like Rita is the pop rock project of Nisi Jacobs. Feel Like Rita's film score credits include Eternal Beach and Abstract Eternalisms which premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in the Summer and Fall of 2021, respectively. Jacobs was granted the sole Creative Writing award upon graduation from Stuyvesant by Angela's Ashes author, Frank McCourt, earned a BFA from Cooper Union, instructed image and sound editing for NYU and Apple, plays the bass and electronics, composes film music and reggaehop trance grooves for other-worldly experiences and rituals, and is the inventor of Liquid Dance Yoga.
- IMDb mini biography by: Nisi Jacobs

Nisi Jacobs is a songwriter/composer and video/sound editor specializing in immersive 3D. Feels Like Rita is the pop rock project of Nisi Jacobs. Feel Like Rita's film score credits include Eternal Beach and Abstract Eternalisms which premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in the Summer and Fall of 2021, respectively. Jacobs was granted the sole Creative Writing award upon graduation from Stuyvesant by Angela's Ashes author, Frank McCourt, earned a BFA from Cooper Union, instructed image and sound editing for NYU and Apple, plays the bass and electronics, composes film music and trip hop trance grooves for other-worldly experiences and rituals, and is the inventor of Liquid Dance Yoga.
- IMDb mini biography by: Nisi Jacobs

Feels Like Rita is the electronic and film music project of Nisi Jacobs. Feels Like Rita's film score credits include 'Eternal Beach' and 'Abstract Eternalisms' which premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in 2021. Jacobs was granted the soul Creative Writing award upon graduation from Stuyvesant by 'Angela's Ashes' author, Frank McCourt, earned a BFA from Cooper Union, instructed film and sound editing for NYU and Apple, plays the bass and electronics, and composes 3D films, film sound and film music. Expected for release in Spring '22, the album 'Liquid Soul' along with several newly scored films in production.

Film Sound and Music:

I record outside in the streets. Lots of conversations with kids, bus sounds. Industrial mechanical, drones, hums, humanity, music from an ambulating boom box. Influencing my work at this time is the music of Olivier Messiaen, Eric Dolphy, Sergei Prokofiev, Eric Satie, Sade, Bryan Ferry, Pink Floyd, Nino Rota, David Shire, Les Paul, John Cage, The Beatles, and Luc Ferrari.

Bass plays both traditional harmonic support as well as melody in my work, thus enabling the instrument to communicate directly through song like a character might in a film. This front and center position of the bass allows me to use basslines for musical structure, emotional coloring, and narration. Transliteration is possible where the instrument tells part of a story, the way strings speak for Prokofiev's Peter, a flute speaks for the Bird, an oboe for the Duck, a clarinet for the Cat, a bassoon for the Grandfather, percussion for the Hunters, and horns for the Wolf. Musical Onomatopoeia (Greek onoma/name + poiein/to make; in which an instrument imitates or suggests the source of a sound it describes) renders the soundtrack on par with the visual world.

I like to work with loose fragments that are tethered to a framework in which a lot of improvisation occurs. How those loose fragments expand and contract in and out of the framework provides a shape to the composition. I grew up with jazz playing all the time. My mother loves Gershwin and Fats Waller and Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton. I was playing Fats Waller's piano pieces when I was a kid. My mother also taught me to collage. She used to bring back pieces of paper from Chinatown, beautiful colors. My father hung speakers everywhere and always sat in the center to hear great classical, Avantgarde, jazz and electronic composers in surround. He would hang about 8 or 12? huge old-school speakers everywhere he could find a place. So music was literally everywhere.

My experience of music is where the music of everyday life overlaps with composed music, where these combine and then differentiate. I like this ambiguity, in which music and soundtrack are congruent and united. I use my visual sense of color to collage from this palette of tonal possibilities. Recording as a kind of meditation, digital and analog synths, contact mics and experimental electronic instruments, and my bass are my tools.

I wear a hat I made to record my foley soundscape ambisonic materials. They should make a hat with recording capsules placed all around the brim. I often compose in 3D utilizing ambisonic plugins and amazing Bluetooth technology which allows me to control the placement of sounds by walking around with my phone. 3D space as a format to compose in adds further dimensionality to the already multi-dimensional role music/sound play.

NYC is so full of great sound track. I was thinking about the jazz for a film I'm working on and walking in the streets of Soho, I happened on an artist painting on a table he set up for himself next to a subway entrance. He was playing ACID by Ray Barretto and it was mixing with the key of Soho. I recorded it with trucks passing and people chattering. New York City's streets effortlessly serve up whatever is needed for a soundtrack. A virtual playground of voices, voice-over art... collage cutup like Soho in the 1970s/2020s. I like the tension of a linear connective thread that can be vehemently veered from as desired. Things happen as a practice, a game to freely play.
- IMDb mini biography by: Nisi Jacobs