From Spanish, 'gallo pinto' is a term popularly used in Nicaragua to refer to a fried/mixed dish of rice and beans—a staple of the Latin American diet. Literally, the phrase translates to spotted rooster. The mixed dish was given this name due to its resemblance of a local, spotted rooster species.

Gallo Pinto was written over the course of several months in the spring of 2022. Large sections were improvised at a time. Further in the process, single sections were performed in a loop and embellished for extended periods—allowing the composer to continue developing variations and transitions in a performance-led compositional approach.

Like many dishes around the world, Gallo Pinto makes use of available/remaining ingredients to reduce food waste among working class households. In this manner, the composer decided to incorporate the textures and (untransposed) sounds of his aural environment throughout the writing process—opting to embrace the reality of living and working in an inevitably non-silent space. For example, if a car horn sounded during a writing session, then it was added (with the same pitch and rhythm) at the time in the piece that it occurred. Gallo Pinto is a natural manifestation of the composer’s musical thoughts combined with the aural collage of his daily experience.