Akira Yamaoka (b. 1968) is a Japanese composer and sound designer born in Niigata, Japan. He’s widely considered among the greatest living video game composers, scoring and designing for the medium since 1991. He joined Konami in 1993, where his early composition credits included flagship franchises like Sparkster and acclaimed installments like Hideo Kojima’s Snatcher, which he adapted the score for on its 1994 ports. Six years later, he’d be tapped as the sole composer and sound designer for the company’s new survival horror franchise, Silent Hill. His work for the series is among the greatest achievements in experimental video game scoring. Noise, radio static, and industrial thrashes function as essential threads within the series’ gameplay mechanics and narrative, and are intertwined with delicate ambient, sublime downtempo, and turn-of-the-millenium alt rock compositions. These divergent experimentations are paramount pieces of an unprecedented picture—some of the most harrowing, existential experiences in any medium.

Yamaoka is now the sound director at video game auteur Goichi Suda’s Grasshopper Manufacture, known for games like Killer7 (2005) and No More Heroes (2007)—Yamaoka has contributed phenomenal tracks to the latter. He is still the central composer for the Silent Hill series, and has taken up film scoring, his most recent score being this year’s Return to Silent Hill (2026). Billie Bugara talked with Yamaoka virtually on June 21st, 2026 to discuss music as game design, scoring for existentialism, and his relationship to film as a distinguished medium.

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Billie Bugara: One of the many compositional aspects of the Silent Hill games that sets them apart from most video game scores is something I felt you articulated so well, that the sounds feel less like “music” and more like “game design.” You studied early CG graphics before scoring video games, and I wonder if that experience played a role in informing this approach.

Akira Yamaoka: Yes, I think it had a significant influence. When I was studying computer graphics, I wasn’t thinking about melody or harmony. I was thinking about space, texture, perspective, lighting, and how people perceive an environment. That way of thinking naturally stayed with me when I began creating music. To me, sound was never something placed on top of a game. It was one of the elements that constructed the world itself. Just as lighting, architecture, and environmental art shape the feeling of a space, I believed sound could shape that space as well. Because of that, I was never particularly interested in treating music as simple background music. I wanted music to exist as part of the environment itself—something that helps players feel and experience the world around them. In that sense, I think it’s accurate to say that my approach was closer to game design than traditional music composition. Rather than simply writing songs, I may have been creating spaces.

The example I always think of is in the first Silent Hill game, where its signature foggy ambiance was a product of hardware restrictions on the PlayStation 1. I’m always astounded by how jarring the pairing of radio static, industrial noises, and dense fog is.

What’s interesting is that none of those elements were originally created with the intention of becoming iconic. The fog began as a technical solution. The radio static was a gameplay mechanic designed to warn the player. The industrial sounds came from my desire to express fear in a way that traditional music couldn’t. But looking back, I think they worked together because they were all communicating the same idea. They were all creating uncertainty. The fog prevented players from seeing clearly. The radio suggested that something was nearby, but never told you exactly what it was. The industrial sounds created tension and discomfort without providing any clear explanation. In a way, all of these elements were removing information rather than adding it.

I’ve always believed that fear comes not from what we understand, but from what we don’t understand. Human beings naturally try to fill in missing information with their imagination, and often what we imagine is more frightening than anything we could be shown directly. I think the fog, the radio static, and the sound design all worked together because they encouraged the player’s imagination to become part of the experience. Looking back, the hardware limitations of the PlayStation probably pushed us toward a more psychological form of horror. What began as a technical restriction ultimately became part of Silent Hill’s artistic identity.

I’d love to know more about your personal connection with the games’ scores. You’ve said that Silent Hill is like a “mirror” that reflects you. I’m wondering how this viewpoint relates to the scores’ instrumental palette—the industrial percussion, the sparse synths and strings, the grating static… all of your experimentation.

I’ve always felt that human beings are not defined by completeness, but by their imperfections and contradictions. Because of that, music has never been about arranging beautiful sounds for me. It has been closer to observing the cracks within ourselves. Perhaps that is why I was drawn to industrial noise, static, and distortion. An old sheet of paper stained by time often tells a richer story than a perfectly blank one. A slightly clouded mirror can sometimes reveal more than a flawless reflection.

Noise felt similar to me. It was a wound in the sound. A scar left by memory, a trace of time itself. As we move through life, the memories that stay with us are rarely the clearest ones. They are more like landscapes hidden in fog—fragmented, incomplete, and partially lost.

When I was creating the music for Silent Hill, I think I was trying to give sound to those missing pieces. The synthesizers and strings were never there simply to make a statement. They were more like distant outlines disappearing into the mist. Rather than constructing music, it often felt as though I was excavating the ruins of forgotten memories. Silence was equally important. Many people think music is made of sound, but I have always believed that silence is the most eloquent sound of all. Late at night, there are moments when the hum of a refrigerator suddenly stops, and only then do you realize that silence had been there all along.

I love that feeling. What is absent gives meaning to what remains. Just as light is defined by shadow, sound is defined by silence. That idea has always been central to my work. So when I say that Silent Hill is a mirror, I do not mean a mirror that reflects a face. It is more like the reflection of the moon on the surface of a lake. It seems close enough to touch, yet it remains forever out of reach. You know it is real, and somehow you know it belongs to you, but you can never fully grasp it. While creating that music, I felt as though I was staring into that water. The industrial sounds, the static, the dissonance, the noise—those were the ripples spreading across its surface. And perhaps the reason people connected with the music is that they were not only seeing my reflection in those ripples. They were seeing their own. In that sense, Silent Hill became both a personal confession and a mirror through which listeners could confront parts of themselves they could not easily put into words.

There’s obviously a lot going on underneath the overarching narrative of Silent Hill as a series, but especially in the first four games, these are stories about normal, regular people having to deal with these hellish, terrifying circumstances and consequences. It’s crazy how much dread I feel when I play these games, because I’m an “everyman” just like Heather or Harry. I feel like your scoring really emphasized those feelings. Was this type of existential fear a conscious part of your approach?

Yes, very much so. In fact, I was never particularly interested in monsters themselves. What interested me was what the monsters represented. To me, the most frightening thing has never been an external threat. It is the moment when something familiar suddenly becomes unfamiliar. When the world you trust no longer behaves the way you expect. When your memories, your identity, or your understanding of reality begin to feel unstable. I think that kind of fear is much deeper than simple shock or surprise. Anyone can imagine being attacked by a monster. But it is much harder to accept the possibility that your own mind, your own memories, or even your own sense of self might betray you. That is why the protagonists of the early Silent Hill games are ordinary people. They are not heroes. They are not chosen individuals. They are people who could easily be any of us. I think existential fear becomes much stronger when the audience can imagine themselves in that position. The music was designed to support that feeling. Rather than saying, “There is danger over there,” I often wanted the music to suggest something more unsettling, “What if the danger is already inside you?” or “What if the world is only revealing something that was always there?”. That is why many Silent Hill pieces avoid clear emotional resolution. The music often feels suspended between emotions. Neither safe nor dangerous. Neither sad nor frightening. Existing somewhere in between. Because that uncertainty mirrors the experience of the characters themselves. To me, the true horror of Silent Hill was never the creatures. It was the realization that certainty itself can disappear. And once that happens, even the most ordinary person can suddenly find themselves standing at the edge of an abyss.

Are you aware of how frequently your Silent Hill work is sampled in hip-hop and electronic music? I feel like it’s a testament to how special your work is… that others find incorporating your sounds into their own work to be so valuable.

Yes, I’m aware of it, and honestly, it makes me very happy. When I created those sounds, I never imagined they would find a second life in genres like hip-hop or electronic music. I think one of the most rewarding things for any artist is seeing their work inspire new creativity in others. Once music is released into the world, it no longer belongs entirely to the composer. People reinterpret it, transform it, and make it part of their own stories. To me, that’s not just a compliment. It’s one of the greatest things that can happen to a piece of music.

You might laugh, but I just have to ask how involved you were with the “dog ending” in Silent Hill 2 and if you composed the silly credits song.

(laughs). Yes, I did compose it. One thing people sometimes forget is that even during the development of very dark games, the development team spends years working together. There are moments of tension, of course, but there are also many moments of humor. The dog ending came from that spirit. Silent Hill explores very serious themes, but I don’t think darkness has much meaning unless there is occasionally something that breaks it. In a strange way, the dog ending almost works because it completely destroys the tone of everything that came before it. As for the music, I approached it with the same sincerity as any other track—the joke becomes funnier when it’s treated seriously. I never imagined people would still be talking about it all these years later, but I’m glad they are.

You’ve said that video game scoring felt like a “natural calling,” which came from your shared passion for both music and gaming as mediums. I’m wondering where film fits into all this. Do you feel a similar passion with film?

Absolutely. In fact, before I thought seriously about music as a profession, I was already fascinated by cinema. What attracted me wasn’t only storytelling, but the way film combines multiple forms of expression—image, sound, performance, editing, rhythm, silence—into a single experience. I’ve always been interested in how different artistic elements interact with one another, and film is perhaps one of the purest examples of that. The reason video games felt like a natural calling was that they introduced one more dimension: participation. The audience was no longer simply observing the work—they became part of it. That idea fascinated me.

But I don’t see film and games as opposing worlds. To me, they are different ways of exploring the same question: How can we make someone feel something? A game asks that question through interaction. A film asks it through observation. Music exists comfortably in both. When I compose for a game, I think about how the player moves through an experience. When I compose for film, I think about how emotions move through time. The tools may be different, but the goal is very similar. What excites me most is not the medium itself, but the possibility of creating an emotional space that someone can enter. Whether that space exists inside a game, a film, or even a piece of music by itself is ultimately less important. The desire to create that space is the same.

Do you feel Silent Hill’s ambient character differs in the context of gameplay versus watching it on film?

I think the biggest difference is that film music follows the camera, while game music follows the player. In a film, the audience experiences a carefully controlled journey. The timing, pacing, and emotional arc are already determined, so music can act almost like a narrator, guiding the viewer through the story. In a game… the player controls the experience. They may stay in one location for seconds or for hours. Because of that, the music often needs to function more like part of the environment than a traditional score.

Do you approach composing for these contexts differently?

I’ve often thought of film music as weather and game music as architecture. Weather passes through a scene. Architecture creates the space itself. When I was working on Silent Hill, I wasn’t simply trying to accompany the world—I was trying to make the sound feel like part of the world. The ambient textures, drones, and static weren’t background elements; they were part of the town’s psychological landscape. So while the emotional goals may be similar, my approach is different. For film, I tend to think about storytelling. For games, I tend to think about space, atmosphere, and how a player inhabits them.

Is there maybe some difference between scoring “playable” fear versus fear that you merely watch?

I think the essential difference is responsibility. In a film, the audience may feel fear, but they are ultimately safe. They are witnesses to someone else’s experience. In a game, the player is responsible for what happens next. They must decide where to go, whether to open the door, whether to move forward or turn back. That sense of responsibility transforms fear into something much more personal. Because of that, I rarely think of game music as something that creates fear directly. Instead, I try to create uncertainty. Fear often comes from the imagination filling in what is unknown. If the music tells the player exactly what to feel, it can actually reduce the tension. So in games, I often leave space for the player’s own mind to become part of the experience. In film, music can sometimes lead the audience toward a specific emotional reaction. In games, I think it’s often more effective to create a psychological environment and allow the player to discover their own fear inside it. That’s why many of the most unsettling moments in Silent Hill are not necessarily the loudest or most dramatic ones; they are often the moments when nothing seems to happen. The player begins listening more closely, questioning what they hear, and imagining what might be waiting beyond the darkness. In that sense, playable fear is not something the music delivers to the player. It’s something the player creates together with the music.

The Silent Hill scores are obviously very tethered to the gameplay experience, and really, video games as a specific medium. So I’m interested in knowing if there were any specific film scores that influenced the Silent Hill games, specifically?

Yes, absolutely. Although Silent Hill was created for a video game, I never thought of inspiration as something that had to stay within the boundaries of a single medium. I was influenced by many things—films, visual art, literature, industrial music, ambient music, even architecture. When it comes to film scores specifically, composers like Angelo Badalamenti and Ennio Morricone had a profound impact on me. What fascinated me wasn’t necessarily their melodies, but their understanding of atmosphere and psychological space. Badalamenti, especially, showed me that music could feel like a dream, a memory, or an emotional state rather than simply accompaniment. I was also deeply influenced by filmmakers such as David Lynch and Andrei Tarkovsky. Their work taught me that ambiguity can often be more powerful than explanation. Many of the ideas that found their way into Silent Hill came from that realization. The goal was never to tell the player exactly what to feel. It was to create a space where their own subconscious could participate.

Those influences absolutely carried over into my film work. In fact, I think the philosophy behind my approach has remained remarkably consistent regardless of the medium. Whether I am composing for a game or a film, I am rarely interested in telling the audience what is happening on screen. I am more interested in revealing what cannot be seen. The hidden emotion beneath a conversation. The memory that a character cannot escape. The feeling that exists between two thoughts. Those are things that cinema and games both allow music to explore. The technical methods may differ, but the artistic goal is often the same. I still find myself pursuing the same thing I was searching for when I first worked on Silent Hill. Not music that explains a world, but music that makes a world feel haunted by something just beyond our understanding.

I love how you modeled your approach to video game scoring after the rise of new wave music, breaking through the conventions of the medium and ushering in something brand new. How does your approach to film scoring compare?

I think the situation is a little different with film because cinema has a much longer history than video games. When I entered the game industry, it still felt like a relatively young medium. Many of the conventions had not yet been firmly established, which created opportunities to experiment and challenge expectations. Film, on the other hand, has more than a century of artistic history behind it. There are already many great traditions and extraordinary composers who have shaped the language of film music. Because of that, I never approached film with the idea of trying to revolutionize it. What interests me is finding a voice within it. In some ways, the influence of new wave is still there—not necessarily in the sound itself, but in the mindset. What inspired me about new wave was not simply a musical style. It was the willingness to question assumptions and to ask whether things could be done differently. I try to carry that attitude into every medium I work in. When I compose for film, I often ask myself: “Does this scene really need music?” “Does the audience need to be told how to feel?” “Could silence communicate more than a melody?”

Sometimes innovation is not about adding something new. Sometimes it is about removing something that people expect to be there. The older I become, the more interested I am in restraint in creating space, in allowing the audience to meet the work halfway. So while my goal in games may have been to expand the vocabulary of the medium, my goal in film is often to listen more carefully to what the film itself is asking for. In both cases, however, the motivation is similar. I am not interested in following conventions simply because they exist. I am interested in discovering what feels emotionally honest. If that leads somewhere unexpected, then perhaps something new can emerge naturally.

I think one of the clearest throughlines from your approach to video game scoring and the traditions of film scoring is the shared idea of “symbolizing” sounds in the context of the greater narrative at play. But I really think the medium plays a significant role in how these symbols might appear through sound. Have you noticed a difference in composing symbolic sounds for games versus film?

I think there is a very important difference. In film, a symbol is often presented to the audience. In games, a symbol is often discovered by the player. That may sound subtle, but I think it changes everything. A filmmaker can carefully control when an image appears, when a musical theme returns, and how those elements relate to one another. Because of that, symbols in film can be more deliberate and direct. In games, however, the player may encounter things in a different order, spend more time in one area than another, or even miss certain details entirely. As a result, symbolic sounds often need to be more flexible and more subconscious.

I’ve always been interested in symbols that are felt before they are understood. A particular texture, a distant metallic sound, a radio noise, or even a specific silence can begin to acquire meaning without the player realizing it consciously. Over time, those sounds become associated with certain emotions, memories, or psychological states. The player creates part of that meaning themselves. That process fascinates me.

In a way, film symbolism can be compared to poetry. Game symbolism is often closer to archaeology. The meaning is there, but the audience uncovers it piece by piece through exploration. That’s one reason I was attracted to games from the beginning. The player is not simply receiving symbols—they are participating in their creation. So when I compose for games, I often try not to make symbolic sounds too explicit. I prefer when a sound lingers in the player’s mind and only reveals its meaning much later. Those are often the most powerful symbols because they feel as though they belong to the player rather than to the composer.

What scores, video games, or films have impressed you recently?

Recently, I would probably say Reanimal (2026). That game genuinely surprised me. It’s rare these days that I play something and find myself thinking, “How on earth did they make this?” (laughter). What impressed me wasn’t just the visuals or the atmosphere, but the overall cohesion of the experience. Everything seems to work together toward a very specific emotional tone. As someone who has spent many years making games, I’m always interested in the invisible decisions behind a work—the countless choices that shape the final experience. Reanimal made me curious about that process again. It’s the kind of project that reminds you there are still new possibilities in this medium, and that’s always exciting.

Yamaoka’s score for Return to Silent Hill (2026) is out now on vinyl via Laced Records.

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Grupo Um is a legendary Brazilian avant-garde jazz group started in 1975 by brothers Lelo Nazário and Zé Eduardo Nazário. The Nazário brothers’ unique music was a result of Lelo’s interest in musique concrète—an extreme rarity at the time in Brazil—combined with Zé Eduardo’s jazz chops, exemplified by his stint in Hermeto Pascoal’s band. Grupo Um released three albums during their initial run—Marcha Sobre a Cidade (1979), Reflexões Sobre a Crise do Desejo (1981), and A Flor de Plástico Incinerada (1982)—the latter of which was released on the Lira Paulistana record label. However, they also had two recording sessions in 1975 and 1977 that were left unreleased for decades, and those recordings have now been unearthed via two archival releases: Starting Point (2023) and Nineteen Seventy Seven (2026), both issued by Far Out Recordings. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Lelo and Zé Eduardo on January 18th, 2026 to discuss their upbringing, their collective and solo efforts, and the Vanguarda Paulistana movement. Special thanks to Henrique Quadros for interpreting and translating.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: Both of you were born in the 1950s in Brazil. What are the earliest memories you have of music in your life, moments when you realized the beauty of music and that it was something to devote your life to?

Zé Eduardo Nazário: I’ll start because I was born first (laughter). I was born in 1952 in São Paulo, Brazil. My father was an important journalist at Diário de São Paulo, one of the most important newspapers at the time. It was founded by Assis Chateaubriand, who was the Brazilian ambassador in London from 1957 to 1960, and he brought television to Brazil in the mid-1950s [Editor’s Note: Chateaubriand founded Tupi TV, which was the first television network in Brazil]. My mother was a music lover and she listened to the radio all the time. When I was 3 years old, I’d be in the kitchen listening to these singers and orchestras… I found it very impressive. I started to listen to some records as well, like classical music.

When I was 9 years old, I started to learn piano with a private teacher, an old woman. I used to go to Mococa, my mother’s hometown, where I had two cousins who were older than me. They had a fabulous discotheque where they played the best of bossa nova, samba-jazz, and American jazz. At about 10 years old, I was listening to Max Roach, Roy Haynes, Buddy Rich, Philly Joe Jones, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins… that’s what made me fall in love with the drum set: the things that those musicians were doing with phrasing, harmony, everything.

I started to ask for a drum set. It took me some time, but when I was 12, I got my first one. As I had been studying piano beforehand, it was extremely easy for me to pick up the drums—I was playing in no time. My cousins were studying in São Paulo and one of them was also a percussionist, so he showed me some things. Edison Machado, one of my idols and one of the inventors of samba-jazz on drums, as well as Dom Um Romão, Hélcio Milito, and Milton Banana… my cousin showed me what those guys were doing and I quickly embraced it. When I was 13, I met some guys who were more or less the same age as me and we formed a trio that we called Xangô Três.

We started playing at parties, in clubs, and we had some jam sessions. We went to a college concert, though we weren’t supposed to be there. A lot of people wanted to play there. This was in 1965, when bossa nova was still the main thing going on, and people were packing houses every single time. I had my drum sticks under my arm and I spoke to the nun responsible for the event—this was a Catholic school, so the nuns took care of everything—and I said, “Sister, we came to play the show!” I opened my box to show her my drum sticks and she said, “Go to this place and you’ll arrive at the venue,” so we went. When we got there, another girl asked me, “Who are you?” I said, “We are Xangô Três.” She looked at the artist list and said, “But you’re not here, who called you?” I said, “My mother told me on the phone that this guy told us to come here to play.” The girl didn’t know what to say (laughter).

Musicians started to come out, and this was a festival with several important groups like Zimbo Trio and Bossa Jazz Trio, and we knew some of these guys from the spaces we played. The venue got full and the show was about to start, but one of the members wasn’t there. The girl looked at us and said, “You start the show.” I couldn’t believe it. We went on stage and played three songs and it was a huge success. People were like (imitates a crowd cheering and clapping) and there was a guy—a famous piano player and composer—who was watching. After the show he came up to us and enthusiastically said, “You have to come on my radio program.” His name was Mário Albanese, the inventor of the jequibau, which is a 5/4 kind of bossa nova. We went to the radio show and did well, and he showed the jequibau to us.

Several weeks later, we came back and I instinctively played a beat with my bass drum and hi-hat which had never been done on record until that time. Drummers only played the hi-hat and the click on the snare like (imitates a type of rhythm) and I instinctively did (imitates a different type of rhythm) where I transformed the 5/4 into 10/4, you know? When we returned to the Mário Albanese show, we showed him that. He had a partner, the maestro Cyro Pereira, who was also a composer. He wrote down my beat, and that became the official jequibau beat that was used for anyone who wanted to learn. And then Mário Albanese started calling me to play with him on major TV shows and at universities. I was his drummer for everything he did because most of the professional drummers at the time—who were 20 years older than me—had trouble playing that 5/4 with the hi-hat on the 2 while being free to play the rest of the kit. So that was how my professional life began.

How old were you?

Zé Eduardo Nazário: 13 years old.

Wow, incredible.

Zé Eduardo Nazário: That was the beginning of everything for me. Now Lelo can tell his history.

Lelo Nazário: For me it was simpler, in the sense that I started learning the piano at 4 years old, and I didn’t really dedicate myself to starting a professional career from a young age. One day, when I was only 5 years old, a friend of ours gave me the record Musique Concrète N° 1 (1959), which featured the works of Michel Philippot, Luc Ferrari, and Pierre Schaeffer. I really enjoyed this mixture of all kinds of sounds, this construction of brand new sounds that could be modified and become other things. So I began my musical study by studying classical music and attempting to achieve sounds through small sound experiments.

When Zé started playing the drums, he already knew what he wanted to be—he really wanted to be a drummer, a musician. But when I started playing the piano, my intentions were solely to study music, and only later on when we started working together did I decide on making music a career. When I started studying, I was mainly interested in contemporary erudite music, which treated music very differently—it used sounds instead of tones as a form of personal expression. Musique concrète started out like that, and then there was Stockhausen, who began doing experiments with electronic instrumentation. I was really drawn to this, to such an extent that when I started my professional life later on, I tried doing this sort of sound work in the experiments we did. Even when we played as a duo at home, we’d do sound experiments, modifying sounds—Zé would modify percussion instruments. We’d play around with the intention of creating completely different sounds.

I imagine most people in your life weren’t familiar with musique concrète or electroacoustic music. I know in Brazil there weren’t people releasing electroacoustic music until later in the 1970s, like Jorge Antunes. Were there other people around you listening to this? How were you studying this music?

Lelo Nazário: When I was given that Pierre Schaeffer record, barely no one talked about this type of music with the exception of professors at universities who had studied in Europe. So when I got a hold of it, I was amazed by the work, and it directed me towards a certain type of research. But really, in Brazil, it was very unknown outside of these small pockets like Jorge Antunes, and in Bahia there was [Walter] Smetak who experimented with building instruments for contemporary music.

Who did you get the record from?

Lelo Nazário: Just a family friend.

That’s so random! (laughter).

Lelo Nazário: Not a musician, either, just an intellectual who was friends with people at home.

When did you first meet the other members of the band? Do you remember your first impressions of them?

Zé Eduardo Nazário: I used to call people over to my home. We had the piano, my drum set, and the bass because of my first trio. Sometimes we had jam sessions at home. Since I was the older brother, I was able to go to the streets. This was because my mother had to take care of my three younger brothers. Lelo was born in 1956 and the other two were born in 1958 and 1960, so there was a similar age gap between each of them. I was going outside to see concerts, and São Paulo had many good musicians in the early 1960s. Before the dictatorship, which started in 1964 but took some time before it got strict in terms of going out—between 1967 and 1970 were the worst years—I was able to take a cab downtown to visit my father at the newspaper office and go to record stores. I started playing with a great Brazilian piano player, Tenório Jr., he’s the guy who recorded the Edison Machado é Samba Novo (1964) record, which was one of the top records of that time. He also has his own solo record. He was murdered in Argentina in 1976 when he was playing with Toquinho and Vinicius de Moraes—it’s a famous case.

So I started calling musicians over to our home, and Lelo was there watching [people like] Mário Albanese and Tenório Jr. play the piano. It’s a different kind of approach—it’s jazz harmony, you know? And it’s all kinds of jazz—samba-jazz, everything. I gave Lelo a harmony book that a friend had given to me. In a few days, Lelo was composing very interesting things for piano. His mathematical mind is something incredible: he was studying physics at university, and he had an argument with the program director because they weren’t teaching him the necessary knowledge for what he wanted to do, like maybe going to NASA as a physicist. So that was the beginning of us playing together. Some of these songs are on Starting Point (1975/2023), which was released by Far Out Recordings. Did you listen to that record?

Yes, I have.

Zé Eduardo Nazário: Some of that was composed in a few days. I was like, “Wow! This guy’s a genius! Let’s play together!” (laughter). And so we started playing. I have a lot of percussion instruments, and I had a percussion group with Guilherme Franco. He was a percussionist and, in 1972, he went to the United States where he played and recorded with all the major jazz musicians, like McCoy Tyner, Woody Shaw, Archie Shepp…

Lelo Nazário: He also played with Keith Jarrett in his group.

Zé Eduardo Nazário: Yeah, he was very famous. Airto Moreira was also very famous because he played with Miles during Bitches Brew (1969).

Zé Eduardo Nazário: Hermeto Pascoal was a great percussion player and made many records, and we had a percussion group in São Paulo. It was the first percussion group that had a mixture of written tunes from composers and improvisations, and these had three drums, berimbau, and every Brazilian percussion instrument. So me and Lelo started playing and spent hours playing at my parents’ home. Brazil had become really difficult for a young musician like myself to have a musical career. There came an opportunity to work in the United States; I was invited to Minneapolis, and they got me a work visa in 1973.

I was about to go, but the telephone rang and it was Nenê, a great Brazilian drummer who was playing with Hermeto Pascoal at the time. Hermeto had recorded his first record in Brazil, A Música Livre de Hermeto Pascoal (1973), in 1972, and Nenê said, “Zé, Hermeto needs a drummer and percussionist because Annunciação,” who was his percussionist and drummer, “became sick and went to Salvador, Bahia to stay with his family. Hermeto needs a drummer to perform at a gig in Londrina, Paraná.” I played the gig, and the following week when I went to Hermeto’s home to get my fee, he invited me to be part of his group. So I gave up travelling to the United States because I was going there to play bossa nova, and Hermeto was the one and only musician who could give me a chance to create, because he was a creator, you know? So I started playing with him in 1973.

Lelo Nazário: Who were you going to play with in Minneapolis?

Zé Eduardo Nazário: I was going to play with Manfredo Fest and another guy whose name escapes me right now. Brazilian musicians needed Brazilian drummers, because at that time it was a specialist thing. American drummers still didn’t play samba well—it’s not like today, where American drummers play samba well and Brazilian drummers play jazz well too. With Hermeto, we started to play for several hours a day, every day. I did that for four years. Hermeto would get invited to make arrangements for singers or for commercial jingles, and every time, he would ask me to play for these recordings. It was a fantastic thing that happened in my life.

I started inviting Lelo to come to the Hermeto rehearsals. At 9 o’clock, we were at Hermeto’s house, we’d have some breakfast, and we’d go to the room outside the house to start playing. Sometimes, Hermeto would appear with a soprano saxophone and play with us. That was before the official rehearsals would start with the other musicians in the band. But one day, Nenê had left the group to play with Elis Regina, and Lelo was invited to join the group. We started a trio with bassist Zeca Assumpção. That was the trio that recorded Starting Point. Hermeto would travel abroad sometimes because he’d get invited to play at a festival in Germany, or Airto would call him to record Slaves Mass (1977) in the United States. Because of this, there were days when the trio would get together and play a lot. We started to develop our compositions this way, and that’s how Grupo Um started.

This is a question for both of you. What do you feel you learned from your time playing with Hermeto? What was he able to teach you, and maybe not just directly but also from being in his presence?

Zé Eduardo Nazário: Well, he had some amazing compositions that needed a special kind of drumming. On YouTube, you can listen to several rehearsals—hours of them—that were recorded by this guy. It’s a recent upload. I listen to that and [think], “Wow, man…” they play again, again, and again… it’s a search for perfection. So there was learning in everything—it just came with playing. Before that, I was studying a lot; I spent hours every day at my parents’ house playing with Lelo and alone, and I was picking up new instruments—things I’d find on the street that had a really good sound—and I’d put it on my barraca de percussão [percussion tent], which was a mountain of things that I put around the drums. There were a lot of instruments. Hermeto was fundamental to my career. In my point of view, he was the most important musician to play with at that time in the world.

Lelo Nazário: What I liked most about Hermeto’s compositions was his harmony design. Even though he learned everything about jazz and bossa nova when he came to São Paulo—he played that really well—he developed a way of harmonizing that was completely different from the entire jazz school. He no longer thought about degrees, and of course he knew them from playing jazz and bossa nova, but he thought of each chord independent of degrees. He could construct a piece with a harmony that starts, let’s say, at a C7, then he changes to F#, then it goes to an A, independent of any tonal relationship. And then he creates a melody on top of these large harmonic shifts. Sometimes we played songs that had eight chords in a bar—eight completely different chords. And these weren’t chords that were just one degree above one another, or dominant to tonic… no, he’d simply change everything, he’d make four completely different chords, and he’d construct a melody on top of these very rapid harmonic shifts.

So he invented a highly complex harmonic system, something that was very particular to him. That’s something that impressed me a lot when I started playing with him, and it was very nice to learn how it was made. I saw that he deviated completely from the harmonic scheme of traditional jazz and even the American avant-garde jazz that was being played back then. It was a completely unique way of creating harmony.

With the first recordings that you guys made in 1975 that are in the Starting Point album, did you have a specific vision for what you wanted your music to sound like? You were familiar with working with Hermeto, with jazz and musique concrète, did you specifically set out to record music that would be new or groundbreaking in this way?

Zé Eduardo Nazário: We just recorded what we were already playing together. Whenever we had the opportunity to play as a trio, we developed these compositions that we had. So if you look at the record, you’ll see that for the berimbau solo, I was studying a lot of berimbau. And it wasn’t only the folklore aspects of berimbau, but I was going even further by improvising and creating different phrases and rhythms. Zeca spent some time at Berklee in Boston—he studied a course there—and he had a very wonderful technique and sound. And Lelo had his own compositions. This was the thing: when we got together as a trio, we played the music that we had in the moment. That was enough to make a some music, but it wasn’t even 30 minutes total. And that’s what we were capable of doing in a studio near my house. I used to record a lot in this studio called Vice Versa. I was a friend of the owner, the maestro Rogério Duprat, who was responsible for the Tropicália movement with Gilberto Gil. He was his arranger, as well as the arranger for other Tropicália artists.

I met my first wife in ’74 and I moved to Pinheiros in a place that was like a basement, where I could barely sit down on my drums because the roof was touching my head. I was talking to Rogério Duprat, who was building his big studio—there were two in the building, a small one and a bigger one—and he said, “Bring your drum set here. We still have some time before the studio is done so you can study.” And I brought my drums to the studio, and when the studio was ready, we were invited to test the sound. Me, Zeca, and Lelo went to the studio to do just that, so Starting Point was really a test of this studio. Fortunately, Lelo kept the tape and preserved it in good condition, and then digitized it and everything. That’s why we have the Starting Point record, the Hermeto Pascoal & Grupo Vice Versa record, and now Nineteen Seventy Seven—it was because he preserved those tapes and kept the music alive.

Lelo Nazário: We were already in Hermeto’s group, but we had this intention of creating our own, which would later on become Grupo Um, but we were only a trio. It was this cozinha [“kitchen,” a nickname given to this trio of musicians] that played with Hermeto: me, Zé, and Zeca. We decided to play things that I had composed alongside Zé’s material. We rehearsed this a lot and when the opportunity came to record at Vice Versa, we felt we had already rehearsed enough. There was a nice grand piano in the studio and it was properly tuned, so I ended up making a prepared piano piece for the album, which was more common in contemporary classical music but not so common in jazz. I just held on to these tapes for all these years. And as we kept producing other records, they ended up getting left behind. We’d go on to record other music, we’d try to release it, but because of all the problems in the music industry, we’d set them aside and move on to the next project.

So you hadn’t released the material from the first recording session by the time you had the second session in 1977, but what happened to that material? Why couldn’t those songs get released?

Zé Eduardo Nazário: We were playing many good concerts with Hermeto until 1976. Hermeto recorded Slaves Mass and had abandoned the idea of releasing those crazy 1976 Vice Versa sessions, which included a 26-minute song called “Casinha Pequenina” with crazy solos (laughter). Even Hermeto thought, “Well, let’s move on to the Slaves Mass record” because that had good marketing and everything. And then, he recorded with Flora Purim during his time in the United States, and he got some good money from that. He had this dream to live near his parents in Rio de Janeiro, at Bairro Jabour where his father was a shopkeeper. So he bought a house there near his parents and moved. We had two options: we could go with him to Rio de Janeiro, because at that time we had to rehearse every day, or leave the group. It was a very difficult decision for me to leave Hermeto’s group, but that’s what I did. My son Ian was born in September 1976 and my first wife didn’t want to go to Bairro Jabour because there wasn’t much in the way of structure for us to live there. We lived in a small but very good house. I had a basement where we rehearsed, and I was also starting to teach—many people wanted to learn what I was doing, and they wanted to play with me, so I started getting a lot of students.

Lelo and Zeca didn’t want to go to Rio either. We had this trio, and we were invited to perform at a concert that I called “Concerto para Ian,” after my son. That was our first good gig, in March 1977, which was after we left Hermeto’s group. We invited Roberto Sion, Carlinhos Gonçalves, the trumpet player Marcio Montarroyos, some singers, and Luiz Roberto Oliveira, who brought the first synthesizer to Brazil in the early 1970s. We had a lot more material at this point, so we played this big concert at Parque Morumbi in São Paulo, and it was crowded. The people loved our music—it was a surprise that they went crazy for what we were doing. We talked amongst ourselves and said, “Why don’t we record something?” But the studio was very small, it was Studio B at Vice Versa, so we did a quintet formation with Roberto Sion and Carlinhos Gonçalves. That’s the Nineteen Seventy Seven record.

I went to recording companies in Rio de Janeiro, but none of them were interested in releasing that kind of music. It was still a difficult time in Brazil for new things. By then, we were already calling this formation Grupo Um, but we only really became Grupo Um in 1979 when we finally recorded an independent record. It was like opening a window for us and for a lot of other artists in Brazil. We made the first independent instrumental record in Brazil. Before that, only Antonio Adolfo had recorded something, an LP called Feito em Casa (1977), but it had songs. [Editor’s Note: Feito em Casa is largely considered one of the first independent records in Brazil, notable for LPs being hand-stamped and independently distributed. Lula Côrtes & Lailson’s Satwa (1973) is often cited as the first independent Brazilian album]. Our record was conceptualized as an instrumental record, and that’s very important. We weren’t making a record for the market—the music was the most important thing.

Lelo Nazário: When we recorded Nineteen Seventy Seven, I was already working with synthesizers. Luíz Roberto Oliveira brought the first ARPs to Brazil: the ARP 2600 and the ARP 2500. I started working with him and learning how to interface with synthesizers. I ended up creating, at the studio, a piece called “Mobile/Stabile,” which is entirely composed of electronic sounds in a way where musicians could play their parts on top of this electronic base. So it was the first time we recorded an electroacoustic piece with a jazz group, with free jazz elements and contemporary music on top of an electroacoustic base. So we did this in this record for the first time.

What was the thought process behind making that track? Were you just trying to see what could happen if you put these different styles of music together?

Lelo Nazário: Actually, I started composing this song by going to the studio and recording many sounds from these three synthesizers that I had access to: the ARP 2600; the EMS Synthi AKS, which was a small synthesizer but very appropriate for contemporary music and finding new timbres and combining sounds through oscillators; and the Moog, which was also there at the studio. I captured many different sounds from all these synthesizers, and I combined them into eight mono tapes. Then, in order to produce the master tape, I spliced each of the tapes. The sounds are really short, so I’d splice them with a tape editor and compose each of the tracks, and then I would remix them into a stereo master tape. With this, I had a base from which we could play on later. So often we’d stipulate, like, “In this brief segment we’ll only play staccato, in this one we’ll do long phrases.” This would eventually change during rehearsal. So it was a sort of composition that had an electronic base on a magnetic tape, and we played on top of this tape with certain pre-determined parameters. Eventually these parameters changed and became less strict as we worked out each section from the piece. But that’s basically how it was constructed.

Did you perform live concerts with these electroacoustic compositions? What was the response from the people who saw your music? I’m sure this music wasn’t something they were likely familiar with.

Zé Eduardo Nazário: Well… (laughter). We have a very nasty story about this. It was during the 1978 São Paulo Jazz Festival, which was the first São Paulo Jazz Festival, and it happened in combination with the Monterey Jazz Festival. Everyone from Monterey came to São Paulo and it was broadcast on TV Cultura in São Paulo. It was a huge festival that lasted several days with everyone you could possibly imagine, including very famous American jazz musicians. John McLaughlin was there with his group, and there were Brazilian groups as well. I was playing with Egberto Gismonti—we did a very good record called Nó Caipira in 1978. I played with him, I think, on a Wednesday, which was the same day as Ahmad Jamal. It was a great concert, but on the last day of the festival, it was supposed to be Márcio Montarroyos. He had made a record with Steve Grossman, Gene Perla, and Erasto Vasconcelos. His concert was supposed to be performed with this group. They were in Rio de Janeiro, but something happened three weeks before the festival: Márcio had a disagreement with the guys, and I don’t know why. He called me, and I was at my father’s place. I was with my instruments, preparing for the gig with Egberto. He said, “Zé, I want to play at the concert with Grupo Um” because he had played with us in “Concerto para Ian” and in Hermeto’s group as well. I said, “Well, Márcio, we don’t have time to learn your material,” and he said, “No! I want to play Grupo Um’s material. Your compositions,” and so we did. I went to São Paulo and we spoke to the director of TV Cultura.

We were told that we could play four compositions, and we had 15 minutes for each one, so this was a one-hour program. There was an evening concert and then a later night concert. At the evening concert, “Mobile/Stabile” was the last composition, and at that concert we played all four compositions and nobody said anything to us. Right before the night concert was about to start, an organizer came to me and asked, “Is it possible to leave the last composition out?” I told him no, that we arranged four compositions that were 15 minutes each and that everything was timed perfectly. When the song started, they shut down the tape recorder and we were asked to leave the stage. There was a fight backstage, it was terrible. They had a jury of four people who didn’t understand anything about jazz, you know? Maybe they knew some mainstream jazz, but our “Mobile/Stabile” was “degenerate art” to them, like something from World War II. They just wanted these perfect paintings of flowers. They censored us and it became a topic of discussion in newspapers—a lot of articles were written. To me it was terrible because I was very prepared to play this new music and maybe, finally, get an opportunity to make a record. This experience really strengthened our belief that we should make an independent record.

Lelo Nazário: It was exactly as Zé said. When they cut the sound on stage, we were forced to stop. On one hand this was really bad because we lost this opportunity to broadcast our music on television. The evening concert was not gonna be shown on TV, but the night concert was being broadcast to the entire country. Of course, this is why they insisted on us not playing “Mobile/Stabile.” But on the other hand, this caused a big revolt among other musicians who were attending the festival, as well as with other artists who clearly saw that censorship was happening. It gave us a certain spotlight, and it even led to us playing concerts later on because audiences were curious to hear something that had been censored. In the concerts that we did later on, like at Lira Paulistana, there was a larger audience because of this notoriety.

Did you feel like there was a sense of community among musicians making more experimental work? There was the Vanguarda Paulistana movement that was born out of the Lira Paulistana label and venue, with artists like Itamar Assumpção, Arrigo Barnabé, Eliete Negreiros. I’m curious if you felt more accepted later on.

Zé Eduardo Nazário: In September 1979, we recorded Marcha Sobre a Cidade (1979). In the beginning of 1980, I lived on Rua Teodoro Sampaio, which was where Lira Paulistana was located. I was walking on the street and I saw some guy painting the wall and I asked, “What’s this place going to be?” “It will be a small theater.” This was the owner who said that and was painting the wall. I said, “I’m Zé Eduardo Nazário. I recently toured with Egberto Gismonti and John McLaughlin, and both groups played throughout Brazil and Argentina. I have a new group now and we need to release an independent record that we produced.” “Oh, nice.” We spoke and scheduled a series of shows at the theater. It was the first thing that happened in the theater. Grupo Um played there in February 1980. We did some marketing with newspapers and a famous critic came to see us and he loved it. He wrote a whole page in the paper about us.

Nothing was happening in São Paulo at that time because it was Carnaval, which in São Paulo is a dead thing, you know? There were no big parties like in Rio de Janeiro. All of this attracted a lot of musicians and other groups to the theater, and they started programming their shows there too. Some of those musicians you talked about started out thanks to that first successful gig we had, which was for the release of Marcha Sobre a Cidade. And then a lot of instrumental musicians, who were not really like Grupo Um—they were more like samba-jazz artists—started to book shows at the theater as well. It was what started the movement. Many singers as well, like Arrigo Barnabé, Ná Ozzetti, Suzana Salles, Vânia Bastos, and Itamar Assumpção started looking to the Lira Paulistana theater, but Grupo Um was the first group to call attention to the space.

Lelo Nazário: Lira opened at a time when there was an increased interest for new music—music that had a different language than what was already happening. What I liked about the Lira organizers was that they had this mentality of hosting anything that was a breath of fresh air, that showcased a fresh way of thinking. They really believed in this new musical mentality that was emerging in São Paulo, and they created a space where all this creativity could be manifested.

How did performing live inform the music that you created later on? Do you feel like it was important to play live in order to have the studio sessions that led to the three albums that were officially released?

Zé Eduardo Nazário: We were accustomed to playing live, as I’d done it since I was 13 years old. I was playing live on television and radio, and I played shows with several musicians. I’ve told you the names of only some of them, but I played with a lot of musicians—the telephone never stopped ringing (laughter). What was important was to release something that was musically new, and Marcha Sobre a Cidade was different.

Lelo Nazário: Playing live is important in the sense that you play it “hotter.” You have live audience feedback and you notice that this feedback gives you energy to take risks and make more forward-thinking type of music. Grupo Um started playing live at Lira and this gave the group this force; music grows when you play it live. When we went over to the studio, we ended up playing more “outwardly” than if we had only done rehearsals.

I’m curious to know what each of you brings to Grupo Um individually aside from the instruments themselves. Is there something more indirect, like a philosophy, that each of you has that shapes the music? In 1982, both of you recorded your own solo albums: Zé had Poema da Gota Serena (1983), which Lelo plays on, but then Lelo also had Lágrima / Sursolide Suite (1982). These two albums are really different.

Zé Eduardo Nazário: I learned Indian music with Lakshminarayana Shankar when I traveled with Egberto and John McLaughlin’s band. When we were staying in our hotels, I’d go into Lakshmirnarayana’s room and he’d teach me about South Asian music. I learned all those rhythms, which I then composed. I wrote everything down for “Prá Sentir e Contar” for my album Poema da Gota Serena. The basis of everything, like Lelo did with the computer, was to write every notation of “Prá Sentir e Contar.” And we did playbacks, because that’s the way to do it with a duo. Lelo plays a lot of keyboards and I had a lot of percussion, but not many channels because we couldn’t use many. But it yielded results, and we had the energy to play a lot back then. We went to Europe, we did a tour in Europe, we were playing at Lira Paulistana and other places, so the energy was overflowing. There wasn’t much preparation for it, we did it in one take, and we recorded those records in two days each. All of them, Marcha Sobre a Cidade (1979), Reflexões Sobre a Crise do Desejo (1981), A Flor de Plástico Incinerada (1982) and my Poema da Gota Serena (1983) in two days. I invited Cacau, a tenor sax player, to do half of the album with me. We just went to the studio and played. With that kind of music, the first take is the best take, and it’s because we don’t have the energy to do any more takes! (laughter).

Lelo Nazário: Regarding Grupo Um, I think it’s interesting that Zé brought with him all this Brazilian music and mixed it with jazz, creating a unique way of playing. My work is more related to electronic music. There were Fender Rhodes keyboards, and I was playing a mix of classical and jazz music with Brazilian elements. Also, Grupo Um had Zeca Assumpção, who plays bass in a really unique way. And it’s not just with how it sounds, but how he plays it—nobody plays bass like Zeca. And whenever we called in the wind section to play, like Roberto Sion, there’s a whole different sound thanks to Sion’s education being more related to traditional jazz. He brought this jazz tradition to the group. When we made Marcha Sobre a Cidade, Mauro Senise had this different mentality because he had an entirely different saxophone education. The musicians all brought their own contributions, and from this, we created something interesting.

Regarding the solo albums, when Zé recorded his, he brought in this Indian music, which wasn’t present in Grupo Um or anything we’d done previously. When I played on his album, I used some uncommon synthesizers. I had previously worked more with synthesis-type synthesizers, but at this studio we had the Oberheim OB-Xa, which is a more commercial type of synth. It’s not built for you to be meddling with the timbres—it came with preset timbres. So I ended up using many of these synthesizers, and that’s why Zé’s album has a particularly different sound.

Lelo, can you talk a bit about Lágrima / Sursolide Suite? I’m curious what you were trying to do with the Sursolide Suite composition in particular.

Lelo Nazário: I was trying to do something that had both written and free-improvised parts. I invited Zeca Assumpção and Rodolfo Stroeter to play together as a trio of two basses and one piano. I played the piece when I was celebrating 40 years of my career; we remade it live. And that’s the interesting thing about the composition: it has written segments and open segments, on and off, until there’s a larger open segment and then a written one at the end. It’s filled with this contemporary musical language, and I tried to do something more erudite with that piece.

I really love Grupo Um’s final album, A Flor de Plástico Incinerada. What was your thought process when making that? It’s the most experimental one, in my opinion, and I’m curious why you guys made this record and then decided to end the group.

Zé Eduardo Nazário: That record was a Lira Paulistana production, so we weren’t independent anymore. We did two records, A Flor de Plástico Incinerada and my solo record, in four days—there were two for A Flor de Plástico Incinerada and two for Poema da Gota Serena. I think the music is completely different, which shows how vast our creativity was at the time. To me, what really changed was that people started looking for lessons. Not only drummers and percussionists, but musicians of every kind wanted to learn this language, the kind of thing that I was doing, the Indian classical music, everything. I was giving too many classes in 1983 when we came back from Europe. I had too many people studying with me at home, so I didn’t have the free time that I had earlier.

Lelo had his projects, and Rodolfo Stroeter had the Pau Brasil project. I played in Pau Brasil as well around ’88 or ’89, but we didn’t play many concerts because Rodolfo was involved in a lot of other stuff, too. It was very difficult to find musicians who were available to play with Lelo and I because very few musicians in the country could play the kind of music we were doing. If a musician who did play with us couldn’t play anymore or had other projects, we couldn’t find a substitute. Percussionists are used to playing other types of music, the kind that is pre-written, has ostinato rhythms, these things written in books with square beats (laughter). There are exceptions, of course. There are great musicians in Cuba and the United States like Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Julio Barreto, and Horacio Hernandez.

Lelo Nazário: Just adding to what Zé said, we really did have our own personal projects. Zé had a lot of classes to teach, and he was perhaps the most famous drum teacher in São Paulo; many musicians studied with him. I started working as a studio musician, and I was hired to compose tracks and worked on that for many years. As Zé said, it might seem silly, but it’s difficult to find musicians who can play the type of music that we played on A Flor de Plástico Incinerada, which is very much an avant-garde record. We are not in the United States or in Europe—we are in Brazil where, unfortunately, there are very few musicians who are dedicated to this type of music. So it was complicated. These splits happen like that, with each one going their own way. But curiously enough, all of us got together again in Pau Brasil. There was one formation that was me on the piano, Zé on the drums, Rodolfo on the bass, and Teco Cardoso on the wind section.

Zé Eduardo Nazário: And Marlui Miranda, too. Pau Brasil’s Babel (1995) was essentially Grupo Um and Marlui Miranda (laughter). You know, I listened to jazz all the time during the pandemic—I had nothing to do because everything was closed. I stopped going to São Paulo to teach. The pandemic changed my life. For breakfast, I would wake up very early in order to exercise and do yoga. I started every day by listening, for two or three hours, to the ’50s records that I love so much. When I went to New York for the first time in 1978 to play with Pau Brasil at the IAJE, the International Association for Jazz Education, they organized a huge gig with everything happening and with every musician there. And what I noticed is this sense of community—everyone played on everyone else’s records, and everyone knew each other. We didn’t have that feeling of community in Brazil that I felt in New York; it was every man for himself, and it was nasty. It’s a pity, you know?

The Nineteen Seventy Seven sessions are finally going to be released at the end of the month. What has it been like to reflect on these old recordings and this early part of your career?

Zé Eduardo Nazário: Well, I’ll never be able to play what I played then (laughter). I’m 73 now, so I’m very happy that this recording came to light. I always had faith that some day, someone would release these recordings. We’re really grateful for the work that Joe Davies at Far Out Recordings did with Starting Point and with Nineteen Seventy Seven, and I hope he’ll be interested in the other records as well. But yeah, I remember the energy I had, and while I try to keep playing today, I’ll never play the way I did then. That’s life (laughter). But I’m happy to give something to these new generations, to those who are interested in learning about this kind of music. And maybe they’ll create their own language from that.

Lelo Nazário: For me, the most interesting thing is seeing how music that’s made with intention and care will last. Grupo Um celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2025. We performed many concerts, and there are books written about each of our records and about our entire history. It’s really nice seeing, after 50 years, that this music is being released and remains alive and fresh.

Is there anything that we didn’t talk about today that you think is important to mention?

Lelo Nazário: The celebrations will continue throughout 2026. We already have plans for Grupo Um concerts at Theatro Municipal here in São Paulo, so even though the 50-year anniversary was in 2025, we will extend it to these next concerts that are being planned here in São Paulo.

I end all my interviews with the same question and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

Zé Eduardo Nazário: Well, I’m 73. I’m here (laughter). It’s the best thing I could say. I’m seeing a lot of bad things happening in all parts of the world today, for different reasons, but I think this desire for money is the main thing. I’m a naturalist—I love nature, and I always loved nature. I eat good food, I practice yoga and Pilates, and I love my dogs. I had seven Rottweilers, and now I only have the last one, the seventh. I saw a film yesterday called Togo (2019), and it’s about these dogs at the North Pole, and Togo was the leader of the sled dog team. I cried the whole time because I love dogs. I think I had a very good life, and I hope young people can reach, with good health, the age of 73 and beyond too.

Lelo Nazário: I love my dedication. I basically see my whole life as one of dedication to whatever I decided to focus on, and for me this was music—this search for doing something new. I don’t know if I managed to do it, but at least I tried. And I’m really happy with everything I did. I’ll keep going, too. I intend on releasing a new album in 2026. It’s basically done—we just need to mix it. So the dedication continues. I think it’s worthwhile to set an objective for yourself and to go after it, to achieve your dreams.

Grupo Um’s Starting Point (1975/2023) and Nineteen Seventy Seven (1977/2026) can be purchased at Bandcamp. Lelo Nazario’s Bandcamp page has his solo music but also Grupo Um’s original run of albums, including Marcha Sobre a Cidade (1979), Reflexões Sobre a Crise do Desejo (1981), and A Flor de Plástico Incinerada (1982). The group’s live album, Ao vivo Jazz na Fábrica: Uma lenda ao vivo (2016), is available on streaming services.

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Gigi Masin (b. 1955) is an Italian musician who got his start composing from experiences at his local theater. Through his interest in composers like Krzysztof Penderecki and György Ligeti, he eventually began using a synthesizer to create his own musical language. His debut album is the cult classic Wind (1986). In the years that followed, he released a split LP with This Heat’s Charles Hayward called Les Nouvelles Musiques De Chambre Volume 2 (1989) and a collaborative album with Allesandro Monti named The Wind Collector (1991). In 2014, Music From Memory released a crucial compilation of Masin’s works titled Talk to The Sea, and he has been especially prolific in the past decade: he’s released two albums in the group Gaussian Curve, two albums with Greg Foat, an album with Rod Modell titled Red Hair Girl at Lighthouse Beach (2024), and more. His newest LP is a solo album titled Movement (2026). Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Gigi Masin on April 25th, 2026 via Zoom to discuss his childhood in Venice, his love for being a radio DJ, and his new album.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: I know you were born in Venice. What was Venice like when you were a child?

Gigi Masin: Venice was very different. I used to go boating with my parents. There were less tourists, less houses, you could swim in the little canals, and there were a lot of people swimming in the canals with me. Now it’s absolutely impossible to do that because there’s too much pollution. But it was a very wonderful place—it was so incredible, and it’s so difficult to describe. You had no cars, no noises, it was just this island with nothing around you—it was only the sound of the church bells and the birds. It was a kind of silence that’s difficult to find on Earth. Nature was just a part of your day. When you walked around Venice, the sound of the boats on the water, the nature all around you, there were trees and gardens and birds… I remember the sound of the wind through the trees and it was so wonderful. Now there’s so many tourists, and all that noise makes it difficult to relax. That’s only in certain corners of Venice now, and you can only find them through actual Venetians.

How do you feel like those experiences shaped your understanding of listening to music, of listening as a practice?

Venice helped me so much to make my first album, Wind (1986). Of course, I played the guitar like many other people, and when I played the keyboards for this, I tried to play something simple and nice. When I was young I wanted to make a rock album, you know? But this music was different, and I started to think in terms of subtraction, realizing that less is more, that it’s better than having an entire orchestra. I found an old studio in Venice that was really wonderful. It was a sort of basement near the canal. You could play when the boats were passing, and it was a typical place in Venice where, once upon a time, they would just put all this old furniture in the space. They cleaned everything, put a mixer in, and put wood all around the space. It was incredible.

It’s a bit strange… when you go into a studio, it’s not so easy to feel at home. But that place, to be on the sofa with friends, it was so easy, it was so fun, it wasn’t a problem. The first album is full of passion but it’s simple: you get a bass, a little piano, a trumpet, and nothing more. I wanted it to be simple, and for me it was a fruit of Venice: Venice is not complicated, Venice is very easy, it’s very sunny, it’s very free. I loved it so much, and it was a gift to make that record in that place.

What sort of things were you doing as a teenager? I know you were interested in artists like Donovan.

When we were young, we had a rock band called Zero. Most of the bands in Italy played progressive rock music, but we played typical rock and blues (laughs). It was the sound of suburbia. We loved to play, and it was just for fun—nothing more. I played acoustic guitar on the side and it was strange… in Italy at the time, people wanted to hear classic Italian songs when you went somewhere on holiday or for your birthday. Instead, I played songs by John Martyn, Nick Drake, and Crosby, Stills & Nash, but nobody listened to that music (laughter).

I also started to think differently when I began to work in a theater. They wanted contemporary music from Penderecki or Ligeti. Hearing this music was an explosion—I was shocked because it was so beautiful. My fortune is that because of my theater experience, I started to work at the national radio in Venice. At the time, the national radio had a big studio and they played these radio dramas. I was 20 and working with tape recordings and I was like, “Wow, this is like Stockhausen!” I started to think about music in a different way—rock music was something you listened to when you were young and wanted to make some noise, but when you discover the beauty of contemporary music, from Steve Reich to Bruno Maderna, your life changes—it’s no longer the same. You listen to music in a different way, and I started to make my own music after I heard this contemporary music.

Can you tell me more about your experience working for this theater?

I was a technician at first, so I was working with tapes, loudspeakers, and microphones, but then on some occasions they’d say, “Gigi, can you please prepare some music for the drama?” And it was very nice because this was a time when a lot of groups created theatrical productions; the 1970s were really full of this interest in theater and contemporary drama. I started to use two turntables with vinyl from Penderecki, Ligeti, and Moderna, and I would sometimes play them backwards. Sometimes I’d use tapes to make a loop or a delay. It was one of the best periods in my life—it was like a game, and I was as happy as a child. We made dramas in the church in Venice, in the mime theater… it was a wonderful experience, the kind that made you want to do it for the rest of your life.

When this period finished—in Italy, things go in and out of fashion regularly—I worked as a radio DJ for a long time, but then things changed again and I wasn’t able to get paid from that either. I was like, what should I do? I said I should make music in my free time. So at night I was making music with a mixer and tape. But this was all lost—around 20 years ago, there was a bad flood in Venice and I lost everything. There was no more. I lost all the tapes I made for theater, I lost all the sounds I made for the national radio—everything. I lost everything. I loved them so much.

What years were you part of the radio and theater?

The theater and radio were at the end of the 1970s and through the 1980s and until 1994 or 1995.

What did you learn from your time as a radio DJ and working for the theater that you were able to bring into your own music? Obviously those are things that are more public-facing, that are part of a job, so what was different when you were doing stuff that’s strictly for yourself?

Music can speak without words or lyrics. And the use of electronics, of these tapes in reverse… you try to find new sounds and ideas. When I made Wind (1986) they said, “Oh, this is a nice ambient album.” But I didn’t know what ambient music was at the time. I just made something that felt like contemporary music. I didn’t find out about ambient music from Brian Eno, but from Ligeti and Penderecki. A lot of classical music was like this. Like Mahler—they made wonderful music, and didn’t need electronics. They used orchestras. And they really did make ambient music. Electronic music was another language, another possibility, and it was easier—you didn’t have to have people around you, you didn’t have to have a viola or contrabass or trumpet. You had a keyboard, and it was a simpler way to do the same thing. From the 1950s and 1960s, there were these experiments with electronic music from Russia and the USA and Japan—there were all these masters all around the world doing wonderful things, but it was not so easy to find.

Were there specific compositions by Mahler and these other composers that inspired the compositions on Wind?

It was not a direct inspiration, and you would have to listen to this music at home. Have you seen the wonderful movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)? Its soundtrack has the best of contemporary music, and you can’t compare what you do with these masterpieces, but you understand that in music… for example, there is a group in the jazz scene called Weather Report. They have a similar way of composition. Maybe the sound isn’t the same, but the texture and the ideas behind their works are the same. All people have these experiences; for me, I heard masters like Steve Reich and Stockhausen and I knew it was wonderful, but I knew that my music was not a masterpiece, and in trying to make music, you make your own language. I wanted my own language to be broadcast to everyone. Wind was a free album—it was not for sale. At the time I thought, this is my first album so it should be free. And what has happened since has been a surprise, but that’s what happens.

When I made my first experiments with a synth, I made these textures, these drones, and these drones were directly my idea of, not copying, but doing something that could be similar to Ligeti or Penderecki. Maybe Penderecki and Ligeti are working with orchestras, but the sounds are strange, the strings sound like metal, and I was trying to do something in that way. And the results are very different, but I was still very proud.

You worked with Marco Barel, Massimo Donà, and Allesandro Monti for Wind, what was that like?

I want to say thank you to Allesandro Monti forever because he spent so many afternoons and evenings in my home, listening to my tapes and saying, “Oh, you can do this.” I’d say, “No, no, it’s a joke.” “No, you can.” He encouraged me a lot. I strongly wanted to release an album and Allesandro Monti gave me brotherly help, and it was so great. The trumpeter and the sax player came to the studio and these guys were nice— Massimo Donà and Marco Barel. They’d say, “What do you want?” And I’d just tell them to improvise. Improvisation is such a wonderful thing—it’s the freedom to do what you want. It’s your language combining with my language. And this is the main idea in my collaborations with Gaussian Curve and Greg Foat. Freedom is nice, it’s super.

You ended up working with Allesandro again on The Wind Collector (1991), and this was after having made Wind and your split LP with Charles Hayward, Les Nouvelles Musiques De Chambre Volume 2 (1989). What was it like to work with him again? How did you grow together?

We played together a lot, and I think we are really brothers for that. He’s a wonderful musician and he’s still working. He was a producer, also, in the USA. But sometimes people drift apart, so we haven’t spoken to each other in a while. But he’s one of the best musicians I’ve ever met. He’s a genius in the things that he loved to do. I can’t deny it. He was so important for me, and I was so lucky to have him by my side for a long time.

I know you worked at the post office, what was that like? Were you also making music during this time?

It was a moment in my life that I had to find a job to survive, and I was lucky because I worked not in a post office but a branch of the postal service where you can move all around Italy. It was nice because I tried a job like that so I could continue to make music. But I wasn’t in a rush—I tried to discover what could be my future, and the main result of working with the postal service was making Wind. It gave me the time and money to make the album. At the time in Italy, it was not easy to make a record, it was complicated for many reasons. The [vinyl plant] would say that I’d have to wait one year for the pressing.

When did you start working at the postal service?

In 1985.

So you were doing this and the radio and theater stuff at the same time?

I started to do stuff for the radio for free because we have a lot of little radios around town that aren’t professional. When you love something, you try your best to do it. Now, it’s not really a possibility so I’ll do stuff on the web. But if you ask me, “What’s your biggest desire?” It’s to be a radio DJ. At the time, I was composing music but my heart is the heart of a radio DJ, to speak on the radio.

What do you like about it?

It’s about working at night… to be at night and broadcasting the music that you love for two, three, four hours. I’ll start maybe at 10pm and go until 1 or 2 in the morning. And it’s about searching for music too. I spent a lot of time and money searching for records in Italy. It’s not so easy in Italy to find music from abroad. I’m lucky that Venice had some nice vinyl shops. I also went around to some US bases and they had some nice records that they didn’t like no more, and you could get it for little money. It was lovely.

What sort of stuff were you usually playing?

At the time, most of the radio in Italy was really commercial. Only pop music. But at night, you were able to do more things you could love. Maybe in the first hour you’d have some requests, but for the rest of the night you could do Miles Davis, John Martyn, jazz from South Africa. It’s like bringing people into your house, into your room, and putting a record on the turntable.

I wanted to ask about your album with Giuseppe Caprioli, Moltitudine In Labirinto (2003). That album sounds more drone-y than your other works, and it also sounds a bit dark at times. How did that collaboration happen?

Giuseppe Caprioli was and is a strong friend. He’s helped me learn about a lot of wonderful musicians, like Jon Gibson. All the stuff he showed me shocked me. For example, when I listened to Charlemagne Palestine, it changed my way of listening to the piano. How could this be? It was a totally different passion, a different understanding of music. In the past, I listened to Cecil Taylor and thought it was boring. But after I listened to people like Jon Gibson and Charlemagne Palestine, I made an effort to love Cecil Taylor… and I did. His music has such incredible texture, it’s pure passion—it’s blood on the keyboards, it’s poetry!

So I asked Giuseppe, “Please do something with me, because for me you have the key.” At the time, it was already public that Björk had sampled my music, so it was easy to find a label, and I found one in Rome. Giuseppe is one of the best Italians. In Italy we say, “You never profit in your own country,” and people from other places in the world were more happy to discover different music. In Italy they prefer to just listen to the mainstream names that they find in the newspaper or on the radio without searching for anything. So if there is a great, wonderful musician in Italy, there’s going to be a struggle to have concerts and make money—Giuseppe is one of these people.

You don’t have to understand all the stuff you listen to. For example, people in Italy really love Frank Zappa. He’s a great musician, but when you want poetry, when you want passion, you have musicians who use music to go beyond the notes. And what they give you is this language of feeling… it’s like listening to the rain, like listening to the storm in the sky. This was an intellectual period in my life. And it’d be like, I can’t make music anymore because I can’t compare with these masterpieces! But if you pay respect to these great masters and you feel the need to compose and make music, you have to find your own language, your own way to make something. It took me many years, but now I’m very happy for all the things I’ve done, and I understand that this is the result of many years of listening. I’m still a student, really. You listen all your life, you learn all your life, and I’m always searching for something and I don’t even know what it is.

What have you been learning recently?

I’ve been in Korea and Japan and there are a lot of young people making wonderful music. People of my age sometimes become boring, they repeat themselves a lot. And then you see these young people making great music with great concerts and you realize, you know, music will go on. You read the newspaper and you see people wondering about the future of music. But you can only say that if you don’t listen to music, if you’re not searching. Come on! We have to listen, and all the world is full of wonderful music, from Argentina to Japan to Thailand. Every part of the world has people making strong music, and we have to be an antenna. This was not possible in the past, but with the internet, you can catch anything on the planet.

You’ve collaborated with a lot of people over the past decade. With Gaussian Curve you were working with Johnny Nash and Marco Sterk, and then there are those Greg Foat albums, and then there was the one you had with Rod Modell, Red Hair Girl At Lighthouse Beach (2024). What have you learned from collaborating with these people?

Collaboration is a way to grow. As I said before, you always have to study, there’s always more to learn. When you have the fortune of finding nice people, the music comes easy without any problem. You’ll find a great musician, yes, but not only that, you’ll find a great friend, and they’ll remain in your life. It’s great to learn their human side, too. A lot of musicians can have big egos and will not want to share anything, but it’s important for me that playing music with others is fun. It’s a privilege to make music. This is something we love, and to make something we love, and to be able do it together and to learn from each other… we spend all this time talking and drinking beer and playing music? Oh, this is wonderful.

Do you have any favorite concerts that you’ve played because of the synergy on stage?

Everything we did in Gaussian Curve was lovely. I remember a concert in Stockholm that was really great. I am very lucky because at most of these concerts, at the end, people are happy and want to shake hands and I’ll sign records. It’s lovely.

I wanted to ask about your new album, Movement (2026). The press release talks about the music connecting with the body and not just the mind, that it’s not just for solitary listening.

I need to move into the future. A lot of musicians work like a river… the water flows to the sea, and they move, move, move in this direction. I’m not saying that ambient music is boring or dead, but I have a personal need as a musician to refresh my language, and it’s important for me to say that my heart needs something romantic. Sometimes we need to dance in our room. And ambient doesn’t have to be dark or sad, and this is because life is actually happy. For me, music is about happiness. And it’ll be Sunday morning and I’ll want to dance in my room—this is my desire, so these things are coming from that.

I don’t think about making music. I don’t sit at the keyboard and think, oh, what should I do today? I do things and the music speaks. I don’t say, “I wanna make four tracks on the new album ambient and the others will be dance music.” I take five or ten minutes to make a track, it’s very spontaneous—or is just what comes from my hands. I love long songs, too. One day I’ll do that again, but right now, I’ll just dance.

Is dancing something you’ve always done throughout your life?

No. But sometimes I’ll go to the club because I’ll want to know how the DJ is working with vinyl. When I see guys working with vinyl, for me it’s like being at home when I was young. One strong idea about happy music is to have music in your room, on your seat, on your sofa. When you think about love and say, “Put that record on the turntable”… I want that.

Songs on the album like the title track and “Deception Dance” are firmly dance music. I’m curious about your relationship with dance music and how that shapes the songs you made on the record.

I have a lot of 12-inches. And for a long time, my manager knew this. I made dance music in parallel with my ambient records. I love this feeling, this movement, and it’s something that’s growing in myself. And I’m not trying to mix these two ideas. I’m a romantic guy, and I love to dance. On one end I love Underworld, on the other end I love Nils Frahm. These are the two different points of music, though I also loved stuff like Test Dept. and Clock DVA in the past. This is all music for the future. I had a girlfriend who took me to a Clock DVA concert and I was wondering why this group wasn’t one of the best known in the world. We only have one life, we really have to enjoy this music.

What does your perfect day look like?

It’s going to a park in Tokyo. It’s going there, sitting in the grass, and just staying. In this stage of my life, it’s lovely to go back to nature and discover the world. One of my big fortunes is that I’ve been able to travel around the world with music. You discover wonderful places and people. Now, I’m not old but I’m not young, and I like to just sit in nature and listen to the birds and be easy, be happy.

Is there anything we didn’t talk about today that you wanted to mention?

I have to give thanks to my manager, Alessia Avallone. It’s not easy to make music your job. You need to be around people who believe in you. The music scene is a jungle, there are these divas. And it’s important to be around people like Alessia who can help this stay simple and happy.

I end all my interviews with the same question and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

I’m a clown. The people around me know. I have two kids—they’re 21, they’re twins. They love to joke, they love to smile. And life is easy this way. There have been challenges in the past, but in order to get through these times, you have to carry a smile in your pocket. My parents didn’t really understand me when I was younger, so I had a deep sense of humor and it helped a lot. When people don’t believe in you, when people don’t understand you, you have to be strong in your convictions, and you have to smile. It’s medicine for your life.

Your sense of humor is not a book with translations. A sense of humor is an instinct that you have inside you. It comes out immediately. It’s not a way of life, because we also have to be serious. But when you have a bad day, when you do something wrong, you have to be the first one to say, “Okay Gigi, it will be okay.” And a little sense of humor about yourself is the key to life. Music is not my life all day. And when music was not my job, when making music was difficult… when people don’t trust you, you have to smile. No depression. There are a lot of nice musicians who stopped making things because they didn’t believe in themselves and they listened to other people who said music wasn’t good anymore, that it was boring. They don’t smile, and they don’t have a smile in their pocket to save their life. I don’t want to stop. And when it comes time to die, it’ll be nice to reach into my pocket and die with a smile.

Gigi Masin’s new album, Movement, is out now via Sacred Bones.

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OOIOO is a Japanese experimental rock band spearheaded by YoshimiO (b. 1968), who had already been in the bands UFO or Die and Boredoms by the time of its creation. While the group’s lineup has changed over the years, OOIOO has largely been the outgrowth of YoshimiO’s own friendships, with each album being a reflection of their own interests. The group has released numerous albums since the late 1990s, including ∞8∞ (1997), Feather Float (1999), Gold & Green (2000), TAIGA (2006), ARMONICO HEWA (2009), and nijimusi (2016). Their newest album is a split LP with Lightning Bolt titled THE HORIZON SPIRALS / THE HORIZON VIRAL (2026) and expands on the gamelan-focused compositions that appeared on Gamel (2013). Joshua Misnoo Kim talked with YoshimiO on February 25th, 2026 via Zoom to discuss field recordings, hardcore punk, and the ideas animating the new OOIOO album. Special thanks to Hashim Bharoocha for interpreting.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: You have this one album, Bor Cozmik (2009), where the whole thing is a 40-minute field recording. I wanted to ask you what your first memories are of listening really intently to the environment around you. This might be nature, this might just be at home or at school. Does anything come to mind?

YoshimiO: I live in Nara Prefecture right now and my house is surrounded by the forest. For the past 10 years, I haven’t actually been listening to that much music and I’ve only been listening to the forest around me, really. Going back to the Bor Cozmik record, that was based on my friend going to Borneo and actually making field recordings. He recorded the sounds of the headhunting tribe there. He also just placed a mic in the forest and used those sounds. Another record I did with field recordings was Flower With No Color (2003), it was on Mike Patton’s Ipecac label and I made it with Yuka Honda. We used a binaural microphone, and we got into a truck and just drove around. It was springtime and we heard a lot of birds chirping. When we arrived at the local temple, there were a bunch of birds chirping there, too, so we recorded that and then just had a bento box lunch at the temple.

Were you listening to nature in this way when you were a young girl? Was that something you did in your free time?

Going back to my childhood, I grew up in Okayama—I was born and raised there. My house was surrounded by fields and the frogs were really loud. They were actually so loud that they were louder than the cars driving by. There were a lot of cicadas in my garden as well, and they were really loud too. I remember just being in awe, listening to those sounds. I never hated those sounds, actually, so it kinda started there.

Were you going on adventures a lot, like going into these fields and playing with cicadas and frogs?

I really didn’t think of it as adventures, as it was just my natural environment. I grew up in a residential area, but it was surrounded by fields, and I just noticed that the range of natural sounds—like the sound of insect wings—was so vast. I did listen to music growing up, but I remember that these nature sounds were more appealing to me; rather than actual, standard songs, I felt like the frequencies of those nature sounds really matched my personality. I obviously didn’t know the word frequency back then, but looking back at those experiences now, that’s probably what it was.

There was a pond nearby where there were a bunch of crayfish—someone probably had them as pets and just let them go in the water. I would catch those. And there was a snack store nearby where they sold insect collection kits. These kits came with a needle, so I remember—and you know, children can be very cruel—I remember using the needle to kill the crayfish I found there. And I would have this badminton racket and put a frog on top of it and jump with the frog. Like, I would jump along with the frog as it was jumping on the racket (laughter). There were also these really pretty Japanese beetles that would hang on the windows—I was in awe of them. I used a paint marker and wrote a number on a beetle because I wanted to see if it was the same one that’d be stopping by later on. But the next day, I noticed the paint marker was really poisonous and killed it.

Oh no (laughter).

So playing with insects and crayfish came very naturally to me as a child.

I know you eventually studied textiles at university. How do we go from you being a child, curious about the world and playing with insects, to eventually weaving tapestries? What sort of things happened as a teenager that helped you recognize that you wanted to study this?

I’m not really conscious of how that happened. But I grew up in Okayama, and I thought that the only way I could leave my hometown was to go to an art school—I was able to go to a town where they had one, maybe I could live by myself. It wasn’t that I hated my parents or anything, but I wanted to experience life in a different place, and that was the best time to do it. So I applied for an art school in Kyoto and got in, but when I got there I discovered that it was even more rural than where I grew up! (laughter).

The reason that I chose textile was because it was easier to get into compared to the other departments. But when I got in, I found that using plant-based dyes and dying fabric and the act of weaving fabric really suited my personality. When you do tapestry, you have to first decide on what the warp is going to be and then you decide on the weft, and then you kind of improvise as you go. I really loved that process; it suited me.

What about it suited your personality? I know that your mother was a piano teacher and you didn’t really enjoy playing the piano, and that you first encountered the drum set in middle school but you were mostly just messing around. What clicked for you here?

I liked the process of creating a blueprint of the ideas I had in my mind. I would write that on paper and then set up the warp thread and the weft thread. When you work on the weft, that’s when you get to improvise with the colors. You have a blueprint in mind, but then you’re also playing off that and improvising at the same time. Looking back on it now, it’s very similar to how I make music—there’s always bit of space for that. And it’s not like you don’t know where you’re going; you have this comfort because there’s a general direction of where you’re going.

When I worked on the tapestry art, my process involved listening to really loud hardcore punk music, drinking sake, and then being totally immersed in the process of making this art. And I really loved doing that. The fun part was being able to materialize the ideas in my head, and I was doing more abstract tapestry art and some of it was very three-dimensional. You know, most people get to see their ideas visually in the form of dreams. I was happy with that too, but I found the process of being able to take those ideas in my mind, creating a blueprint, and actually making it into a material object to be very gratifying. And that’s the part that really fits my personality.

Were there specific artists who worked in textiles that you were inspired by when you were making these works?

The only textile artists I knew back then were my professors. It’s the same with music, too. I don’t really listen to other people or check out other artists that much; I just get totally immersed in the process that’s in front of me. That’s always been my process. I know more tapestry artists now, but back then, I didn’t know any names or anything like that.

You said you were listening to hardcore punk music, was this American hardcore or was it Japanese bands like Gauze, The Comes, The Stalin, and stuff like that?

Gauze!!!! (laughs). I love Gauze, and a lot of the hardcore bands I was into were Japanese. I do remember American bands like Germs, though I guess they’re more punk rock, but I love them. I also love Napalm Death. I’ve always likened the sound of Napalm Death to a vacuum cleaner, so I would have that on full blast and just work on tapestry art. I also loved Japanese punk bands like Lip Cream. There’s a bunch of Mexican hardcore bands I was into as well but I can’t remember their names.

Did you see these Japanese hardcore bands when you were a student at the time? I know they were mostly in Tokyo, but I’m curious if you ever saw them live.

There was a club in Okayama called Pepperland, it’s been around for like 50 years. It’s probably the first rock club that was built in Japan by a guy named Iseo Nose. He was also a music writer and he wrote for Rock Magazine and stuff like that. So I went to his club and bands like Lip Cream would play there. The club is still around, and OOIOO has actually performed there. He still runs it with his wife, and his sons are like the PA sound engineers—it’s a family business.

Do you remember the first really important or influential show that you saw there?

Probably Lip Cream! (laughs). I saw them twice. I also did a live show there in high school. I can’t really remember the details, but that’s where I met the early member of OOIOO, Kyoko. I remember it vividly because she was like 6 feet tall and had a band called Kokushoku Elegy. Kyoko was a little bit older than me, and I was still a teenager back then. After I went to Kyoto, we became really good friends. We talked about starting a new band, which became OOIOO, and she was the band’s first guitarist.

Was Kyoko the first woman you met that you felt a kinship with in terms of artistic and musical interests?

Kyoko was a really good friend but it wasn’t really about music—it was more that we got along as people. And the band that Kyoko had, Kokushoku Elegy, was a really old band in Okayama. I didn’t really know much about them, but I remember always having a good time being with her. And to this day, it’s still really important to work with people I can get along with outside of music. Kyoko was a little bit older than me, but we would talk about all types of things. Obviously we were both into music, so that was one thing we had in common, but we also just hung out a lot and went on vacation to Okinawa.

When I formed OOIOO, most of the members weren’t real musicians. Kyoko was a vocalist, and she wanted to try playing the guitar, so she joined as a guitarist. And myself, I was already a drummer in UFO or Die and the Boredoms, but I wanted to try playing guitar and singing, so that’s what I ended up doing in this band. The bassist back then was a friend from my high school. I asked her, “If you had a transparent bass, would you play it?” My friend took that seriously and actually bought a transparent bass, and she became the bassist of the band even though she had no experience. So it’s not just about the music, it’s about whether I can get along with my bandmates and if we can be good friends.

Yeah, and it seems like this camaraderie is about a willingness to try new things, right? Like, you want to be around people who are willing to take risks and will encourage each other to do that? That’s what it sounds like.

I wasn’t really conscious about the people I was hanging around with being risk-takers or stuff like that. I just found them interesting as people. Like, my bassist friend who joined the band back then, one day she was like, “I’m going to graduate from OOIOO and do something else.” She was always an interesting person—she was a really good dancer, and she was good at all types of things. And now she’s going to a pâtisserie school to become a pastry chef.

Is this Maki?

Yes, Maki. And Kyoko eventually left the band—she unfortunately passed away [in 2015]. The guitarist that joined the band after her, Kayano, was also just a friend who I hung out with. And if you think about it, she’s not like a real guitar player even today, and I find that interesting. So maybe we encourage each other in terms of like, we’re not that good at playing but we’re still in this band together. If the person I’m playing with has a really good idea, I might interpret that and use that in the music. And it’s not like we’re always trying to do new things in OOIOO. If you think too much about that, the sound becomes too intentional and forced. I always think that I can only be me, and the person I’m playing with can only be them. OOIOO is more about the friendship between the band members than trying new things.

You’re an interesting person as well. Do you feel like these other interests you have are important to your music? Like, do you feel that running your fashion brand, emeraldthirteen, shapes the way you approach making music at all?

emeraldthirteen really only started after meeting certain people, but I’ve always loved clothing. I have my other band SAICOBAB and we had a live show in the mountains. I was on a bus traveling up there to perform and I met a girl on the bus. She suddenly starts talking to me and says, “My name is Tamago [“egg”], would you be interested in making some clothes with me?” I was really surprised by this person coming up to me and saying that, and it was especially surprising because our family dog who had the same name, Tamago, had just died that day. So I had no interest in making clothes, but I was like, If a person named Tamago, the same name as my dog, was saying they want to make clothes with me, it has to be destiny. I decided then and there to make clothing with Tamago.

I love it (laughter).

I found out later that Tamago was a student at a fashion school, and she didn’t actually have the skills necessary for making clothes yet. She had a friend named Yurie, though, who had more experience. She was actually doing all of Tamago’s homework at this fashion school (laughter). So Tamago dropped out after she got sick, and then Yurie came in. I’m working with Yurie to this day on emeraldthirteen clothing. She actually does all the sewing and pattern making and I do the actual designs—we complement each other because we’re doing things that the other person can’t do. My concept has always been to take one piece of fabric and to think about how it can be made into clothing. We used to use a factory and make clothing there, but now it’s all hand-sewn by Yurie. It’s just the two of us—we make limited quantities.

In terms of how that influences my music, the only connection is that I try to make clothing that would be easy to play drums in. It has to be clothing you can really move in, and a lot of my musician friends have been buying the clothes because they want to wear it on stage, though regular people buy it too. It’s a lot more comfortable than it looks.

You mentioned earlier how you don’t want to think too hard about what your music sounds like, that it should be an overflow of who you and your bandmates are. I know that when you first started playing drums, you would just naturally start screaming and that this has been your inclination ever since. What’s your relationship with your voice like? Were you frequently singing as a child, and do you scream in general outside of musical contexts?

With my voice, it’s not like I was screaming or singing a lot as a child. It’s just that the voice is something immediate. With the guitar, I still don’t know how to change the strings and I don’t know what sound will come out if I press a certain fret. I’m kinda guessing as I go. But with my voice, I’m using my body, I’m making my body vibrate to create these sounds—it’s a more immediate way to create the sounds that are in my head. And with the screaming, it really started because in the Boredoms, Eye would say, “You should scream in this part of the song.” And then when I did, he was really happy and kept asking me to do that. So the screaming came because people were asking me to do it, and that’s been a recurring theme in my life. When I record with other bands, they’ll ask if I can scream. Or when I get a photo taken for a magazine, the photographer will say, “Can I take a picture of you screaming?” Though, I will say that it is partially natural—playing instruments, like the drums, does give me the impulse to want to scream.

In my day to day, I’m not thinking about the guitar or what I want to do with it. But it’s different with my voice or playing the flute, which I’ve been really into lately, or playing the trumpet. I feel like these are much more immediate for me. At my age, I’m always interested in what my voice will be doing on a particular day, or in this moment, or when I improvise—what sounds are going to come out? And going back to childhood, I didn’t really scream a lot. I was actually a pretty quiet child. I was introverted, and I had a lot going on in my mind. I would think about all the ideas I had in my head and smile, but I didn’t really share them with people.

Now that I’m talking about this, I remember an incident when I was in second grade. I was sitting on a flat flower bed and there was a wall. I tilted my head back and hit my head on a rock. I remember wearing a red turtleneck sweater, and even though I was all bloody, it was hard to see the blood because of my turtleneck. Before that, I was the sort of kid who couldn’t eat that much, I wasn’t very active, I was quiet. But after hitting my head, I would eat a lot, I became super active, and I ran for [student body president]. I wasn’t interested in swimming before, but I suddenly started swimming. I suddenly became this really active kid. Like, before all that, I couldn’t finish my lunch—I would just chew some food and bring it to the rabbits that were in the school, spitting it in front of them so they could eat it. So the rock probably hit me in a good place (laughter). The moral of the story is that the brain is a very interesting thing.

How old were you when you hit your head?

Probably 6 or 7—it was the second grade.

You talked about playing the trumpet, and I know you played it on Jim O’Rourke’s Bacharach album. You also play it in this earlier Canadian and Japanese band, Nimrod. I’m wondering what your relationship with the trumpet is because it’s not an instrument that you’re necessarily known for.

After hitting my head and becoming active, I joined a brass band at my school, like a marching band. The music teacher said, “We have a trumpet and can lend you it. Why don’t you try it out?” While the other kids were having a hard time making sounds with the mouthpiece, I was able to do it pretty naturally. And I liked using the mouthpiece just for fun, making frog-like sounds with it. It really helped me to build up this skill. This was a small town, so people had already heard about me playing the trumpet by the time I tried to join the brass band in middle school. The music teacher said, “I heard that you’re pretty good at the trumpet, why don’t you join the brass band? However, we only have a trombone that we can lend you.” So I decided to play the trombone and did that for three years.

I just remembered this—when I was in the seventh grade, there was someone older than me in the ninth grade who also played the trombone, but he was really good at playing guitar, too. His name is Norio Yamakawa—he’s actually a professional guitarist and pretty well known right now. He was really into Deep Purple and he let me listen to that music, and I remember playing the keyboard solos in those Deep Purple songs on the trombone. I was really into doing that. That’s what got me interested in rock music, like, this is what rock music is about. After middle school, I didn’t really play the trumpet or the trombone for many years.

After I joined the Boredoms, we were playing in this hall in Kyoto Univesity called the Seibu Kōdō [Editor’s Note: 西部講堂, lit. western hall, one of the few fully videotaped Les Rallizes Dénudés shows was there]. So I would walk in there all the time and they had a jazz club there. At the entrance of this hall, there was a trumpet in this case. I’d walk by it so many times and it was always there. I was like, maybe this person just forgot about the trumpet? So I “borrowed” it, and I’ve kept it for 30 years. That’s the one I’ve been using in all of these recordings, with Free Kitten and OOIOO and Boredoms.

Is there something you specifically like about playing the trumpet? What makes it unique to you?

Whether it’s the trumpet or using my voice, the act of using my vocal cords and using my breath opens up something inside me. In my music I also do things like chant mantras, and when I do that, I feel like my voice is coming out of the top of my head. I really like that sensation. Instead of crouching down and looking at an instrument and playing it, I like the act of using my breath. It’s like this with the drums, too. When I have a cold and play the drums really hard, I feel a lot better. It might have to do with the act of sweating a lot? But the physicality of it feels really good to me and opens up things inside of me. And it’s something you can do really impulsively. There’s also the route of becoming really good at your instrument and having these superhuman techniques when playing. But when I’m in the act of playing the trumpet or using my voice, I’m really immersed in that process and not really thinking about any of this. But yeah, I just like the act of using my vocal cords or my breath, and with the trumpet you have to use diaphragm breathing. If you do it a lot, it really hurts your stomach, but after you play it for a while, you feel a lot better. It’s also the same for me when playing the flute.

Is playing these instruments ever a challenge for you then? Like, do you enjoy it being a strenuous process at all, or is it generally just about pleasure?

In the end, it ultimately has to feel good for me to continue doing this, and to do anything, really. But there is an aspect of it being a challenge. For example, in the Boredoms, there would be ideas that other people have and they’ll ask me to do them. I’d have to look into the ideas that are in that person’s brain, interpret that, and then express it as sound. It’s like a director that’s giving you directions, and it feels good when you’re able to perform those sounds.

When I play my own music, when I’m improvising with other people, there’s maybe an unconscious element of challenge. But ultimately, it has to feel good. Otherwise, I don’t really see the point in doing it. In order to create music, it all has to come from everyday life. It starts with your relationships, it starts with what’s important for you, and that ends up being reflected in how I use my voice. And the vibrations you have in your voice, when you put them out into the world, you have to be conscious of how you’re using it. There are other people who are going to listen to it, and maybe they’re coming to a show to listen to me and feel refreshed. I don’t know what motive they might have in listening to this music, but if I’m going to use my voice to express myself, I want it to be in the best shape possible. Again, this is all really subconscious. I’m not thinking, “I want to make the world a better place” or something like that when I’m using my voice.

You talked about the way you draw from everyday life. I’m curious if you could talk about what that looked like with these new tracks on THE HORIZON SPIRALS / THE HORIZON VIRAL (2026). Who are you today, and how is that coming out in the music on these two tracks? And how does this compare with who you were as a teenager or in your early 20s in bands like UFO or Die and Boredoms?

In living very close to a forest, everyday life is just business as usual, you know? It just does what it does, every day. And that process is ongoing. For example, according to the lunar calendar, spring arrived on February 17th, and that’s also when the new moon arrived. When that day hit, I noticed that the warblers started chirping again. Nature follows this process all the time whether you notice it or not. The insects in the dirt just keep doing what they do, and then they decompose. When I go on walks, I see things like the dung beetles walking around and breaking down the soil, and I also see wild boars.

You know, people will hunt these boars and say, “They’re a menace, they’re destroying things around them.” But actually, humans create roads and cover up dirt so that it can’t breathe anymore. But these animals, these boars, they’ll dig up the dirt and try to create more soil that’s breathable. They’re helping nature. And also, in the forest around me, there’s a lot of stones. I see them as things that are cleansing the air. I see stones and the dirt as senpai, you know, elders. And they’re always doing what they do, every day. I see myself as part of that natural process. I feel that THE HORIZON SPIRALS record came out of that, of feeling like a part of nature. I feel a lot of gratitude to be able to create a record in that environment.

With this record, I feel like I’m not really doing anything new. But one new thing I did was have the sound of metal or steel—I had the players use steel gamelans. On a previous OOIOO record, Gamel (2013), they were using bronze gamelans. But these players had gotten hold of these steel gamelans, which a lot of younger gamelan players are currently using these days. Obviously, gamelan started out as music that was dedicated to the gods, and with the bronze gamelans, the frequencies were very hard to master in the mastering process. I feel like the steel gamelans have a very “new wave” sound to them. And going back to my days in the Boredoms, we would use all kinds of unique instruments. There was always this intent to surprise listeners. Obviously, the Boredoms changed a lot from the ’90s to the 2000s and I’m not part of the band anymore, but I feel like with this new record, a lot of these elements came together very naturally. The SAICOBAB record, NRTYA (2024), was based on ragas, but this record felt new to me in that it came out of a natural process.

When you said these gamelans sound like “new wave,” what do you mean by that?

I meant new wave just literally, like a “new wave of sound,” not “new wave” the genre. I feel like this record is a step up, or like it’s on a new dimension, from Gamel. It’s more of a sound that I can share with other people. With the older gamelans, it’s not just the sound that you hear coming from the instrument—there’s an ancestral aspect to it, an energy. And that can also be a sort of baggage that comes with the instrument. With this new record, it doesn’t have that, there’s more lightheartedness, and it was easier to create melodies with them. We didn’t have to tune all of these instruments to the gamelans because they just naturally matched. By using steel gamelans, even though the sounds of the instruments and the gamelans might not be a perfect fit, there’s still a lightness to the sound. And that was kind of like a “new wave” to me.

You mentioned that you’re able to share this music with more people. Is that an important thing for you? Do you want as many people as possible to hear your music?

The music I’m making isn’t standard pop music where you have hooks and people can understand what I’m singing. Obviously if it’s shared with many people that’s a good thing, but I don’t really think of sharing in that sense. A lot of people who come to my shows, whether it was for the Boredoms or OOIOO, say things like, “I want you to change me” or “I want you to show me something new.” I want to share my music, obviously, but I can only do what I can do. I find it very difficult to have lyrics and put meaning to them. My process has always been to create sounds that come from my body, and it should feel good to me. On this new record, I’m singing lyrics that are not part of any kind of language. I don’t know what listeners will get out of that, but I want them to feel a sensation from it and interpret those sounds in whatever way they want. I’ve come to a point in my life where I don’t really understand why I get in front of people to perform music anymore, it just kinda comes out naturally.

So the things you’re singing have no meaning at all?

With the words I use on this record, some of it is English but pronounced very badly, so I’m not sure if people in the English-speaking world would even understand those words. And there’s a lot of words that are just made-up, from my own language. On this new record, there’s this song “Gamel BE SURE TO SPIRAL,” which is based on a song on the Feather Float (1999) album called “Be Sure to Loop.” The idea for it came from how when you see the horizon, there’s the sky, and then the ocean under it is a straight line. But I imagined the horizon becoming spiral-shaped, and if the horizon became spiral-shaped, maybe all the separation and the division we see in the world would go away. This is also based on the human DNA being a spiral. And you know, the horizon is a phenomenon people see, and it looks straight, and maybe it makes people feel good that it’s straight, but I want it to become a spiral. It’s also based on some dreams I’ve had where the horizon becomes spiral-shaped, and there’s also the sun above and below it.

The meaning I got out of those dreams is that the reality you see with your own eyes isn’t the only reality that exists. And there’s a famous monk from hundreds of years ago, Kūkai [founder of the Shingon school of Buddhism], and his theory was that the ocean is the collective consciousness and the sky is the source of all creation, and that’s why his name is Kūkai, kū (空) means sky and kai (海) means ocean. So, that’s also part of it. Also, another concept behind the song is that what we think of as common sense, or what we think of the world as being, may not be the actual truth.

Those are the kind of ideas that are in “Gamel BE SURE TO SPIRAL”’s lyrics, and it was also created using the gamelan. We had the past record, Gamel, and the word gamel by itself means to hit. And on this album, the hitting aspect comes into play because in hitting these sounds, I’m hoping the horizon will turn into these spiral-shapes. The record is actually just one song, but due to the label wanting to release it digitally and on CD, it was divided into two. But on the vinyl, you’re able to hear it in its full form. And when OOIOO performs, we usually don’t even have any spaces between songs—it’s like a long DJ mix where all the songs are strung together.

Is there anything that we didn’t talk about today that you think is important to mention?

I also want to mention that the song “THE HORIZON” was inspired by a record from the ’70s by the Sun Ra Arkestra. The bassline is actually inspired from the Arkestra, and the melodies that we were playing and I’m singing are also based on them too. I’ve always had an interest in the Arkestra because they’re supposed to be from Jupiter. I was always really interested in how aliens from Jupiter might create their music. The album is also inspired by recent astronomical events. There’s a comet called the 3I/ATLAS. Ironically, NASA didn’t really put out information about it, but I heard of it from this amateur astronomer and photographer—this person has been posting a lot of information about it. It’s supposed to be like a comet, but it was also like a sun from a different galaxy. The sun that we know has nickel inside it which creates magma, but this comet is different and is spiraling into these different shapes. It apparently came really close, and with something that size, it must have affected the Earth somehow.

I end all my interviews with the same question and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

(laughs). My smile. (pauses). I’m having a hard time thinking about this, but it’s not because I hate or like myself—I’m just living with myself. So maybe it can be that I love to eat food, that might be it (laughter).

Do you have a favorite food you like to eat or cook?

I do love to cook, and I actually have a food business too, which is called O0 [the letter O and the number 0]. I have a friend that makes cold-pressed juice, and I thought that you could make something really good out of the pulp that comes out of it since my friend uses really good ingredients. I started using the pulp to make seafood curry, and also okonomiyaki [Japanese cabbage pancakes]. I’m also into making South Indian food—I make food for my friends.

OOIOO’s new album with Lightning Bolt, THE HORIZON SPIRALS / THE HORIZON VIRAL, is out now on the Thrill Jockey website and at Bandcamp.

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Florian Hecker (b. 1975) is a German artist whose sound installations, live performances, and recorded music grapple with sonic boundaries and psychoacoustics. Initially intrigued by electronic producers on labels like Mego, Sähkö, and Cheap, Hecker began constructing his own computer-generated music in the 1990s, and has since released a large number of records and CDs that speak to his evolving interests in synthesis, composition, and perception. Most recently, he released Natural Selection (2026) on PAN, a collection of tracks that are built on ideas related to “automated file selection, database-generating sequencing systems, and the prospect of synthetic cognition.” Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Hecker on February 10th, 2026 via Zoom to discuss his earliest experiences with electronic technology, “sound art,” and his newest album.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: I was revisiting some of your early work, and I love that the first album under your name, IT ISO161975 (1998), has a 14-minute hidden pre-gap track. And then your first album as CD_slopper, SaskieWoxi (2000), comes with a .zip file featuring ASCII art, among other things. It’s clear from early on that you were enamored with technology—when did that start for you?

Florian Hecker: My dad had a Grundig Weltempfänger, a short wave radio with a particularly attractive industrial design, but maybe my first CD player is something to start with here. I remember getting one in the late 1980s for Christmas, just the unit on its own and not an entire stereo system. It has a headphone output with a tiny volume control knob, and I listened to CDs with wired headphones for a year. Then, for next Christmas, I put an amplifier on my wishlist (laughter). The stereo system grew slowly, and there was this sort of forced focus on each device. Fast forward to the releases you mentioned: I made these albums with the format in mind, looking at what the CD could offer. In the end, IT ISO161975 had to be mastered twice since the mastering engineer I initially worked with did not use a system that could write information into the negative space of a CD.

Other than that, my curiosity stemmed from hearing sounds that I couldn’t classify as a child. I would hear part of a strange synthesizer solo in a pop song on the radio and have no idea what it could be. These were sounds that were different from a guitar riff, a drum beat, or—for me back then—visually plausible instrumentation. And then when I saw these tools—synthesizers—that presumably made those sounds, they felt like black boxes, which made me more curious.

I never played a classical instrument; many of my peers that I’ve become close with over the years were far more exposed to underground music when they were young. However, the very first concert I went to was Kraftwerk. This was in Munich in 1991. My friends at school told me that if I were to go to a concert, I had better be there many hours in advance to get a good spot, but their references were popular metal bands like Iron Maiden, Slayer, and Metallica. With this in mind, I took the train to Munich at 12:30pm to make sure I’d arrive early. I grew up close by, though, so it wasn’t a long commute. When I arrived at the venue, Circus Krone, nobody was there (laughter). Luckily, a poster reassured me that the concert was still happening. People started to arrive around 6pm or so, but because I was literally the first one to enter the space, I got to stand in the front row. At the time, they still performed with the entire hardware studio on stage. And “Pocket Calculator” still featured this little synthesizer that they held out to the audience, and you could press a button on it if you were close enough.

It’s this black-boxiness of musical equipment, where you wouldn’t know what it was, that made me curious. And then much later on, I was listening to electronic music at Ultraschall in Munich. I remember seeing Pan Sonic there, using these instruments that Jari Lehtinen built for them, including the famous typewriter synthesizer. It looked so different from the instruments that other artists were using at the time, and this fascinated me as well.

When did you first get a synthesizer? I’m assuming it was the first instrument you played?

The first thing I owned that was more of an instrument was a Roland Space Echo. And then when I came across the first records from Mego, I got curious and wanted to know how they were made, especially once I understood they’d been produced with computers. I was also briefly studying computational linguistics at the time, and through that encountered NeXT Computers before moving to Vienna in 1997; these had a built-in sound card for real-time audio, and they’d become a favored platform in computer music as much as in speech synthesis. So those were some starting points. Also, before that, a friend and I were DJing at a small bar in a nearby city on Fridays. Music-making started from listening. Through Mego, Sähkö, and some Cheap releases, I was drawn to material that featured a large number of “refusals”: no beats, no rhythms, no melodies. I was left wondering: what’s left? There was the occasional piece that might have only been a bonus track on a 12-inch or CD, and I found those the most attractive.

Were there any live shows in particular that stood out for you when you were younger in club settings?

Many. Seeing Pan Sonic back then was really special. There were performances from a group of musicians from Cologne who performed as Global Electronic Network, and those stood out. The Rephlex crowd came fairly often to Munich, and artists associated with Hard Wax from Berlin were distinct. For some years in the 1990s, Ultraschall in Munich had a quasi-encyclopedic program and an “ambient” room that was rather experimental. It was really informative.

All the early releases in your career—IT ISO161975, which I mentioned earlier, but also [OT] Xackpy Breakpoint (1999), and the CD_slopper releases—were super minimal in a way that aligns with what you’re saying about “no beats, no rhythms.” That even feels true with the collaborative Esognomig (1999) LP. What were the intentions there?

IT ISO161975 was very much me experimenting with tools. I partly made it at home, partly at the first Mego studio in Vienna. This stripped-down, low-frequency material was oriented along the tracks carved out by Sähkö. Really, this first album was more a matter of mimicking things and less about having a clear concept. The untitled long track on [OT] Xackpy Breakpoint was done almost exclusively in a software called Sound Effects at the time, which could handle the playback of multiple files simultaneously and offered particular ways of pitch shifting. Over the years, I got more invested in working within a single software environment to produce something. So these early releases you mention are a mix of experimentation, and looking up to certain artists you admire while making sure you don’t sound exactly like them.

At what point do you feel like you really came into your own? Was that with Sun Pandämonium (2003)?

It’s connected to that. I made a CD as a contribution to the exhibition Ausgeträumt… at the Secession in 2001. The pieces were later reissued as a 12-inch around the same time that Sun Pandämonium came out, and that was called Pandämonium 9 Playlist (2003). The pieces on both releases, and more so on Pandämonium 9 Playlist, originated from my encounter with Alberto de Campo, whom I met in 1999 during a year-long workshop on physical modelling synthesis at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany. At the time, Alberto was working with Curtis Roads at UCSB on the first version of PulsarGenerator. This, and also a previous instrument from Curtis, CloudGenerator, embodied for me a certain angle of computer music that I wasn’t familiar with at the time. It sounded intense, direct, and raw, and not like expensive or overambitious ambient music. Alberto made a version of Xenakis’ GENDYN algorithm at the time, and we experimented with feeding this into a reinterpretation of Trevor Wishart’s waveset concept, from which Alberto made a playable real-time version. Also during those years, Florian Pumhösl invited me to contribute a soundtrack to an exhibition he was working on, which ended up becoming PV Trecks (2004). The pieces were not actually included in the exhibition as such, but functioned as an artifact to accompany the exhibition—an extension—in parallel.

What’s it like collaborating with other artists in general? Around this time you released Palimpsest (2004), which was made with Yasunao Tone. You mentioned the black-box nature of these machines that you liked, and I’m wondering if there’s something similar you feel when collaborating with others?

The notion of working with others is so particular in sound; it encompasses much more than only doing things with other artists. I’m thinking of these ongoing, very long collaborations with Alberto de Campo, Vincent Lostanlen, Maya B Kronic, NORM. So many sound productions benefit from others being part of them. These exchanges are crucial.

Has any label you’ve released an album on shaped the way you thought about the music you wanted to make? You’ve mentioned your love for Mego, as well as Rephlex, and you have that one album called Recordings for Rephlex (2005). Has anything like that ever happened, or was that never really a factor?

With Mego, it’s difficult to dissect this in retrospect given the moment and conceptual formation that was part of my time spent with them. Recordings for Rephlex was simply chosen as a pragmatic title; the tracks on that are certainly not the “braindance” that Rephlex followers were after, and there were some good reviews, with audiences lamenting it being so out of line with their expectations. But Rephlex did that all the time; there were so many releases that were just utterly different. The same goes for Resynthese FAVN (2024) with Blank Forms. When Russell Haswell and I were working on the Blackest Ever Black UPIC record, we wanted it to come out on a classical music label. This was conceptually relevant for us even before we started working on it at CCMIX in Paris. It took some time, and our manager knew someone who had just started working at Warner, but again, it did not affect how we made the music.

Can you talk about the difference between releasing music on a CD or LP versus having music as a multi-channel installation in a particular space? I know you had music playing at the DMZ in 2014, for example.

At the DMZ, I had an installation and also a performance in that auditorium with staged seating directly overlooking the border, and a little later also a 12-inch vinyl publication. But let us go back quickly to the pieces Pandämonium 9 Playlist and Stocha Acid Vlook that were part of the exhibition in 2001. Back then, I had strong skepticism towards anything labeled “sound art,” a term I still find outdated today. Contributions to an exhibition—as something that would be in sync with a publication, like a CD or a 12-inch—was a shortcut that worked for me. There was also this pretense that an exhibited work would allow for a sense of sonic and conceptual continuity with something that is published or performed. CDs and records also have this particular afterlife: once they’re out, they take on a very different existence.

Around 2005, Cerith Wyn Evans invited me to contribute something to his exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris and suggested I occupy one of the exhibition spaces, which put me in a situation where I knew I could work in formats other than before. Specifically, this meant I could work with a particular number of channels and sound sources in the space, yet in terms of integrity and fit, I still thought of working with synthesis and editing concepts that would unify into something, not unlike how I would structure an album. The multiplication of sound sources challenged this perspective immensely. At the same time, I could continue the way I edit and structure sound; that is, mainly by avoiding the concept of mixing several sound sources altogether, meaning there were no superimpositions of sounds. Instead, I was securing a space for each process and algorithm through a dedicated channel and loudspeaker.

You mentioned that you were skeptical of anything labeled “sound art.” Why was that?

I felt that “sound art” was too disconnected from non-academic electronic music, such as techno or ambient. It felt like a relic of a time when the compartmentalization of genres seemed odd. It’s a bit like “video art,” a term that’s barely used any more. But it’s also probably because what was labeled sound art back then—the late 1990s—lacked a certain intensity, which is a quality in sound material I’ve been intrigued by for a long time.

How are you even measuring intensity? There can be an intensity in volume or in rigor. I love your album on Presto!?, 2⁄8 Bregman 4⁄8 Deutsch 7⁄8 Hecker 1⁄8 Höller (2012). To my ears, that album is intense but also scans as funny and playful. The sounds and timbres scan as unexpected and consequently humorous.

Intensity is as strange a concept as timbre, sitting on the continuously moving Möbius strip that oscillates between the subjectively felt, the unknown, and the measured. In the mid-2000s, I became interested in the psychoacoustics of non-standard sounds. By this I mean not musical psychology, nor psychoacoustics in the sense of experiments employing quasi-clinical test signals, but rather how these concepts hold up when applied to sounds generated through algorithmic synthesis, such as GENDYN oscillators, chaotic oscillators, and so on. Intensity here also has to do with processes that wouldn’t diminish the qualities of an input sound through alteration, but instead intensify the overall sonic field by suggesting a specific constellation of relations. These often minimal but highly effective twists are often just time-shifts in milliseconds, particular pitch relations, or concepts stemming from visual Gestalt theory. Apart from the Presto!? album, Hecker Höller Tracks (2007) also featured this throughout, as did many subsequent productions.

When did you come to the realization that mixing was not achieving the effects you wanted?

I’ve barely done any mixing from Pandämonium 9 Playlist onward. Something that triggered this was experiencing sounds generated with software that my friends at Mego were using. It was this idea of using, as much as possible, only one tool, concept, or algorithm as the sound source and producing a kind of quasi-enclosed sound, where any additional processing might diminish qualities rather than support them. This is applied in most of my productions. Synopsis Seriation (2021) features segmentation and automated arrangement of four three-channel pieces into one long continuous stereo arrangement. Hecker Leckey Sound Voice Chimera (2015), originally a three-channel installation and performance, only made it into a publication once the label [PAN] started to work with digital downloads; hence, channels one and two are featured on the respective sides of the 12-inch, and the third channel exists as a digital download.

Earlier you mentioned video art. I’m especially fond of the early video art from the ’60s and ’70s—artists like Bruce Nauman and Joan Jonas, the latter of whom appears on Chimerization (2012). Can you speak to how video art has affected the way you approach art? The earliest stuff reminds me of this stuff you’re talking about regarding reduction, stuff like Joan Jonas’ Vertical Roll (1972) and Left Side Right Side (1972). And what was it like having Joan Jonas on your album?

Video art as a category certainly was not an input. When I was producing Chimerization, I was teaching at MIT, where Joan was a colleague, so this was also pragmatic (laughter). She has a fantastic voice and was up for the idea.

How did you decide on the vocalists on the three different versions of Chimerization? You’re editing the voices in some capacity, and I’m wondering what it’s like to work with something more concrete.

Well, there really was a good dose of pragmatism at work. I was based in Cambridge at the time and that certainly had an impact on the radius. East Coast. Guerino Mazzola already appeared in a footnote of Reza Negarestani’s libretto, and he happened to be in the same city as the Orfield Labs, an interesting place regarding anechoic chambers in the US. With the follow-up piece, Articulação (2014), I could work with Joan La Barbara. What shifted with these pieces was that I started working with external signals rather than synthesis directly, which was the case with more or less everything before.

When you’re teaching students, is there a specific guiding philosophy that you have?

One aspect is about raising awareness of the material conditions you’re working with. The question of how something is produced seems to fade away, but looking at sound, you can see that the “how” has immediate effects on one’s sensorial and aesthetic encounter with a sound. So it’s about reflecting on the tools you’re using to make sound, and that this choice of materials is never neutral. It’s important to see the diversity of approaches. This idea is under pressure; there’s a troubling degree of homogeneity being produced, and I want my students to develop a critical mind and ear for what each tool actually inscribes in their work and what it forecloses—what are its conditions, origins, possibilities?

How do you feel like you’re avoiding sameness in your own music? And we can talk about this in relation to your new album, Natural Selection (2026). What’s different now, and how do you stay fresh over decades of making music?

The recent pieces all look at the notion of difference and cognition, human and synthetic. With the pieces from around Chimerization, I started looking into tools and concepts stemming from audiology and psychoacoustics that were originally conceived for sound analysis, but then used them as a means for synthesis. Within synthetic cognition and machine listening, some of these processes employ iterative optimization steps, guided by gradient descent, where the uncompleted resynthesis of intermediate computational steps bears a vast range of artifacts and byproducts, considered debris or remnants, that add new characteristics to a sound.

Can you give an example of a track like that?

“Syn 21845 8 J15 Q12” and “M 35 36” from the new album. Also Inspection II (2019) and Resynthese FAVN, but they’re all using different algorithms at their core, so the byproducts that appear are also different. This notion of difference is quite closely tied to the shifting notion of timbre. Another album, Synopsis Seriation, took this as a structural point of departure: four differently resynthesized three-channel pieces served as input for an automated segmentation and sequencing system, through which they were collapsed into a single, long two-channel piece. Natural Selection, however, is more varied and less programmatic; it resists the kind of systemic logic that governs these other releases.

The album is characteristic of how you’ve presented work throughout your career, where you’ll have much longer tracks juxtaposed with these shorter ones. Do you just like having these two extremes? What’s the thinking behind the drastic differences in runtime?

Often, the differences at work here are extremely subtle and simply need space to become perceptible. So, a certain number of iterations is required as these pieces slowly scan through the different resynthesis steps. In terms of duration, these pieces are far from extreme. Syn As Tex [AC] (2021), released on Stefan Juster’s [aka Jung An Tagen] ETAT label lasts around 53 hours as a monophonic track; and the pieces of the Resynthesizers exhibitions exceeded the duration of the show itself, running for a little over three months. I have also been a bit puzzled by the recent excitement around so-called long duration; perhaps that is just my way of processing it.

There’s a question I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

Oh (laughs). I have a sympathy for details. When you’re into this really unpopular form of music, you need to have an obsession.

Florian Hecker’s Natural Selection is out now via PAN. More information about Hecker’s work can be found at his website and Galerie Neu.

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Thank you for reading the 226th issue of Tone Glow. Obsessions.

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Tara Clerkin Trio is a rock band from Bristol. While the group’s beginnings are as the Tara Clerkin Band—a psych-rock outfit featuring eight different members—the collective’s pared-down iteration is nevertheless sprawling, featuring influences that range from downtempo to trip-hop to post-rock to Kosmische, all in a cheery, cozy manner without being cloying. The trio is made of three intertwined members: Tara Clerkin (b. 1990), her partner Sunny Joe Paradiso (b. 1990), and the latter’s brother Patrick Benjamin (b. 1996). In 2020 the group released their self-titled debut LP and followed it up with two EPs, In Spring (2021) and On the Turning Ground (2023). Their newest album is titled Somewhere Good (2026) and features eight songs that expand on their subtle but varied sonic palette, simultaneously honing in on traditional song forms while indulging in resplendent, long-form jams. Joshua Minsoo Kim interviewed the Tara Clerkin Trio on May 27th, 2026 to discuss their childhood, the Bristol scene they emerged from, and the ideas informing their new album.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: What are the earliest memories you have of engaging with art? And this could be music or film or dance—anything.

Sunny Joe Paradisos: For me, a lot of it was music. My mum played music a lot, and she used to take me to gigs when I was very young—my friends would be playing in this social center that we used to go to a lot. And we’d have parties in the house. I remember being a toddler and coming into the living room and they’re all sat there, smoking and drinking and listening to music, curling up on the sofa or in the corner. Those were high-impact memories.

Tara Clerkin: One of my earliest memories of being floored by music is when my brother showed me Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92 (1992). We were on holiday in Ireland and we were lying in the garden and watching the stars and he was like, “Hey, check this out.” And I was like, “Whoaaa.” (laughter). We were talking about the size of the universe and the distance of the stars. I was 12 or something.

Patrick Benjamin: I had piano lessons. Also, when I was little my dad took me to folk festivals quite a lot and they were awesome. I remember falling asleep to Nick Harper and then him telling me afterwards that while I was asleep, he met him and chatted to him. “Oh, the guy from the stage? No way!” (laughter).

I like that all three of you mentioned stuff that involves music in a social context, of music being a glue that brings people together. Is that how you all interfaced with music through your teenage years, too? Obviously Pat and Sunny Joe, you two are brothers, but I’m curious if that’s the case in general.

Patrick Benjamin: I remember getting to a certain age where I started going to parties and would put on certain music and nobody would like it (laughter). So that’s an anti-social bit, but there were one or two people who’d be like, “I know this!” or “What is this?” and you’d spark conversation and be friends forever.

What would you play?

Patrick Benjamin: At that age it was stuff like Four Tet and Burial.

Sunny Joe Paradisos: I remember being out and going back to a friend’s house and lying down. I put on Connan Mockasin’s “Forever Dolphin Love” and the beginning has this really drone-y section. I was just on the bed, really vibing out, and my friend’s friend was like, “Who is this?” “Connan Mockasin, man.” “This is fucking horrible.” (laughter). I thought he was gonna be like, “This is so sick!” (laughter).

Tara Clerkin: Yeah, going to parties when you’re young and coming out in school as someone who’s into a particular type of music—not-normal music—and then finding your little scene there. Playing gigs, and seeing the people that you know in your city go on stage in front of you and do amazing stuff—it’s all tied together with the enjoyment of music.

Sunny Joe Paradisos: When I was starting to go clubbing around 16, going to raves and free parties, I was like, “Oh shit, there’s a whole underground!” But there’s an earlier bit, too, when you realize that you’re a bit of a freak. I was what we used to call “grebos” in the Midlands. These are people who’d experiment with painting their nails black. You’d have big baggy jeans, and there were these things that would make you stand out and be ridiculed, even physically threatened. A lot of that is tied with the cultural identity of expressing yourself. When we were young, it was blink-182 and Rage Against the Machine to start with, and then you’d begin to dig more, and music was always a very big part of that identity.

Patrick Benjamin: I got into dance music when I was not of age, and there’s the thing that Burial talks about, of this music that’s nostalgic for a period of clubbing that doesn’t really exist in the same way anymore. I kind of had the reverse of that, where I was nostalgic for the clubbing I was definitely going to have, and then I went to clubs when I was 17 in this small town—where none of the clubs are good—and I was like, “Wait, is this… good?” (laughter). And maybe there was a scene previously and there is now, but I was just in this spot where I was like, oh there’s so little good that you can go out and see.

Sunny Joe Paradisos: A bit of a lull in the Shrewsbury cultural scene (laughter).

Patrick Benjamin: There was a techno night there once a month called Traffic. It was at a pub called The Vaults. It’s like a sports bar now.

Sunny Joe Paradisos: I used to go out to The Vaults as well, when I was a teenager. It hasn’t got the same vibes anymore.

In the early 2010s, Bristol was important for y’all because of things like Howling Owl and Stolen Recordings. Do you mind talking to me about what it was like at the time and what made it unique?

Sunny Joe Paradisos: It was very DIY. Bristol is a mid-sized city, especially when we first moved there—it wasn’t quite on the map. Obviously there are periods when it was known for things, like for trip-hop, so there is a musical prestige or whatever, but when we were there it was not a place where you’d be like, “I’m gonna get signed, I’m gonna get rich.” It was just not a thing that entered into the dynamic. It was very “by and for the community,” and we were just having fun. It was a lot of crossover between the different scenes, a lot of mixed bills. A lot of people who went to the analog techno nights also went to the power-pop nights or the punk nights or the weird, experimental improv stuff. It was very welcoming and inspiring as well. The music was great, and you’d go to a gig and see four bands doing completely different things, and you’d be motivated. And since everyone was friends, it was just a way for us to enjoy each other’s music. We could put on DIY shows in unusual places or in people’s houses—there are some decent mid-sized venues in Bristol, but a few have shut down. The more art-space, squattish-type ones aren’t there anymore, really. Me and Tara haven’t been back in a few years, but back in the day, I really enjoyed it and got a lot from it.

Patrick Benjamin: I came in the tail end of it, and it was such a lovely group of people—very welcoming. There were loads of people who’d encourage you to do music.

Sunny Joe Paradisos: It was very unpretentious and not gatekeep-y. It was very encouraging, and you could find people to play with, and people would put you on. It had a very positive vibe.

Tara Clerkin: I didn’t really play music before finding that scene. I wrote a bit of poetry, and then I wrote and recorded one song on GarageBand, and then right away there were six people who were like, “Let’s perform this live! I can do that part! I have this equipment!” It was because of that ethos that I even started at all.

Was there a point at which you decided to commit more strongly to music?

Tara Clerkin: It just kind of built up slowly. At one point I was doing pottery and music at the same time, and then I decided to put the ceramics on hold and focus more on the music; that was after our first album [Tara Clerkin Trio (2020)] came out.

Sunny Joe Paradisos: I remember you showing us your first couple demos. There were a few big houses we lived in at various points, and there was one called The Pink House, which was an eight-bed, big townhouse with lots of people living in it. You lived there and you showed me some demos, some bedroom recordings, and I remember being like, “These are great.” We lived in another big house called Belvoir, and a lot of us would play each other’s music. We kind of called it the Belvoir House Band, unofficially. If Karl was fronting it, it’d be called Karl Band. If it was Ed Penfold fronting it, it’d be Ed Penfold Band. And if Tara was fronting it, it’d be Tara Clerkin Band. It was the same musicians, but whoever was the songwriter, it became their named project. It was an amalgam band that did all these different projects, but some of them gained more traction than others, or others wound down.

Tara Clerkin: There wasn’t a point where I was like, “This is a thing I do.” It was more like, okay, this is the next thing. “Do you want to play a gig?” “Yes.” “Do you want to release a tape?” “Yes.”

Sunny Joe Paradisos: And that’s what it is. Music is all about moving goalposts. When you’re starting a band, what do bands do? They play gigs and record music and try to sell it. When you start doing that, you’re not like, “I’m on this path that’s gonna lead to getting signed.” But as you continue to make music, you realize that the goalpost is constantly changing, and there isn’t really a point at which you’re like, “I’m a musician.” We’re not all full-time professional musicians, but we’re years down the line of that process. And it’s not a tangible thing you can achieve, you know what I mean? It’s this weird thing you flail through.

Patrick Benjamin: Before I lived in Bristol, I was making little bits on Ableton. I remember sending something to Sunny and he sent it to Joe [Hatt] of Howling Owl, and he emailed me like, “Oh, I wanna put this out!” I made a bunch of new stuff for that, and they did a thing where they did it as download codes. They were printed on little strips of paper that were put inside clay balls, and you had to crack the clay ball open to get the download code. It was a comment on the superfluous nature of the modern streaming age. It was very low pressure. And from there it was like, okay, let’s play shows.

Sunny Joe Paradisos: I felt nostalgic looking at your old SoundCloud. For you, Patch, you’re a bit younger and your first tunes are from when you were 14. Our brother is Simon and there’s a song called “Si Likes Sugar in His Tea,” and it’s a nice ambient, electronic song. And I was like, “Wow, I remember these tunes!”

Patrick Benjamin: It’s nice having that be there. Simon makes music as well, and we were talking about how there was a period when you could just put stuff on the internet and people would listen to it. Now, it’s a lot harder. My partner is doing it at the moment and trying to find press for it, to get people to listen to it. But there was this period where you could put things on SoundCloud.

Sunny Joe Paradisos: The algorithm has become such a gatekeeper, hasn’t it?

Tara, I’m curious about your debut album, Hello (2017). You mentioned how you made pottery and I’m curious if you saw any link between these two practices at all. And I’m curious about this period in general for you. I know Sunny Joe played on that album as well.

Tara Clerkin: That was a long time ago—I think I started making it in 2015. After we played some gigs and I released a few singles on some tape compilations, Howling Owl and Stolen Body asked if I wanted to make an album. I really liked the first few albums from Osees when they were called OCS. That was the main inspiration for the sound world that I wanted to build—where you feel like you’re in the room with it, and then sometimes it drifts off. I was also getting into a lot of minimalism as well.

Sunny Joe Paradisos: And Micachu & The Shapes was a big influence as well.

Tara Clerkin: Yeah. I wasn’t coming from a musical background, and definitely not a music technology background, so I could hear how stuff like OCS was made and felt that I could do it myself. I never really thought that the music and pottery were connected, but at one point I thought that I was splitting my creative mind in two and that I should focus my mind on one and see what happens. But actually, the more creative stuff you do, the more ideas you have—for me, anyway. Doing the pottery alongside the music just feeds this state of mind of thinking creatively all the time, in different ways.

So how did this all turn into the Tara Clerkin Trio? I know the band originally had eight people in it. And how did Patrick get into the fold?

Patrick Benjamin: I begged them (laughter).

Sunny Joe Paradisos: I remember we needed someone to play keyboards for the album launch. It was still Tara Clerkin Band playing Tara Clerkin music, and Tara Clerkin Trio was kind of a joke because we ended up being the three remaining people who turned this into something else. And we thought the name sounded kind of jazzy, and maybe it was supposed to sound jazzy, conceptually.

Tara Clerkin: And Pat was bringing the jazz with his piano.

Sunny Joe Paradisos: The big band was psych-y, garage-y, and experimental. And when there were fewer people, it changed.

Patrick Benjamin: We covered Steve Kuhn’s “The Meaning of Love” (1971), and that’s when things got a little jazzy. It wasn’t really a conscious decision to become jazzy. “In the Room” was the first trio song that we did. We borrowed someone’s loop pedal and did this short loop where I’ve laid up some clarinet, and then we just jammed it. We thought it was cool, and that’s how we write all our songs (laughter).

Sunny Joe Paradisos: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I think the jazz thing came from trip-hop, hip-hop, and downtempo. We got a looper and started experimenting with sampling. Jazzy samples are a big part of a certain type of hip-hop, electronica, and downtempo, so it was us trying to make our own version of that stuff, but sampling ourselves instead of sampling jazz records.

What artists were you looking to as reference points?

Sunny Joe Paradisos: One of the first things we did was us trying to make something sound like a Sun Ra sample. But there’s a lot of British downtempo music from the late ’90s and early 2000s that has this twee vibe. Amon Tobin has it at points, but his stuff is a bit darker.

Tara Clerkin: DJ Krush.

Patrick Benjamin: Lemon Jelly.

Sunny Joe Paradisos: There’s a band called Alpha that has music like that. Some of it is kind of silly sounding, but it was chillout music. Chillout compilations were actually a big thing, even aesthetically. There are some amazing album covers where someone is sat in some white CGI beanbag with some big headphones on and there’s a TV with fish on it (laughter). I love that aesthetic.

Patrick Benjamin: I remember one early reference point you kept bringing up was old Orange adverts. They were a mobile phone provider in the UK and in one era, their ad campaigns were this weird, futuristic thing.

You did the design for the first Tara Clerkin Trio album, Patrick.

Patrick Benjamin: Kind of. I was the pair of hands that put it together in Photoshop. But we did it all together; it was a communal effort.

I can kind of see where you’re coming from with this chillout comparison because there’s the one image with that random blue shape on the beach (laughter).

Patrick Benjamin: That was it! It was those inserts.

Sunny Joe Paradisos: The blue guy was in those different spaces, yeah. And on SoundCloud, I saw that we did that COVID mix, and we had the blue guy in your living room with the big view of the city at night, which is actually the same view as the album cover. And there’s a bottle of wine and a glass on the table (laughter). So that was definitely the vibe we were going for.

Was there a reason to release the shorter EPs after this first album instead of compiling more material for a full album? Was it because World of Echo wanted something out in a short span of time?

Tara Clerkin: In Spring (2021) was just supposed to be a single, but then we ended up making so much stuff and it fitted together thematically, so we were like… it’s four songs.

Sunny Joe Paradisos: Materially, COVID happened. People started being like, “Do you wanna record for a week?” Studio times were expensive so every time we went in, we did as much as we could. Those ended up being the beginnings of that and the next EP, On the Turning Ground (2023). It felt different during COVID, but there’s a balance where you don’t want to sit on stuff for too long—things belong in the context in which they are made. And things move on so quick nowadays. We could’ve waited to make an album, but both of those EPs feel like complete EPs, and they feel like sisters—they’re from a similar period, one is a progression from another, and they were made in a similar way. I kind of see them together as an album.

Patrick Benjamin: With Turning Ground, we got to a point where we had enough material for it to be a longer thing, at least in theory. But there was a fair bit that we couldn’t get to work and it felt right with the songs we had to finish them off and make it this self-contained thing.

What sort of things were you not able to work out? And what sort of things were you able to make happen?

Sunny Joe Paradisos: Songwriting was coming more into it at that point. And straight loop-based jams, which we had more previously, were maybe not going anywhere. Rather than stuff being random textures, we wanted to write proper songs. That was the beginning of that. If you’re just recording for a week, you can end up with a lot of bits.

Tara Clerkin: Some of them were quite hard to let go of. There are a few where we really believed that it was good, but we also knew that it wasn’t finished. And maybe we can go back to them.

Sunny Joe Paradisos: There’s that one Stereolab album that’s a B-sides album, and it’s one of my favorites from them. It’s Space Age Batchelor Pad Music (1993). In the vinyl there’s an insert, and for every single track it’s like, “We made this track at this time and we didn’t include it because blah.” It’s really interesting.

Patrick Benjamin: We should do that. We’ve got so many bits of crap (laughter).

Sunny Joe, you just mentioned that you were making more “proper songs.” What makes something a “proper song” for the Tara Clerkin Trio? Is it just that you’re relying less on a loop pedal?

Sunny Joe Paradisos: By proper songs I guess more like traditional songs. An instrumental piece can be conceptual and atmospheric, but without lyrics, you still can’t convey stuff that clearly—you can only bring senses of stuff. When you bring lyrics into something, you have structure to think about and how that all works as a composition. So maybe it’s about songs where you marry those things together. I don’t wanna use the word “pop” because I don’t think it’s the right description—people have been like, “This is their most poppy record!” and that’s not something I’m averse to, but I don’t think it’s poppy.

Tara Clerkin: I think people are talking about classic song structures.

Patrick Benjamin: People use that word to mean so many things.

With the new album, Somewhere Good (2026), how are you deciding if a song should have lyrics or not?

Tara Clerkin: We always write at least the barebones of the song, and then I write the melody and then I write the lyrics. Some of them, we just know that we have strong ideas that we can convey without lyrics and don’t consider it. I don’t know why, really, but it just feels that way.

Patrick Benjamin: Sometime it’s just like, this thing we’ve made with some loops would slap as a song, and it’d be really good to have some lyrics that could bring some structure to it.

Tara Clerkin: And we’ll jam a lot, yeah. I’ll just make sounds with my mouth (starts humming melodies) over the music, while we’re writing it. Sometimes it’s really hard, like, “I know what this song is about and all it needs is the lyrics.” Those are the hardest ones.

Sunny Joe Paradisos: “Silently,” you pontificated on for a while. You had a very specific thing, and once you got it, that was that.

Tara Clerkin: Right. “Lazy Daisy” was quite hard, and that’s because it was a very vocal-led song. I really liked doing it, but it takes a long time to distill your ideas and have it carry meaning while remaining sparse.

Sunny Joe Paradisos: And one word can change the meaning so deeply. For that song, you’re trying to write an upbeat song about how shit pointless jobs are, but how do you say that without sounding mopey, without putting people in a downer space, without sounding entitled? It can be such a fine line to get to the place you want where you’re expressing the thing you want in the way you want to express it—it’s so nuanced. There will be one little rejig and it completely changes how something comes across.

Tara Clerkin: And it’s in the melody as well—how you deliver each line.

Patrick Benjamin: From my perspective, as someone who’s just playing instruments and contributing loops sometimes, we’ll be jamming and I’ll think, we need lyrics to hold everything in place.

Is that an intentional maneuver with this album, to not put people in a downer mood?

Tara Clerkin: Yeah. We talked a lot about emotions while writing this album. That was a big difference from the other things we’ve released, and that was always what came up—recognizing difficult emotions but not wallowing in them. A lot of the music we really like is commenting on shit stuff, but we’re offering some light to it in some way.

Sunny Joe Paradisos: There’s the song “Pigs… (In There)” by Robert Wyatt. And there’s things by Ivor Cutler. My mental state is very linked to the stuff that I absorb, and there is a lot of stuff to absorb now—there’s a lot thrown at us. I’d rather contribute something that feels lighter and more positive, and hopefully there’s something empowering that comes from that. Being aware of the ills of the world can be an important part of the process. You should feel angry about stuff but at the same time, too much of that can be paralyzing and it can put you in a blackpilled kind of headspace, and it’s hard not to get too much of that these days if you’re not careful. Times feel dark, and I think a lot of people feel conscious of all this.

A lot of the music I hear on the radio now, and the music that people are putting out, seems to be connecting to “goodness” in this way I like. It’s trendy now to be nice and care about stuff, and that’s real progress. There’s a song we’ve been referencing a lot: “Power of Love” by Nocturnal Emissions. It’s great because it’s the most chirpy song I’ve ever heard, but the lyrics are about having a bloody revolution and smashing all the power structures. It’s actually quite violent. When I heard that, it blew me away. When I hear it I’m like, maybe we can win all these battles. And I feel that way more than if I’d heard all these things over a more negative-sounding bit of music.

Tara Clerkin: When we end up using a lot of discordant sounds, it can quickly go into a dark-sounding place, so a lot of the time when we build up and add more tones to the mix, we do stop and be like, “Oh, that’s gone dark.” And then Patch is like, “That’s because it’s a diminished blah blah.” (laughter).

Sunny Joe Paradisos: The basslines may reference jungle and drum ‘n’ bass, which is very feel-good music, but there’s something about those low, simple basslines that feel quite invigorating and positive.

Patrick Benjamin: The basslines in drum ‘n’ bass tend to be more complicated and they’ll have some weird accidentals in there to keep the movement going. Our basslines may sound drum ‘n’ bass, but the melodies are more like dub or something. It’s simpler and repetitive and driving.

Something like “Slow Island” has such a reggae bassline.

Sunny Joe Paradisos: Oh yeah.

And something like “Movin’ On” sounds like it could get darker but then it ends up being more cartoonish.

Sunny Joe Paradisos: That song was inspired by the DVD menu for the boxset of Spaced (laughter). All the characters are floating around and saying quotes from the show, like, “Babylon 5’s a big pile o’ shit!” It’s got a certain vibe.

Are there any other unexpected reference points that people wouldn’t get from hearing the album?

Sunny Joe Paradisos: Bach is a reference point for all of us.

Tara Clerkin: Bossa nova for “Silently,” but because the lyrics are about being a woman and how you’re perceived in the world and how you perceive yourself, we wanted to echo a bit of ’90s R&B—there’s the Spanish-y guitar there.

Sunny Joe Paradisos: You also wrote the lyrics after reading the John Berger essay, Ways of Seeing (1972).

Tara Clerkin: The lyrics were entirely inspired by that. There’s a passage in it where he says, “A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping […] And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman.” I read that and very much identified with this description, and it was the first time that I had considered that it wasn’t a universal experience, that it was something that comes from society. It was on my mind quite a lot, and I wanted to describe it myself and how trippy it is. I was thinking of all the things that perpetuate that—watching MTV when I was a teenager, thinking of these music videos which objectify women, but loving the music and it being an influence on me musically, too. It was all a nod to that.

I end all my interviews with the same question and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about the other band members?

Sunny Joe Paradisos: We have a lot of personal connections. Something I love about Patch is that he’s a good-vibes guy, not as in he’s like, “Everything’s good,” but he’s always nice to be around. He always makes every hang more enjoyable for his presence, which makes it really nice to be in a band with him. And it’s nice to have him as a brother.

Patrick Benjamin: That’s very sweet.

Tara Clerkin: Pat is very excited about things very often, which I enjoy, especially on tour. It makes things exciting for me.

Patrick Benjamin: Yeah, like particular train lines (laughter).

Tara Clerkin: Yeah. Or the hot dogs in Copenhagen (laughter).

Sunny Joe Paradisos: They’re not remarkable hot dogs—just basic street hot dogs.

Patrick Benjamin: They’re good! (laughter). I guess you live in Chicago so you’ve got that there, but it’s a novelty for us to be able to get a tasty hot dog on every street corner (laughter). Both of these guys have shown me a lot of interesting music and they have a lot of interesting ideas. And they always know how to turn that into something good, into something real. They’re very inspiring.

Tara Clerkin: Aww. And well, the thing about Sunny is that he’s funny. He’s very funny on stage as well.

Sunny Joe Paradisos: I do stupid bants.

Patrick Benjamin: Both me and Tara are too scared to do stage bants, so Sunny brings all that.

Tara Clerkin: He brings plenty.

Sunny Joe Paradisos: The thing about Tara is that she’s very naturally talented, she’s a creative person. She didn’t come from a musical background but she’s very good at making music, she writes excellent lyrics, she’s good at making pottery. You’re just very good at it all. I think it’s easy for people who are naturally talented at things to have imposter syndrome because they think they don’t deserve it, but you do. And you work very, very hard at it.

Tara Clerkin: Aww, thank you.

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Stephen Vitiello (b. 1964) is a guitarist, electronic musician, and sound artist born in New York City. Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, he created dozens of soundtracks for filmmakers and video artists such as Jem Cohen, Seoungho Cho, Eder Santos, and Peter Callas. It was in his time working at Electronic Arts Intermix that he met Nam June Paik, eventually compiling the work in the retrospective album Works 1958-1979 (2001). Vitiello has also released numerous albums throughout the past three decades, collaborating with artists like Scanner, Machinefabriek, Lawrence English, and Steve Roden. He recently released Second (2025), a collaborative album with Brendan Canty & Hahn Rowe that eschewed his typical ambient soundscapes for grooving, experimental rock music. This Friday, he’ll release parallel infinitives (2026), his second record with the poet Edwin Torres. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Vitiello on May 29th, 2025 via Zoom to discuss his New York upbringing, getting tricked by Pauline Oliveros, and his many collaborations over the years. Additional questions were asked more recently via email and are included in this interview.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: You were born in New York, correct?

Stephen Vitiello: Yeah, I was born in New York and I never thought I would leave. I lived the first 40 years of my life there. I grew up in Park Slope and was there until college, when I went to SUNY Purchase. After that I was almost always in one sublet or another, in Park Slope or Tribeca or the base of Canal Street or Chelsea. But Brooklyn has always felt like home.

What was it like growing up in Brooklyn? What comes to mind first?

I think the first thing is Prospect Park. It was a home base for any day that wasn’t totally frozen over, and we’d play frisbee, play baseball. At that point, especially when I was younger, people lived in brownstones, and these weren’t chopped-up brownstones yet, so there was a lot of going to people’s houses and listening to records. There was a lot I took for granted until I left the city; I didn’t know how fortunate I was to be there. From the time I was 13 or 14, I was starting to meet bands, poets, people who seemed like everyday New York life, and I began to realize it wasn’t like this for people in many places.

I took for granted the access to record stores, bookstores, and being able to go to places on foot. I’ve now been in Richmond, Virginia for 20 years, and I don’t drive. This is one of the many things that makes me feel like an oddity, but I grew up with the subway and the bus and that was such a normal thing—to go on the subway for 45 minutes to wherever you’re going. And most of the time it was safe. My best friend Jon lived across the street, and [Beastie Boys member] Adam Yauch would come over and practice bass because Jon had an amp. This is when we were 14 or 15. The first band I met was called The Stimulators. And through the guitarist of that band, Denise Mercedes, I met this old poet named Allen [Ginsberg]. He gave me a book called Howl (1955) for my birthday. It seemed cool, but I didn’t realize how cool.

Wow, what else can you tell me about Allen Ginsberg?

Denise shared an apartment with Ginsberg in a historic tenement building in the Lower East Side. My memory is that Arthur Russell and members of Television also lived in that building. I met Ginsberg a handful of times when I came over for guitar lessons or went to a Stimulators gig. I’m pretty sure I would have been 14 or 15. I just remember that he gave me a copy of Howl and said I should read it as it was said to have influenced songwriters. I also remember going with him and a group of people to a reading at CBGB’s but, at this point, I had no clarity of who was performing or who else was in the entourage.

What are some formative musical experiences you remember having, that you can trace to being crucial in making you want to pursue music?

Probably middle school, listening to The Rolling Stones’ More Hot Rocks (1972) side 3 and 4 over and over and over. That was an activity. My closest friend’s father was in theater and would get us tickets. We would see so many things—Led Zeppelin, Queen, Aerosmith, Rick Derringer. And then it moved from rock and roll to The Clash and punk and new wave and whatever else there was, like Blondie, Television, The Cramps—I saw The Cramps so many times. A lot of tracing my life probably continues through then seeing New Order on their first or second tour at the Ukrainian National Home in 1981, that famous gig.

Going back a few years, I was just listening to music and being affected by it and, at a certain point, I realized that people heard differently. People would talk about lyrics or basslines and I was like, “Wow, I don’t even know how to hear the bass. I never listen to the lyrics in that guy Bob Dylan’s songs.” I was more attuned to texture. Marquee Moon (1977) is an album that has such a sound that I could live in, and I don’t always know how to describe it. Is it about frequency? It is about the instrumentation? And why does it have an immediate impact on me while another record where people play wonderfully doesn’t? I started to play in bands around the time I was 14. I was never very good at guitar, but I really wanted to be in that, both for the social aspect and for the energy.

What was that band called and what music did you make?

It was called The Offals. We were really influenced by The Mad, which was Screaming Mad George, who I believe still does special effects in horror films. He had this Max’s Kansas City version of Alice Cooper just in terms of the stage show, but he was way more punk than Alice Cooper. We played Max’s a number of times—we were probably all 14 or 15—and I remember that the New York Times said that we were “awful or funny, depending on your tolerance level.” (laughter).

Did you take that as a compliment?

I thought it was great! I start to worry about memory the older I get, but I remember this conversation with Steve Roden that was in BOMB and they had to proof it and make sure I was telling the truth. I think I was right, or at least very close.

I got into Steve Roden’s music as a teenager and it kind of changed everything for me. Of course there was John Cage, but this was a different sort of quietude than what I was used to. I started thinking about the different types of silence that existed, and the different gradations of listening involved when engaging with such work. Do you mind talking a bit about Steve?

My fear is that I can talk too much. He and I were always paired as “Two Steves” even though he’s a Steve and I’m a Stephen. East Coast and West Coast. People would point to a work and be like, oh I love that piece and that painting and I’d be like, “Oh no, that was him.” And he’d get an email that said, “I loved your World Trade Center recordings” and he’d be like, “No, that was the other guy.” (laughter). After his illness became semi-public, it was his wife, Sari, who wrote to me. I ran out with another friend, Michael Raphael, to see Steve’s solo exhibition at Vielmetter in 2019 when we learned he had Alzheimer’s. About a year later, we saw that a woman named Meg Linton was doing archiving of Steve’s paintings and drawings. He was so much a visual artist as well as a sound artist. Michael and I asked about the media work and there were no immediate plans [to archive it], and it took a while to convince Sari to let us volunteer. Steve was losing clarity, and by the time we were starting to archive all the media work, he really couldn’t speak. He died soon after. [Editor’s Note: Meg Linton also wrote an obituary for Steve Roden].

I loved his work, and sometimes I was envious of his work and his mind. When he sent me The Radio (1999), I just cursed. I was like, “What am I gonna do?” (laughter). I told him that and he said, “I feel the same way! I don’t know how I made that.” His work was always so conceptually rich and well-formed. We collaborated on a piece in Marfa, Texas. It was a sound piece and a structure—it was solar powered—and it was one of the most joyful experiences. To be with him and watch how he really insisted on quiet and lower levels, more discreet placement of speakers, building a structure out of found material… it’s one of those things where you’re working together and, at least for me, I’m absorbing so much. There was definitely a give and take, but I always admired him and felt like he pushed me to want to be better.

What were the eureka moments for you with this collaboration in Marfa?

I think we would each hear something as field recording that the other wouldn’t—it was about hearing through this other person’s ears, making the world more spare and quiet. Quietness was such a part of his aesthetic, and I think that’s one of the things he insisted upon—lower levels, lower levels, lower levels. Many years before, I had a piece in Marfa and I invited Tetsu Inoue to come out with me and do a show. I called him to listen to the piece I did, and I was aiming for quiet at the time but he said, “No, you need more ego! You need it to be louder, you need it to fill the space!”

I disagreed with Tetsu more than I disagreed with Steve, but to get someone’s takes and to retain what you want to do… with collaborations, it’s like, how do you retain your own voice while being responsive and responsible to your collaborator? Steve was a lot more informed about the history of visual art than I was, so to be in Marfa surrounded by Donald Judd and John Chamberlain’s work… he had references that I never had. Some years later, I was part of the first group to do the Rauschenberg residency in Captiva. I remember I kept thinking, I shouldn’t be here, Steve should be here. He said that he had done a field recording trip with Chris Watson and others in Norway, leading towards a commission. He kept saying that it should be me, not him (laughter). You land in the situations you land in and hopefully always feel lucky.

So it was just a sensitivity to little things, little sounds. I watched him every day do these 4’33” paintings, and he would just sit quietly. This was another time in Austin when we were together. He would quietly just respond and then make a little written notation. When his Alzheimer’s was really bad, Sari asked if he wanted to give me one, but then he said to me, “But I didn’t make these—the other Steve made them.” And I had to say, “I watched you make them.” That was really hard to watch.

Can you tell me about the things that you and Steve disagreed on? I’m asking because I’m curious to learn about the differences in your respective approaches to art.

With Steve it was never an intense disagreement. If he didn’t want to do a thing, he’d just say no, and if he wanted to do it he’d say yes. I’m sort of almost always in. “Let’s do this no matter what, let’s collaborate no matter what.” And then my works are not loud, but they tend to be louder (laughter). They’re multi-channel, so that’s a big part of it. And there’s more abstraction. There are definitely pieces with field recordings, but the manipulation is more about placement and bracketing. There are other pieces where they’re layered with instruments.

I’m more remembering agreements. We did these live shows together in France and we each had a small modular case. Neither of us were technically proficient at it and he’d whisper to me, saying, “I forgot to bring an oscillator.” I’d point at mine and he’d take a line out, but then one of us would be getting pissed off about feedback that wasn’t stopping, and we’d look at each other and I’d be short with him, and then it would turn out to be me, or vice versa. If we were working together, we were forgiving of the differences. For the most part with collaboration, I’m aware of how much you give up and how much power you retain.

I’ve done hundreds of collaborations and the question is always, “Who’s in charge? Are we both in charge? Who’s gonna take responsibility for what? Who’s got ownership over the final product?” I imagine we’ll get to the collaboration with Brendan [Canty] and Hahn [Rowe], Second (2025), but that was definitely a thing where I wanted to make sure that everybody was happy. This goes back to Tetsu. There’s an album [Humming Bird Feeder Ver 0.2 (2002)] with a piece of mine that has remixes by Tetsu and Andrew Deutsch. It was on Lucky Kitchen. Tetsu was insistent that our names be alphabetical, but to me the logic was that the label came to me and it starts with my work, and both of them made radically different remixes. It was a point of tension. With each project, I wanna find my voice but also find balance so there’s no resentment or confusion afterwards.

I think your career is really fascinating. Early on you were in Propeller and She Never Blinks, the latter of which is on the Flirt (1996) soundtrack. I actually interviewed Hal Hartley a couple years ago and told him that Flirt is perpetually underrated. Do you mind talking about these early projects? I love the “Alfred Field Mix” on Bite the Neighbor (2000), for example. How were you finding your voice back then? How did you get that song on Flirt? And you’re also on Eder Santos’ Enredando as pessoas (1995), too.

In college I was a literature major, but I was always taking every film studies class I could. Tom Gunning was at SUNY Purchase at the time. I was playing in bands and a friend of mine introduced me to Barbara London at MoMA in the video department. Video art was this place where all of my interests converged. I always thought that I’d have to give up something. Through that internship, I ended up working at a place called the American Federation of Arts, doing traveling film programs. I was at the low level of that, but I was inspecting Stan Brakhage and Maya Deren films, and then I started working at Electronic Arts Intermix. In parallel to that I started working with Nam June Paik, on and off.

The way that I found myself in video art and felt comfortable there was that I kept identifying with the artists. I realized that they were involved with sound and electronic music before that, and I started to wish that I could do soundtracks. With a lot of things, you have to think you’re ready for it and then opportunities come. This Australian animator and video artist, Peter Callas, asked me to do a soundtrack [for Neo Geo: An American Purchase (1989)]. Then Tony Oursler asked me to do sound for an installation called Crypt Craft, which was shown at the World Wide Video Festival in The Hague. Tony Conrad was an onscreen performer in it.

And then I met Jem Cohen. I approached him and said, “I’d love to make music like you make films.” I ended up getting to work with him for a few years. Through all of those experiences, I was always seeing the artists’ visual work as a priority, but trying to find my own creative voice. To be with Jem in the streets of New York when he had a Super 8 camera really informed my ideas of field recording. To go into the studio with him when he was editing—or when I had created a soundtrack and he wanted to reconceive it in some ways—was to learn through collaboration.

Opportunities just kept coming. You mentioned Eder Santos. He was probably the most well-known Brazilian video artist, at least at the time. He and I once made a list of 60 things we had done together. I was mostly creating soundtracks for him, but we also had concerts together and he produced my first two albums. They were self-released but he basically funded them—they were soundtrack-based. Each one of those experiences taught me [something] and people brought me in, somewhat as an equal, but also to serve their interests. Seoungho Cho is another I made so many pieces with.

I just programmed a bunch of his works at Anthology Film Archives for Prismatic Ground.

I saw that. Was he there?

He wasn’t. I had been in contact with him a couple years ago and when I reached out more recently, he didn’t respond.

He’ll write to me about every six months, but often says, “Don’t email me, I’ll email you.” He was talking about going back to Korea.

Right, my understanding is that he’s in Korea now.

He was a longtime friend and longtime collaborator, and he was a really, really good artist. All of that accumulated experiences culminated in two things that happened in the late ’90s. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon used to have this sound art-related show called Musiques en Scène. They said that they wanted to do a tribute to my soundtracks unless I did installations. I said I did installations, but really I had only done sound for other people’s installations. [Editor’s Note: Vitiello’s installation was in 1998 and called The Light of Falling Cars, featuring Pauline Oliveros and Hahn Rowe, and was released as an album later that year].

Soon after, I got invited to do the residency in the World Trade Center for six months. And around 1998, Anthony Moore invited me to Cologne to be part of a four-night festival. One night was Scanner, one night was Pauline Oliveros, one night was Frances-Marie Uitti, and one night was me. The idea was that you’d have a solo night but you would also invite the others to collaborate. I was by far the least known, but they all became longtime friends and collaborators, especially Scanner—Robin is my closest friend. Pauline was so generous and I did a lot of work with her. One other element to all this was that Andres Bosshard, a sound artist, had a 64-channel sound system in this church where we were performing. That really opened my brain to multi-channel, to collaboration, to improvisation. On the flight home, I asked Pauline if I could study with her and she said, “No, you’ll do a show with me and Joe McPhee next week at Experimental Intermedia Foundation.” It was kind of like throwing someone into the water before they could swim, but I did my best to keep up.

I love everything you’re saying because your entire life story is this constant unraveling, of meeting one person after another who leads you down a different path. I love that it was Anthony Moore who did that, too. I interviewed him a couple years ago for The Wire and it was specifically to talk about his film soundtracks, which are some of my favorites in general. The ones he did for Dore O. are incredible.

There’s a few people I owe lifetime debts to (laughter).

Did any films or videos you worked on feel particularly formative to your practice? I’m wondering about stuff like Jem Cohen’s Drink Deep (1991).

Drink Deep was a big one, both working with Jem on that but also some live concerts we did. With Cho, it was an interesting experience in doing one of the soundtracks, for Rev (1997), as I never felt like the original soundtrack was right. It premiered at a festival and I remember someone writing about it as being dark and heavy and slow, and this was visually and not about sound—they talked about the colors being brown or a deep red. Cho and I decided that it was a little too morose, and the same person who wrote about it saw it again and said, “Wow, this is faster than I remember, and I’m seeing lighter colors!” That was one of those moments where I realized how much power sound has—it can change how people see and feel.

I did a soundtrack for the poet Claudia Rankine recently. I remember thinking how any decision I made would radically change the way people read the language, and how I could misjudge it, how I could overshoot, how I could make it too academic. I’ve had some level of that experience in every project I’ve ever made. You’re trying to find this piece that could fill this space. With the soundtracks I’ve done with Lynne Sachs, I’ve talked about wanting to haunt the space between the voices. She has a lot of talking heads and she doesn’t want sound under the voices, but the interstitials are so important. So, how do I leave space but rise and fall within the parameters? How do I reflect on what’s just happened and how do I reflect on what’s coming? It’s kind of like a jazz note, going from one place to another through a careful decision.

What was it like to play that show with Pauline and Joe?

There’s a couple things. One thing is she kind of tricked me (laughter). I told her I was really nervous and she said, “Don’t worry, you’ll only play 10 minutes.” We get on stage and I say, “Okay, tell me when to leave.” “No, you’re playing the whole show.” “Wait a second…” (laughter). What she did do was have me run into her board—it was so smart of her. She could manipulate my sound but she could also make decisions if I overplayed. I believe she had me running, when she wanted, into her delays—into her [Expanded Instrument System]—so I was handing a good deal of control over to her.

I remember whispering to her, “How will I know when it’s over?” “You’ll know.” That was something that throughout the show… I don’t get stage fright, but there was a mental bubble, like, “How will I know?” And at like 43:51, we all stopped and she said, “See, I told you you’d feel it.” I still have the DAT tape. There was a rise in sound and we were looking at each other. I mostly watched her, but she had her eyes either closed or she was connecting with Joe. I just tried being as attentive as possible. That last show in Cologne, The Wire reviewed it and said I was the most valuable player, and I think it’s because I wanted to be so in tune with these other players.

What year was this show?

I think it was ’99. (goes and grabs DAT). It doesn’t say, but there’s this postcard here that says it was designed by Seoungho Cho—I had no memory of that. Experimental Intermedia used to be $4.99 for admission—I don’t know what’s been going on since Phill Niblock passed away, but he’s another historic marker. After that show, I was invited to do a couple records on this Dutch label, JDK, and then one on New Albion, which at the time was like a major label in our small world. In each case, I would ask Pauline if she would play. Every single time she said yes. Sometimes she would say, “I’m supposed to be at Bard and I can’t leave the campus, what time do you need me at the studio?” She never said, “How much am I getting paid?” or “What’s my credit?” She had a generosity to younger generation musicians especially, and I’m so fortunate for that.

What was it like to work with her on The Light Of Falling Cars and Bright and Dusty Things (2001)? What sort of things did you learn as a result of playing with her live that led to the sort of material that ended up on the latter album? I’m thinking of tracks like “Odyssey Guitar Solo” or “Twister” where there are these longform drones.

In terms of the experience, I really learned that the choice of people was a big compositional factor. It’s about finding people who had a sound, finding people who would listen well, who were interested in what I was doing. Maybe there were minimal instructions, but with someone like Pauline she’d say, “You lead, I follow.” And knowing what an incredible listener and player she was… that experience was about figuring out personnel, treating them well, letting them know what the terms were, and paying them when I could. As much as I wanted them to be in the moment, I wanted to be in the moment, too. I was figuring out, within a given improvisation or composition, when to raise the energy and when to lower it, when there would be repetition and when we’d move along.

With CDs and concerts, I was always conscious of time. How long can a piece be? How long can I sustain it? When I got into installation, it was a different kind of time, and not something necessarily linear. I wasn’t determining how much a visitor should or could spend time there. I was finding that, with installations, some people would sit there for two minutes while others would sit there for an hour. I still have this dream that goes back to when I was a kid, coming home with a Buzzcocks record and sitting down, like, “Okay, I’m listening. And I’m gonna listen to it again.” And then I’d call a friend to listen to it a third time. You hope for rapt attention, which is less and less likely now, but it felt like making an album for New Albion was like making a thing that people would take in.

I’m even thinking about the live album you have with Robin, Invisible Architecture #7 (2003). What’s it like to have a live performance that’s recorded and then presented, as it’ll be different from hearing it in the actual space, and then both of these are of course different from an installation.

I haven’t done that many live albums. There’s one with Taylor Deupree, Fridman Variations (2019), and I’m not sure what else. But it’s just that rare moment where you want to capture something that felt special, where it had enough shape so you don’t have to go in and start rearranging and tweaking, where there was mutual interplay. There’s a good video online of me and Robin playing at Knitting Factory in ’99, and it was his gig but I was the featured duet. We have a really good friendship, and it was fun for me there because he made me more accessible and I maybe made him weirder. Another memorable thing about that night was that I had this rolling case with all the rack equipment—it was probably three feet high. We rolled it through Tribeca, rolled it to the World Trade Center, and about midnight went upstairs to the 91st floor—that’s where my studio was at the time—and we could just roll in this crazy-looking thing without anyone batting an eye. He doesn’t drink, and I don’t drink much, but that was the nightcap: being up there, looking at the city after the show—it was special.

There was a lot happening around this time in electronic music. There was glitch and the PowerBook artists. I’m curious about what your feelings were about this evolving style of music and what it’s like to look back at that in retrospect.

I had a realization early on. There was this event at PS1 with five laptop artists, these incredible artists—people like Zeena Parkins—and we all played bits of our work and then talked about the software we were using. For how different each person was, we were remarkably the same in that moment (laughter). It really taught me to be careful. Not long after, I got asked to do a performance at Philip Morris, which was a space that the Whitney Museum had, and they asked me to pick a laptop artist. I asked Yasunao Tone, who is not a laptop artist, and I think the curator was mad at me, like, “Who is this guy?” I just thought this was much more interesting. He’s working with a limited setup and doing this manipulation, but coming from a far different background. It was exciting.

John Hudak was the first artist I met who used software. He gave me a whole lot of plugins and showed me how to use them, and then Pauline told me to talk with Morton Subotnick. I went to his studio and he was talking so above my head, and at a certain point he saw a look on my face and said, “Oh, okay,” and sent me home with a simpler piece of software. I wasn’t entering with any training with synthesis, and the use of plugins was exciting. But then I quickly realized what a trap it all was, at least until it got more powerful.

How’d you know it was a trap?

It was that event at PS1. We all sounded pretty similar even though we’re such different musicians. It was in 2000, and the event was called Volume: Bed of Sound. Elliott Sharp curated it. The people in that event surpassed that moment, but when I was in it… well, I had briefly played in a band with Ikue Mori that was reportedly her last band playing drums, and she’s a genius at what she does now with software. But in that in-between moment, it just didn’t sound that different from where she got to or where she’d been.

Was there a point at which you felt that you also surpassed that moment?

I moved from laptop to hardware-based sampler and that was definitely something. Even early on, I was mostly sampling myself. I have an album called Scratchy Marimba (2000) from around that time, and Hahn’s doing turntables. It was kind of influenced by Tricky. That one has some jazz samples, but it was mostly about starting to use guitar in a less conventional way—definitely influenced by Fred Frith. Even a brief mention by Jim O’Rourke in an interview with The Wire, where he said he would dump his sample library very often, reminded me to constantly clear the palette and build a new one. That’s the era when I started to feel more creative and more in charge.

Bright and Dusty Things was an album where I was still trying to learn to speak the language. I remember bringing in two guest musicians who didn’t trust me yet, and I didn’t have enough to explain to them what I wanted them to do. They looked at me like… you mean like Terry Riley’s In C (1964/1968) and I was like, “I guess?” (laughter). Hopefully after, I started to get better at speaking about what I wanted, but not everybody would do it. I asked Tony Conrad to play on a subsequent record and he said no. “Not unless you can tell me what you want beyond me and my sound.” We did a live show later that was really fun, but this was just in that period of finding a way to be articulate. And when I was fortunate, someone like Pauline wouldn’t need me to be articulate; she’d just need me to play well.

You went on to release many more albums throughout the 2000s, a lot of which were collaborative. You had the album with Andrew Deutsch, Inductive Music (2007). You had the album with Rutger Zuydervelt, Box Music (2008). You had the album with Molly Berg, The Gorilla Variations (2009). Earlier you mentioned this notion of bringing people on in thinking about compositions. Were there any particular collaborations from around this time that you felt were crucial in pushing you creatively?

That first album with Rutger happened because he asked if we could collaborate. He said that we should come up with an idea, but that he was busy now and would write to me in six months. But then a day later he said he had an idea. “I want us to send each other a box of non-functional things and dare each other to make something with them.” In some ways, I thought that was Steve Roden-like in that we started conceptually, that it was object-based. That was also my introduction to 12k.

It was my first long-distance piece, and for the most part I’m really comfortable with that. That was one where we were apart and we really enjoyed what the other person made. Each person had two solo pieces and then we made one piece together. I was responding to the objects he sent me; there was some of him in what I did, there was some of me in what he did. It became a suggestion of a modular way of working, and I remember seeing reviews where they’d say, “Rutger does this” and I’d be like, ‘No, that’s my track.” (laughter). We later did those in Canada—two different gigs where we performed it live. We gave each other a box of objects on stage and it felt Fluxus-like in that we were both laughing constantly. We were happy, like, “Oh no, you didn’t send me this to make music with?” (laughter). It was also just enjoying each other’s company.

There were opportunities to perform live with Ryuichi Sakamoto, and those were really special. The first time we played was one of the few shows where I went in fairly intimidated, and I feel like I would’ve been foolish if I hadn’t felt that way. He worked hard to put me at ease in his own quiet way, though. I remember we did a set at The Stone, and for the first set, I just couldn’t believe that with the smallest shifts in sound that I’d make, he’d be listening and responding so complexly. That really made me be that much more responsible to what I was going to put out. Like, it should be meaningful. Afterwards, we went backstage before the second set and he said, “I’m so sorry if that was too melodic.” “It was incredible what you did toward the end with the melody.” “Do you mind if I’m more melodic in the second set?” It felt absurd that he was asking for my permission, but it was also really kind. He was letting me know to be sure to take his input. To be on stage with someone who seems to be playing so sparely but with such careful choices and such a touch… I’ve always felt that my touch was better than my technical skills, and he’s someone who had both.

By touch do you mean sensitivity?

I think it’s like picking up an instrument and creating a tone that feels expressive, even if it’s with a single note. It’s one of those deals where, yes Keith Richards has that sound and he plays with five strings and he loves a certain kind of Telecaster, but people will say, “Keith Richards can pick up the crappiest guitar and make it sing.” Steve was somebody who could pick up a wildly out-of-tune, broken instrument and make it sound intentional and clear and in tune. The last time I saw him was when his Alzheimer’s was very advanced. We jammed, and he was so strongly in tune even though when I picked up his guitar it was terrible. He made it sound beautiful! Even through the Alzheimer’s, he was listening and making decisions that sounded right. Tone is not necessarily about playing all the notes, or replicating everything, but making sounds that have a conscious depth.

I know that you did a performance with Sakamoto that was for a Nam June Paik event.

That was the second time we performed.

Can you talk a bit about Nam June Paik’s importance in your life? You played a significant role in the CD that came out in the 2000s, Works 1958-1979 (2001). What kind of person was he?

I was working at Electronic Arts Intermix and he’d come in to get his videotapes. I knew he was a leading figure in the history of video, but I couldn’t understand him. I feel like I’d say something and he’d shuffle by—he always shuffled. Even though he was wearing an Issey Miyake scarf, he’d have these broken-open shoes and shuffle by. One day he heard the soundtrack I made for Peter Callas’ video, Neo Geo, and it was my first soundtrack. He asked, “What’s that?” “An Australian artist, but it’s my soundtrack.” “Very good, let’s go to Blimpie’s.”

Suddenly I could understand him. He told me that I was to help him set up a concert with Bad Brains and Joseph Beuys. I knew Beuys was dead but I knew Nam June was too intelligent to be confused. I helped him produce that concert where Beuys was projected and Nam June was on stage with Bad Brains, and every five minutes he’d lead them off the stage and bring them back on (laughter). He was playing a piano with a stopwatch in one hand and a hammer in another. He’d hammer at the piano and, after that, he started sending me instructions like, “Videotape three Buddhas in the beach.” And I’d tell him, “I’m not a videomaker.” “Okay…” But then I’d of course do it (laughter).

In ’94 he called me and said, “Mr. Vitiello, this Fluxus and Korean dance performance starts tomorrow for a month at Anthology. You’ll videotape.” “I don’t have a camera, and I’m a musician.” “This will make you a better musician.” Every night of this series was Fluxus, and then a break, and then a Korean dance. The exposure I got in that month was like grad school. Working with him was always different in that way. It was always on his terms, and it was almost never the thing I knew how to do, but he saw in me—and this was true of everyone who worked with him—someone he had to discover. I was encouraging him to work with Seoungho Cho as an editor, but Nam June was weary of Koreans and Korean Americans. They were always coming up to him so they could work with him. He would rather find somebody who was delivering the piano and turn them into a brilliant editor.

One other memory with Paik was this performance he did that was a tribute to John Cage at The Kitchen. He had just come back from Germany and I said, “I have a ticket, I’ll be at your show tonight.” “Don’t worry, it’s a group show—I’m just doing something quick.” “It’s only you and it’s sold out.” “Oh shit,” and then he hung up (laughter). A few hours later, there he is at The Kitchen with an armful of videotapes, a piano, a ladder, and a camera. And for an hour he just held court. It really encouraged me to realize that performance can be everything that’s ever happened. It doesn’t have to be a month of practicing, it doesn’t have to involve practicing parts with another musician. It can be, but it can also be a different kind of response. He responded to a life with Cage and a series of memories. It was beautiful.

I love hearing about all this. I’m Korean and there’s definitely something to this notion of being a Korean artist and being skeptical of other Koreans.

I went to Korea with him, to Gwangju, in 1995 I think. I could see him. He was The Beatles. But he was The Beatles with this complication of his family having left during Japanese occupation, so there was some absolute love and some resentment.

Do you approach your own music in a similar way to what you saw Nam June do that day? This notion of a performance being understood as a broader, long-term response to something, that it was coming out of simply living?

Definitely. The connection for me between the installations and soundtracks and CDs is that it’s always a response to something. In recent years, there was one piece I made for Room40 that was very much a response to finding out I had rheumatoid arthritis [A Room Adrift (6x6) (2021)]. There was another piece that was similar to that one that was a response to my mother’s death [one string left and a head for the sea (2021)]. There are several things I’ve done alone or with collaborators that were from thinking of Steve and his passing. A lot of what I do is to set up a system and capture a performance—a solo performance in my studio—and then determine what to do with it. That’s been true since the pandemic. Sometimes I’ll bring it to Molly Berg or somebody else, but it’s about setting up a moment where I’ve got the right level of tension, where I’m really in it. I’m thinking about this person or event. There’s no way for me to be too literal about it, but I let that all flow through.

I wanted to ask about Brood IX (2020), which was recorded during the pandemic. What was it like to be in that space at Peters Mountain? What was it like to go to that space initially, and then to revisit it and eventually record the album?

There’s that album and also Two Broods (2024). A lot of it was, “These insects are gonna be making these sounds, so these are the microphones I should bring. This is the space where I’ll have the most privacy and the least interruptions from people and traffic.” And while I was going into nature knowing what to expect, I was absolutely bowled over by how it was so much more. It really was a deep, emotional experience. I think that’s something that comes with field recordings. Just to sit there with headphones on, far away enough and silent enough from the mics… to hear through the technology, to hear with my eyes closed, to hear the vastness of it… it’s so often the case that the longer you’re there, the more you start to hear the sounds. That happened back at the World Trade Center residency, and that happened with a piece I did soon after in PS1’s clocktower with the bell. You think you hear it and you know it, but then you can know more and more and more. Then there’s also just patience to have chance encounters, which can then enrich the experience: certain birds fly within proximity to the mic, or a cicada lands on the mic.

Can you give an example of the microphones you decide to use? You mentioned Two Broods, and that was a different album because you were in Illinois for that instead of West Virginia.

In the first case, I brought an ambisonic mic that could do all directions spherically. And I also brought a really nice stereo mic. The interest was usually in one direction, and there were often problems in another direction, so I found that stereo was an easier way to record even though the ambisonic would’ve been good, too. There’s microphones that are less susceptible to humidity, and it being Peters Mountain, there’s so much humidity. I used my Sennheiser mics instead of my Schoeps mics. I’ve also always got other things as backups: contact microphones, a hydrophone for underwater, some little lavaliers that I can hang in a tree and leave overnight, and then the really fancy mics I have on a stand that I don’t leave overnight. Even though there’s no issue of theft, there are bears running by or morning dew that I want to protect them from. I’m really jealous of this new album, The Pines (2025).

Right, by Joshua Bonnetta. I reviewed that for Pitchfork.

That’s what I thought. It’s such a beautiful record. That’s an idea I wanted to do on Peters Mountain but I never felt like I could have the right technology to capture the wind. It’s a beautiful project that he’s done.

These cicada albums are amusing because I still hear the same you from the 2000s. There’s a certain drama to the music there. I think about that and compare it to the way that Steve would approach drama with his sort of quietude.

It’s definitely different, yeah. I was just quoting him for something I’m writing where he talks about lowercase [music] as a response to loudness, against richness, and against the actions of the art world in the ’90s. With the cicada albums, I’m titling them in a conscious way. With Two Broods, I was with this scientist based in St. Louis named Kasey Fowler-Finn. She was getting input from this cicada specialist telling us exactly where to go, like, “In Springfield, IL go down this road for a certain period, you’ll see this mile marker, turn left and go in—it looks private but you’re okay to park there.” We were getting in-ear messages telling us where to find the richest sounds, and they were so different. It was the first time in over 200 years that these two broods were emerging at the same time, so there was this feeling of awe. And with Kasey, who was coming from this science point of view, I was learning so much from her. There was also a collaborative pleasure there.

What sort of things did Kasey say, and did any of that information dictate what you would record or how you would edit?

We would talk in the car between sites. She would say, “Did you notice when the clouds came out they all quieted down? Did you notice when the sun was over here that this other thing happened?” She also did some testing where she took my recordings and played them to cicadas in the lab, expecting them to respond in a certain way. I don’t think she got the responses she expected, though. She also listens to substrate-borne recordings—recordings through surfaces. Because of all this, I was that much more interested in what might be happening. We were focusing on air recordings, but as much as anything, she would give me cues when we’d been in a location enough. Or I’d stop and set up a recording and she’d go down a path and say, “Oh, it’s actually even more exciting down here.” It was each of us going, “Wow, can you believe what we’re hearing?” A friend of mine, the poet Edwin Torres, went a week later to the same location and said what he heard was not nearly as intense—we really hit the moment.

I wanted to ask about Second, your new collaboration with Brendan and Hahn. You’ve been talking about collaboration a lot, and I have to wonder if collaborating now is different than what it was like beforehand.

I did an album with Brendan a few years back that was just called Stephen Vitiello with Brendan Canty (2023). It was an EP, really, of five pieces. That was the first time I’d asked him to work together. I’ve had Hahn on different projects and I also auditioned for Hugo Largo—I’d loved them so much. So with both people, I knew their sensibility, but this was a moment of really coming together with these pieces I created that have wacky rhythms and sort-of melodies. I had Brendan to strengthen and clarify what those rhythms could be, and I had Hahn to brilliantly pull out melodies or create new ones that could work with my textures and decisions of speed.

I felt like it was the best of us. It was about having more trust. I never have enough time with Brendan, but he’s unbelievably resourceful. On some tracks, we just used what he did, and in other cases it was more on Hahn, who did the final mix, to figure out which of those three drum beats that Brendan threw at the track would be the strongest, creating loops of that. I loved the decisions that everybody made. Brendan did more than just drums, Hahn did more than just viola. And on the last track, Geologist from Animal Collective just happened to be in the next building over and Brendan invited him. So there was what was planned and then the chance of what happened in the moment.

I’m so proud of every single track and the strength of every person’s contribution. I was talking about that issue with Tetsu many years back, but with this album, it was one where I was like, “Should it be Brendan, Hahn, Stephen?” Brendan said, “It really isn’t my album,” and he didn’t think he should take that sort of authorship. Hahn said he was happy with whatever. So I tried to distinguish it was me with them. Philip [Sherburne, who co-runs the record label Balmat] said that in some ways it’s kind of like a jazz album where it’s my album but I have these very valued soloists. Their contributions make it what it is, but I initiated the project. These tracks started with me sampling myself, or in one case sampling Hahn and creating a base for them to work with.

Both Brendan and Hahn have been involved in a ton of different projects. You mentioned Hugo Large—I love that Drum EP (1987).

Oh man, me too.

Given that all three of you have been making music for decades, at this point in your life, how do you push other musicians into different territories, how do you allow yourself to be challenged?

Brendan has said that with each of the three things we’ve done together that he doesn’t know where to find the center in a track. I’ll have different rhythms that are being triggered, like I’ll play guitar and put it into the modular synthesizer and then have different, random generators making certain leaps and I’ll be trying to handle those and control it. He’ll say, “You haven’t given me 4/4 here, you haven’t given me an absolute path to follow.” But then he’ll try something, and try something again, and then at some point it’ll be like, wow, that holds it together. After the studio session for the album, he dropped me off at my hotel and said, “Safe travels home, this is the best thing we’ve done. We’re getting better together.”

It’s about finding ways to anticipate him but also appreciating that he can make sense of my mess (laughter). Because of the way I’m sampling myself, I’m not always coming up with perfect pitches. If I were to hand these tracks to a pianist, they might struggle, whereas Hahn… he never said he had perfect pitch, but I’ve seen him listen to a track and instantly tune a 12-string to it. I’ve always got my tuner, and I only know how to do it within A440, but Hahn just finds where the pitches need to be based on his ear—he does it so quickly. And with a bowed instrument, he’s able to respond to wherever those pitches have been.

Because so much of my background is in ambient and sound art throughout the past 20 years, I’ve wanted to move beyond that. With some of the pieces with prepared guitar—Hahn called them “skronk”—I can’t play like Marc Ribot, but I wanted to find a way to get that energy, that rawness. I was pushing myself to do that with an initial sound and then through resampling. And then those guys just pick up on it.

I’m really into the concept behind Trinity (2025). I’m curious how bringing in new collaborators deepened your musical relationship with Lawrence English. You two collaborated on two duo albums prior to this, Acute Inbetweens (2011) and Fable (2014), and have known each other for decades. How did bringing in a third musician on each track help things evolve?

This is the third album Lawrence and I have made together over a period of 15 years. We knew we should consider the approach and try not to duplicate past efforts. My memory is that Lawrence first suggested bringing in Chris Abrahams from The Necks. I was thrilled—I’m a fan and love his band but also his solo work. And then, as discussions progressed, we thought of others who could bring their own distinct sound, as well as their abilities to listen and respond. We wanted to keep it to people who we have a relationship with, and Chris is the only one of the five guests who I don’t know personally. Lawrence also reached out to Aki [Onda] and Marina [Rosenfeld]. I was in the studio with Brendan, recording tracks for what would become Second. I played him a work-in-progress that Lawrence and I had been putting together, and Brendan played to it, maybe just a single take, so that was that track.

Both Lawrence and I were close to Steve Roden. For the last three to four years, I’ve been transferring tapes from Steve’s archives as well as documenting all that I can to help preserve his legacy. I came across an unreleased track and we approached Sari for permission to work with it as a 5th “collaboration.” With the exception of Steve’s piece, the approach was to create a bed of sound for the guests to respond to. Once the tracks came back to us from each person, there was then some moving of elements around in the mix so the connections felt most natural. With Steve’s piece, the process was reversed, where we took his track and played to it. That’s the one I feel most intimately connected to. I did my best to channel what it was like when we would perform together, weaving abstract sounds and bits of melody together, listening, responding.

How do you approach an album like sublingual infinities (2025) or parallel infinities (2026), your works with the poet Edwin Torres? The voice is such a unique instrument because it grounds every single track and becomes the center of attention. Do your tactics or methodologies have to change since these are recited texts and not sung vocals?

These releases with Edwin document work from over a period of 7 years. In each case, the catalyst is Edwin sending me recorded voice—sometimes recorded in a studio, sometimes on his phone while out walking. I’m sure the expected process would be that I listen carefully, process the ideas in the poem, and then find my place in the relative background. But in most cases, my approach was more chaotic, more spontaneous, with me starting to mix and sample in the first moments of hearing his voice. I got more involved in the sound of Edwin’s voice—his rhythms and pacing—rather than what seemed like a respectful understanding of the poetry.

One of the beauties of our relationship is that we don’t treat the voice as dominant all the time. There are pieces on sublingual infinities where the voice is up front, but there’s others where I take great liberties in abstracting the voice and my processing takes over, and it goes somewhere that Edwin may have never expected. On the parallel infinities EP, most of it is on the abstract side. One piece, “Seed Song Coda,” ended up as a kind of Spiritualized homage—not intentionally, but it felt that way listening back. As with any successful collaboration, there’s discussion of, “Is this working for you? Is it too much?” It’s rare for there to be a disagreement between us, and there’s a pleasure in ending up somewhere surprising. We did perform together once and I think that only strengthened the trust.

Is there anything we didn’t talk about today that you wanted to mention?

There’s always more. I’m so excited when opportunities come. With this label [Balmat], I feel so lucky and fortunate and excited to see if it takes us somewhere. It’s a series of studio constructions, so I’m curious what it would be like to do live gigs. I don’t have any doubt that Brendan and Hahn could take it somewhere exciting—I just have a little doubt in myself, but I usually need some doubt.

I end all my interviews with the same question and I wanted to ask this question to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

I love that I fight through chronic migraines, a very full-time job, and still find pleasure in squeezing in moments to be creative. I love that I still feel genuinely lucky. People will say, “Is that modesty or false modesty?” I don’t think it’s either. I just know that anything we get to do may not be there the next day, so we should enjoy it.

Stephen Vitiello’s newest releases include Second (2025) with Brendan Canty & Hahn Rowe, Trinity (2025) with Lawrence English, and his two collaborations with Edwin Torres: sublingual infinities (2025) and parallel infinities (2026). Next month, Vitiello is giving a talk at the Centre Pompidou in Paris—information can be found here. More information about Vitiello can be found at his website.

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Since 2019, The Reds, Pinks & Purples has served as Glenn Donaldson’s primary outlet for mulling over fears and insecurities to the tune of ’80s college rock. It’s the most personal and renowned of the thirty-odd aliases and bands he’s worked on in his prolific career, initially envisioned as a means of turning his long, ambling walks around San Francisco into songs, with trains of thought sharpening into angsty, deadpan verses. His tenth album under the moniker is Acknowledge Kindness (2026), and he puts extra emphasis on the instrumentals: It’s the most atmospheric and detailed Reds, Pinks & Purples record to date, weaving influences from alt-country and 4AD goth rock. Jude Noel spoke with Donaldson over the phone on April 13, 2026 to discuss his work’s overlap with stand-up comedy, getting props from emo icons, and turning music into a full-time gig.

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Jude Noel: I find the uniformity in your body of work really interesting, especially when it comes to the material you’ve released as The Reds, Pinks & Purples. You’re often using pictures of flowers and buildings in your neighborhood for the cover art, with a thick border. And even the tonal palette is consistent across the board. Is that something you’re intentionally striving for?

Glenn Donaldson: As a fan of records, I like a project that is really consistent. I think the original artist I saw who was like that was Jandek, and so I think it’s a bit of a nod to him. I also just appreciate bands that are consistent. I just don’t really listen to too many records where there’s a lot of variety; I like records that are just one vibe. I mean, The Feelies are kind of my ultimate band. Their career is so consistent and every record is slightly different but it’s always the same, too.

What sort of records are you listening to these days?

I kind of listen to music half the day while I’m doing different things, so I’ll go in and out of micro trends within 24 hours. My sweet spot is definitely the college rock era, like the late ’80s. I’m really into this band called The Schramms right now, which is a country rock band fronted by the original guitarist [Dave Schramm] of Yo La Tengo. I’ve been checking out that catalog. He wrote a couple of songs on the first Yo La Tengo record.

Yeah, I remember when I was first going back and listening to that early Yo La Tengo stuff, I was struck by how many explicitly country-inspired songs there were.

Yeah, Ride the Tiger (1986). That’s kind of my favorite era. I mean, I love President Yo La Tengo (1989) too, which is after he left, but yeah, I think he brought in that country influence, that Byrds influence.

You’ve explored a bunch of genres over different aliases over the years. What made you interested in doing a college rock-inspired project?

That’s what got me into music. I got into music pretty heavy in the late ’80s through a friend’s older brother, who was a college DJ in Lowell, Massachusetts. He brought back Dinosaur when it was still Dinosaur and he showed me Galaxie 500, so I kind of witnessed the birth of that sound. I think that it’s really stood the test of time in terms of songwriting quality and also being experimental.

You’ve been very prolific as The Reds, Pinks & Purples. Do you have an order of operations for writing these songs? Is there a space where you always start from?

Sometimes a song comes like a bolt out of the sky, and it’s kind of complete in your mind, and you just channel it. Other times, I’m going through old notebooks and going, “Hey, this is actually a pretty good verse I could use.” And sometimes you’re piecing it together. Usually, a really cool line just pops into my head and that will lead me into a song.

So you typically start with the lyrics.

I’d say most of the time. Occasionally I’ll write some music and go, “Oh, that music’s pretty good. I should try to write to it.” But I think that’s actually harder to do. I’m impressed when singers can write lyrics to existing music. I feel like that’s hard for me.

Has that always been the case for you, even when you were doing Horrid Red or Art Museums and stuff like that?

It’s pretty close to what I do now, where I was thinking of a melody and song concept and then realizing it. But yeah, it’s kind of like 3D chess with yourself.

I do feel like the lyrics are initially what drew me into this project. So much of it is about making art and then commenting on the art itself. Really interesting. Are there any lyricists that were a big influence on this era?

The thing that really launched me into this era of writing was thinking more about stand-up comedy. The greatest stand-up comics are kind of this raw version of themselves, where they use themselves as the material. In order to be a great comedian, you have to completely destroy your own ego. And so a lot of it was just me thinking about my life through the lens of bleak stand-up comedy.

It definitely comes through. With this type of music, it’s usually so sincere or cute, but I think with The Reds, Pinks & Purples the songs can be sarcastic and dark.

I’ve talked to people, and especially English music writers, and they want to talk to me about irony. And I’m like, I think the sad thing is it’s not ironic, it’s just painful honesty. American comedy is kind of based on this painful honesty, and there’s an art to it. It is somewhat of a character, but it is also true—as true as you can make it when you’re a writer, you know? I just think, “What’s true for me?” And I’m just gonna open the closet or the drawer and look behind the socks. “Here it is.” I think a lot of people have the same thoughts as me that are embarrassing, and I’m just putting myself out there to let people know, “Hey, I have these thoughts too.”

One thing I liked about some of your earlier work is that it talks a lot about the conflict between working for a living and wanting to make art. And I read in a recent-ish interview that you had finally gotten to a place in your life where you were able to make art for yourself full-time. How has that changed things for you?

I was able to cobble together enough income through music and then a little bit of freelance to quit my day job, which I had for over 20 years. I sort of regret not taking that risk sooner, but it’s just so expensive to live in a way where I can afford to make the music I want to make and not be on the street. I have less money now because I’m not getting a steady paycheck. And I’m my own boss, which is good and bad. I was always under a boss, under the hourly clock, and so it’s been strange, but also fun.

How much of your day are you working on music?

I probably work on something every day, but right now, I’ve been slacking because I finished this record. I’m just waiting for it to come out, and I’m doing press, I’m trying to set up shows. I haven’t really been working as much as I normally do, but I did spend eight months on this record that’s coming out. Some days I wouldn’t do anything, and then for three days straight I might just be only doing music. It gets exhausting, the intensity that I have to work at to get things right.

With this new record, the sound is pretty recognizable, but I do feel like the production and the details have leveled up this time around. Were there any things that you approached differently?

Thanks for noticing because, yeah, I did want to make a record that was more detailed and a little bit more sophisticated, whereas I feel like the previous records definitely had a “first thought, best thought” kind of approach. I just had done a bunch of records—nine pieces of vinyl—so I was like, “Well, I’m gonna change it up and really sculpt this one a little more and see where it leads me.”

“Emo Band” is one of the tracks off of the new record that has really stuck with me. Could you tell me about where the inspiration for that one came from?

Directly from emo bands, actually, because a couple of guys from well-known emo bands from the second wave had reached out to me on social media to say that they were fans of The Reds, Pinks & Purples. Or I ended up on some big-name emo band’s playlist. I had this revelation where I was like, “Maybe I’m emo. Am I emo?” It’s kind of a sincere tribute to that scene, but also kind of funny—the idea of older guys reforming their band and trying to feel the same way they did when they were 20. So, it’s really a self-examination of my own work as well—I came from hardcore music when I was a kid, and the challenge of being a musician is trying to stay inspired. That’s really what that song is about.

Where do you turn for inspiration besides music?

The revelation of what this band would be became apparent on walks around my neighborhood taking photos. I had a few songs, and I had some local people I was playing with in my neighborhood. And so it was like, oh, this will just be about this, you know? It’ll be about my life in San Francisco, my neighborhood, the people here. It’s expanded into this macro thing as well, but it doesn’t have to be about grandiose things. It could just be about riding the bus.

Yeah, and you had mentioned before about the sort of work ethic you had before. “First thought, best thought.” Was that something you were very intentional about wanting to do when you started out, being extremely prolific?

The breakthrough came when I realized that what it is to be an artist is the same as trying to be a great comedian. It’s really about opening yourself up, exposing your vulnerabilities, and telling a story about yourself. But you have to have a story to become a storyteller, and this works for so many genres of entertainment. At the same time, I discovered a sound that I could live with. It was mostly about focusing on the guitars and the idea that I would work on the lyrics and put my voice way out front, making that the main feature. I was really wrestling with my demons about being a good singer and lyricist, and I just went for it. You can get very self-conscious producing yourself and I decided not to judge myself in the same way. I have freed myself to become the lead singer of this band.

Your new album is called Acknowledge Kindness (2026). Did you have any particular themes in mind while writing it?

I think with this record, I wanted to be a little bit less topical than I had been in the past and just go more into the lyrics so that people could listen and make up their own meaning. I realized the other day that this is a political record. Not explicitly, but it’s about being human in an inhuman moment in history. I didn’t set out to make that statement, but that’s how I’ve been thinking.

And what kind of stuff are you doing when you’re not making music?

I’m really into biking these days and I’ve been biking a lot. I’m really music-focused, though. I’m kind of a loner, so I get my social life through music by going to shows and supporting other bands and having a band. I joke around with them, like, “I’ll have to buy some friends, hire some friends for my band.” But yeah, you know, it’s hard to have friends as you get older, and music gives you an opportunity to get something out of it, and you can also be social. I really value that.

The Reds, Pinks & Purples’ new album, Acknowledge Kindness, is out April 24th via Fire Records. The album can be purchased at the label’s website and at Bandcamp.

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Thank you for reading the 223rd issue of Tone Glow. What if the real music was the friends we made along the way.

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My New Band Believe is the new solo project of Cameron Picton (b. 1999), largely known as a founding member of the UK rock band Black Midi. After dropping two one-off singles, “Lecture 25” and “Numerology,” Picton released the self-titled My New Band Believe debut earlier this month. His initial desire was to work with a rotating cast of musicians, and with a slew of different artists—most notably the members of caroline—the album features eight tracks of progressive folk music inspired by Bert Jansch, Judee Sill, New Narrative authors, and a desire for openness within the song form. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Picton on April 17th, 2026 via Zoom to discuss the acoustic guitar, finding ways to avoid his artistic practice from feeling like an obligation, and the ideas behind his new LP.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: I know you just had those in-store shows the past few days. What’s it like playing in record stores versus typical venues?

My New Band Believe: They were cool. I did them as a duo with this guy, Kit Mosely, who I’ve been playing with a lot recently. Kit’s a great guitar player and there’s a lot of interaction between us, and we can transition between the songs in a natural way. We did like five or so, and all the ones that were really good had shops that let us play totally acoustic. Sometimes they have a little PA set up and it sounds weird because you’re using acoustic guitar pickups that generally sound bad—there’s no way getting around it. It just sounds a lot better [totally acoustic] because you can hear the natural sound of the instrument, and you get a lot more of a sense of the room.

What sort of things do you feel like you’ve learned from playing with Kit? What is he bringing out in your playing?

He’s super quick. He has perfect technique, which I don’t really, so we fill in each other’s gaps quite well. I knew of him because he was living with a few friends of mine, but I never had a chat with him until this gig by that Dig That Treasure guy—he runs a radio show but also a festival here in London. He put on this fundraiser for Resonance at Cafe OTO in October. It was like, “You’re not getting paid, but you can do whatever you want.” That Bert and John (1966) album is big for me, and I never had the chance to play in an acoustic guitar duo like that, so I thought it’d be good to try. And I wanted to play with Kit for a long time too so I just messaged him to see if he was up for it. Also, we were going on first, so if it was rubbish then no one would know, and if it was good then we could carry on. We met the week before and had a couple rehearsals.

What are the gaps that Kit might have that you’re filling in, and vice versa?

Kit just doesn’t really write songs, generally. So I’ll usually have an idea and we’ll develop it together. In the shows we’ve been playing, he’s playing steel string while I’m playing classical guitar. You can really lean into the strength of both instruments. There’s a lot more attack with him, but my classical is quite loud. You can play a lot with dynamics.

With My New Band Believe, you’re focusing a lot more on the acoustic guitar. What sort of things do you feel like you’ve learned about the acoustic guitar from composing with it and playing with it?

It’s funny. It’s limited because you don’t get that much sustain out of it, especially when it’s amplified. It’s great when you’re playing in a smallish room and it’s reverberating, but for the recording there were bits where I was like, I need to have something that’s sustaining because otherwise it’s such a percussive instrument. For a lot of the recent shows we’ve been leaning into that, and you can get a lot of interplay between the two guitars where you say, “Whatever I’m doing, make sure you’re accenting a different beat.”

You mentioned Bert [Jansch], and I know you were inspired a lot by his music, but I know you also like Judee Sill. Her debut is one of my go-to answers for my favorite album of all time. What is it about her music, her singing, or her songwriting that you’re drawn to?

She talks about such serious topics in a way that’s not super light—there’s a bit of humor to it. There’s this thing of following a humorous line with something serious, or making a serious line funny with the line after it. It’s also a few melodic things. In my song “Actress,” the chorus melody was [inspired by] “Crayon Angels.” I was like, “Oh, this is just basically that,” and I carried on for the rest of the chorus.

The thing I love about all her music is that she has a very particular way of singing. In “Crayon Angels” she says the word “laugh” in a really memorable way—you can really feel the contours of every word with the way she intones.

The way she speaks is so weird as well. She’ll speak like (with emphasis) this, and then speeds up and slows down within sentences.

Right. I love the way she sings on “Jesus Was a Crossmaker”—the melody’s bobbing up and down the whole time, like (hums the vacillating topline).

It’s quite campy as well. She’s got this liturgical thing going on, but then “He’s a bandit and a heartbreaker / Jesus was a crossmaker” is a silly line, but she carries it! It’s great.

I’m assuming you know about her backstory, how she was in jail?

Yeah. And she got dropped from her label because she outed David Geffen. She was on tour in the UK and it was something like, “David Geffen is more focused on his boyfriend” at this show in Leeds, and he found out.

In speaking about this, I’m wondering if you were trying specific things with vocals on this album. What’s your relationship with your voice? Did you sing much when you were a child?

I sang a lot at school. I was in school productions like Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and I was in the school choir. Group singing is obviously a big thing at a lot of primary schools in England, but it’s quite casual. I didn’t really get back into it until, to be honest, more recently. At the Brit School there were loads of singers already, so you didn’t get a lot of opportunities to focus on singing because there were people who were actual vocalists, like an Adele-type thing. Black Midi slowly got more into it and I thought, okay this is maybe something I’ll be interested in getting better at. Then when I did that single, “Lecture 25,” that felt like I finally had a way of exploring how to deliver words. It felt like something new.

What was the newness you felt in singing that song?

The session was from 11PM to 4AM. We were doing it right at the end of the session, and Margo [Broom] and Seth [Evans] really pushed me to go further. I’ve never really had that. When we were doing Black Midi records, you’d just do it and the producer would go, “That’s amazing!” That’s the right thing to do when you’re recording someone’s vocals because it’s a very vulnerable thing. But with this it was cool because I have a good relationship with Seth, and Margo is a no-bullshit person, so they were both like, “No no, do it more like this. Just go for it!” There would be times when they wouldn’t record things and just ask me to push myself to the point of failing. Through that, I could get somewhere that was beyond where I’d usually go. I felt like I actually got to a place that was a lot more developed than what I was doing with Black Midi.

With Black Midi, do you feel people were afraid to push back against ideas? Did you feel like there wasn’t enough friction to have the band grow?

There was a lot of push and pull on the first album [Schlagenheim (2019)], and once we did the second [Cavalcade (2021)] and third [Hellfire (2022)], it was this weird thing where you couldn’t really say if you didn’t like anything. Or there was this thing where we felt we had to follow everything to its natural conclusion. This can be good, but sometimes it ends up on the album and it’s not the best thing it could’ve been. Even though everyone wants it to be the best thing, people want to trust each other. This leads to interesting results, but it’s less collaborative. Speaking for myself, sometimes you know that whatever you’re doing could be better and it’s useful to have someone to push against. Someone will say, “Have you tried this?” and you’ll say, “No, don’t think so.” You can then justify why to both yourself and to the other person. But if you have this thing where nobody says anything and you’re getting nothing back… it’s not ideal.

Is there a song on the new album where you feel like there was a big difference between the initial idea and how it ended up, specifically based on communication and feedback?

The last song, “One Night.” We recorded it with the caroline guys and I was like, this is cool but I’m not really sure about it as a composition—does it stand up to something like “Heart of Darkness” instrumentally? The lyrics are really good on it though, and I was pushed by Mike [O’Malley] and Jasper [Llewellyn] to accept that the music does a good job of foregrounding the lyrics. Similarly, “Heart of Darkness” was the opposite thing where I pushed to have it my way. The end of it, where I have Steve Noble and Caius Williams playing, Jasper thought it should be a separate track. I was like, “No, it’s gotta be the full thing, it’s gotta be part of the same idea.”

It’s interesting to hear this notion of lyrics being at the forefront of a song. Was it a challenge to do that with My New Band Believe since Black Midi’s songs were a lot busier?

Yeah, I think so. That’s why that song is so interesting. And it’s a single-tracked vocal while the rest of the songs on the album are double-tracked. I did it all very quickly, and I didn’t think much of it—I didn’t know what value it had for the record. Over time it was like, “Oh, this is actually really good.” With the lyrics, I was interested in this idea of playing with perspectives, with obscuring different narrative outcomes in a way where there’s a justification for each, where every line could have a dark or light reading depending on how you hear it. With “Target Practice,” it’s a bit more obvious. I didn’t really discuss the lyrics with [caroline] and I remember Jasper said off the bat, “The chorus [of “One Night”] is really nice, I like how positive it is.” But you could read it as a negative thing, too. That’s what I was going for—not necessarily ambiguity in the narrative, but the outcome having a dual reading.

Was that inspired by particular artists or authors or experiences you’ve had in your own life?

In your daily life, you’ll have people telling you about their interactions with another person. As a hypothetical example, let’s say two of your friends have fallen out and they tell you completely different stories. It’s like… okay (laughter). It’s a bit like that. And a lot of the stuff I was reading while I was writing the lyrics was New Narrative writers like Robert Glück. In Margery Kempe (1994), the narrative of the book merges where he becomes Margery and Margery becomes him, and Margery’s getting with Jesus and he’s getting with this guy in the ’90s. What happens to Margery is that suddenly she’s on a train, and he’s suddenly in Nuremberg in 1413 or something. There’s a lot you can play with perspective, especially when you’re the only voice on the record. I can modulate the delivery, and I think there’s bits of that in “Actress” with the showtune bit. And while I inhabit that, the song’s verses don’t change so much. It doesn’t need to be signposted; it’s not gonna be like, “I’m gonna do the nasty line read and now I gotta do the nice line read (laughter). I let it just wash over you.

Earlier you mentioned that you were in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and in choir. What was important about those experiences for you?

I was really young when I did Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I was like 9 or 10. I’m not sure I took anything with me (laughter). I was just interested in performance, and it’s this weird thing where I took more of a backseat on that front in Black Midi, and then with this… when I first started doing the solo shows, I did a course in Laban movement, and I became a lot more interested in things like this. The scripted nature of it is interesting because it allows you to inhabit a different world. When you get on stage and do the songs, you’re in the music. I guess it’s the same when you’re in a stage show and doing the production and everything else goes to the side. It’s something I would’ve liked to have done more, but in secondary school my drama teacher had a beef with me (laughter). It’s this feeling where you’re really going for it. It’s the same with listening to music: you wanna get to a state where you’re really listening and everything else is gone.

How was it different when performing in Black Midi?

The beginning of Black Midi was kind of like that. Towards the end, it was a bit like… we were making money, so it felt like it was out of obligation. We still enjoyed it, but we started this when we were 17 and now we’re 23. I could stop, but what else would I do? And how would I make any money? Everyone probably felt a bit like that toward the end, and when that happens you’re not really in the music—you’re just playing the songs.

Is that something you guys talked about with each other?

A little bit, but towards the end the communication was pretty bad, so these sort of things weren’t really talked about. There have been conversations since then, like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” But around that time it was hard. In my experience, with having a lot of friends who are musicians in bands, a lot of them have been in them for a long time or have been in a similar position as Black Midi: they started the band when they were a teenager and now they’re approaching 30, or are 30, and still doing the band. And maybe the band isn’t even 100% of their income—they’ll tour for six months of the year and it makes 60% of their income, and for the other six months they’ll work a little bit. And then maybe it’s not something that they enjoy and they’d rather be doing something else, but because they’re doing it with friends they can’t step away because then the band would break up. And there might be people who are more invested in the band than others, too. I do think there are more people in bands who are doing it out of obligation than people realize, and at a certain point the music suffers—the album isn’t being done for the right reasons.

I know that with this solo project you were initially playing shows under different names, and that the intention was to play with different members. It feels like a circuitous way to prevent yourself from feeling the same way again, where you have this obligation to your friends and the band itself. Would that be accurate to say?

There are positive reasons behind it as well, but that’s obviously part of it. I think you get something interesting when you tell a group of people, “Let’s just do something for six months or a year, and really commit to it, and then after we can decide if we should carry on or do something else.” And then there’s no reason that anybody couldn’t just jump back in, either.

The initial idea was to do a Neil Young & Crazy Horse-type thing where I’d do the album with caroline and then go to, I don’t know, Idles and say, “Let’s do an album together,” but still do the same songs. And then the arrangements would be different anyway. After that I could go with The Chemical Brothers. Obviously neither of those examples would work (laughter) but that was kind of the original idea, and it’s become a lot more open.

Did you approach caroline with a specific expiration date in mind? And how did it become more open?

When I started talking with caroline, I knew that they worked very slowly and that they were working on the second album [caroline 2 (2025)]. This was while Black Midi was still touring—I wanted time after the tour was finished to do solo shows. I wanted to go down various avenues and not really worry about it being a proper thing. Working with them, I knew it’d have to be like a year or so, which gave me some time to write songs while being able to tell a record label that there was something going to be done in the future. What happened is that the songs I initially brought to caroline were unfinished, and I thought that they could help finish the gaps in the songs—that’s how it could be collaborative. But then I started touring solo with Black County, New Road and thought, well, there’s no point in bringing songs that I think are unfinished, so I finished them. And after that tour is when me and caroline came together. I was like, “Actually, these songs are finished now, so the collaboration isn’t going to be on the writing anymore,” and then it naturally opened up after that.

Do you think your songs evolved while playing them live, too?

When I did the solo shows, all the songs were meant to be played live with solo guitars. And while the album’s got a big sound, all of them are reducible to guitar and voice. I guess that’s what we did at the in-store thing this week. And that was the thing of writing the songs—they had to have musical interest rather than just strumming out chords. They had to have strong melodies and lyrics I could deliver that could then be interpreted differently at every show, where they could reveal themselves whenever I played.

That’s super fascinating. So this notion of the lyrics having dual meanings is partly so you don’t get bored of playing the songs live?

Some of the songs. Some of the songs on the record I didn’t play live much, like “Pearls” and “One Night,” which I used earlier as an example of something that was most going down that road anyway. “Actress” was definitely like that. I remember doing shows and feeling differently about the lyrics depending on how I felt that day. It becomes a much more interesting way to perform—you react to your environment. Obviously I have enjoyed playing improvised music in Black Midi, but it’s nice to react to your environment even within set song structures.

For the last six months, a lot of the shows we’ve been doing as a band have not involved a great deal of money because we’re playing in a small room or whatever. I’d usually ask one of the band members to do a solo set to support the band, and that would massively inform how the set went afterwards. Like, Tara Cunningham did a solo set before we played with her and it’s just this thing where I never played with her before, and we didn’t rehearse any of the shows so I don’t think she made soundcheck—I had no idea what she was going to do. There was just more space for her playing, and it was a lot more tailored for her. I guess that’s a natural thing of playing with people anyway, but having that 25 minutes to listen deeply to how she played affected the rest of the set.

Can you give an example of a song where it changed as a result of a particular performance?

I think “Love Story” is one like that. We do it in a different key to the record, so I get a different feeling for it every time. That one feels totally open for me. It’s interesting because you can’t really sing it the same way—it’s lower, so to sing it with the exact same melody would be awkward. It forces you to explore a bit more with the vocal and, through that, there are these different line readings. But also, it might just be a tweet you read before the show (laughter). Or maybe you’ll bump into an opp (laughter). And because of that, certain lines might become more poignant.

We played Rewire the other weekend and I was asked in another interview about it—it was like a Rewire promo interview. They were like, “Rewire is a festival for adventurous music,” which is great, but I was a bit like… this is a songs thing. And I thought, there’s no reason to contrive doing some kind of totally free set because we’re doing Rewire, but the songs within themselves have a lot of space to be changed. I’m taking big swings and sometimes big misses with the vocal line and extending sections and stuff. The song form still has value as “adventurous music.”

What are some of the big misses you’ve made?

There’s this live video that’s kind of unfinished called “Kick Me.” There are points with the vocals where you can hear me go for it and I go, aughhhh (laughter). There’s bits of the songs when I was editing it together where I was like, should I correct this? Then there were certain lines where I sang the wrong lyrics and it gave the wrong impression. But there are other bits where I was like, it’s important to keep this in. The more you listen to it, it all just becomes part of the song.

Can you talk a bit about the arrangements for your songs? I’m curious about Mike and Jasper’s roles, specifically. What would not be present in these songs if they weren’t on the record?

They were useful in being honest about certain sections. It was the first time I was doing something without a normal band structure around me, and those guys had obviously produced their own records, but I think it was a lot about them giving me confidence. Like, I don’t need a proper producer like Dan Carey to do something like this. I tried to record “Opposite Teacher” a few times and they said, “Just do it in your bedroom.” They also have a lot of contacts for people I wanted to play with. I was reacquainting myself with the musical world in London—I had just been touring so much that it was a nice route back in.

I was re-finding people who were into adventurous music, not to use the Rewire phrase (laughter). People who were open. For example, Steve Noble doesn’t really do any session work, and when I asked him I thought there’d be no way he’d want to do this. But it was this thing where he just loves music and was down. He’s very serious in terms of how he approaches the music, but he’s super open. With all the people who were involved, the best experiences were when people were open to taking big swings, and while there were some misses, there’d be a big hit in there as well. That’s what was exciting—pushing ourselves and seeing where we could go.

I didn’t make demos for any of the songs either, so it was kind of like… similar to how I left the songs initially open for caroline, I left a lot of the arrangements open, but there were things like the end of “Heart of Darkness” where I didn’t know what to do. The obvious thing would be to put a drone under it… but that’s quite boring (laughter). It was hard to work out what else to do while building a sense of intensity. And the thing is, you can labor over something for ages and then someone comes in and plays and it’s like, “Oh, that’s amazing. This is it.” It’s about being open to things being different to how you expected them to be, and then following that to its natural conclusion.

Is there a song on the album where you were most surprised by how it ended up based on your initial vision?

“Pearls.” I like how much it breaks the fourth wall of the album. It’s constantly taking you out of the song, knocking the song off its course. And also, I liked physically leaving the studio at the end of the song.

That’s a total caroline thing, yeah. The idea of making the presence of the room a compositional element.

That’s one thing that they helped me with—allowing these ideas to be properly explored, that you could just go with a phone recording into a different room as long as it had the right narrative effect. I made one of these mixtape things where a lot of it is just the sound of the street I live on. It’s a really busy street and every so often you get cars that are playing music that pass by each other, and then there’s a split-second remix of, I don’t know, Beyoncé or Tudd Rundgren with drum ‘n’ bass. That’s not on there, but you’ll hear this completely random stuff.

I know that you were initially interested in getting Van Dyke Parks on the record.

Yeah, and that’s a similar thing of getting Steve Noble where, why not just ask this guy who’s obviously not gonna do it? (laughter). Van Dyke Parks was really sweet and funny on the emails, but I think I maybe emailed at too early a stage of making the record. I just wanted to see what would happen. Song Cycle (1967) is a record I really love, and I love his work with Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys—everyone does—and I was like, why not ask? There were lots of people who were asked to be on the record who couldn’t make it, or they thought they wouldn’t be right for it. There were probably as many people who played on the record as those didn’t play but were asked.

There’s a promo photo for the band and it’s riffing on the self-titled Velvet Underground album. What about that album is meaningful to you?

It’s one of the albums I return to every few months. There was a period where I listened to it to go to sleep. I also just love the guitar solo on “What Goes On.” The guitar solo is always different in your head than what it is, and that’s why it’s kind of sick—it’s never actually what you think it is. I was talking with Kit about this the other day. Like, on The Beatles’ “Come Together,” you think it’s bum-bum-bu-da-da-da but it’s actually just bum-bum-dum-da. The tom makes you think there’s that kind of fill in there.

Oh my god you just blew my mind. I was thinking of the bassline in my head and I totally thought it was like that, but you’re right—it’s the tom.

It’s this interaction between the instruments that makes it sound like the performance of one instrument. But that’s an aside. The thing about doing the homage was that the album cover looks a lot like that photo, though it also looks like the Band on the Run (1973) cover and the VU (1968-1969/1985) album cover. My friend’s brother is a photography student and he had access to the same film and camera. We were like, “Okay, this seems like the right thing to do.” All of the press shots were organized on the day of with whoever could come down. Like, let’s get anyone who could look a bit like Doug Yule (laughter).

I’m still fascinated by what you mentioned about “Come Together.” Is that something that you’re thinking about with your own arrangements? That seems like something that’s hard to do intentionally because it has a bit to do with how a song exists in memory.

The beginning of “Actress” was super labored over, like the first two minutes of the song—the guitars. There’s lots of swapping between different guitars and some of it is recorded in a studio, some of it’s recorded in a home studio, and some of it’s recorded on a Zoom mic in my bedroom. I guess that’s different because it’s more of an intentional swapping, but it’s quite hard to make that feel natural and not take you out of the flow of it.

There are other tracks, like the live recording of the “Kick Me” song, where there are interacting parts where melodies are passed between one another. I think there are some bits I mixed out towards the end; there were loads of guitar bits where I’ll play like a baby monkey, playing bum notes, and I’d do some overdubs to see what would happen. When you listen through, there’s an unexpected interaction between that and another part, so you can cut everything out except this one muted note that’s totally out of time. It’s more of a diversionary thing; I don’t think it necessarily affects how good or bad a song is—it’s just a fun, interesting technique. I guess that’s the thing with the acoustic guitars—you’re limited to the effects that you can put on it. With an electric guitar you have 10 billion pedals you can use, you have amps and pickups. With an acoustic guitar it’s just a box with strings, so you end up developing different techniques to get interesting sounds.

I wanted to ask about the “One Night” music video that Park Kyujae made. How did you stumble upon his films?

One of the cooler videos we did with Black Midi was with this Icelandic guy [Vilhjálmur Yngvi Hjálmarsson] we met at a festival in Iceland. He made this really cool video that had like 50 views, and then he made a music video [of “Chondromalacia Patella”] that was really cool. When you start talking about music videos with a label, they’ll suggest these production companies like Canada. And obviously that’s fine, but I find that a lot of these music videos are ways for a director to show off that they can get a gig as an advert director.

Yeah, that’s exactly it. You’ll go to their website and you’ll see it all laid out, and often the music videos are some of the earlier stuff they’ve made.

Yeah, and the trajectory is that they’ll do short films or music videos where they won’t make money, and then they can move on to making high-end adverts. But all these videos look the same, they have the same kind of narrative, they have the same kind of tricks. Every couple months, I’d do a deep dive of UbuWeb and then find different directors. Kyujae’s films aren’t really accessible, and I don’t think he’s ever had a screening in London, but you can figure things out. I found this one Korean director, Kyungmook Kim, who I really like as well. I thought about asking him, but I didn’t. I can’t remember how I found him but I think I was just looking through a list of Korean directors. Often with these people, they’re students or they’re early in their careers so you can just DM them. I just DM’d Kyujae and was like, “Would you wanna do this?” I honestly thought he wouldn’t because his films are really good, and I feel like good filmmakers aren’t usually interested in making music videos (laughter). He knew about Black Midi though, so he was down.

He knows a lot about music! I’m friends with him because I showed his works last year, and one of his films has an Éliane Radigue soundtrack. I was pleasantly surprised that he made the video.

Yeah, it’s really good. I need to find more directors for other music videos because I want to do one for every track.

I can give you a list of filmmakers if you want more experimental ones.

That’d be great. It’s funny—I would also spend loads of time finding people who made interesting [Instagram] Reels, but you can’t contact them… I don’t think they know how to really use their phones (laughter). Like, they know how to upload these Reels but they maybe haven’t sorted out their DM requests and other things.

I’m shocked you mentioned Kyungmook Kim. That’s a deep cut. He has this early film, Faceless Things (2005), which is the only Korean film I’ve ever seen that is explicitly gay and also explicit in content. It’s more explicit than most gay films I’ve seen.

That’s the one with the hidden camera, right?

Yeah, it’s one of my favorite Korean films, just nothing else like it. And after that he made stuff that was a lot more accessible.

Yeah, he made a sitcom or something. It’s maybe like Van Dyke Parks where there’s something crazy early on and everything they’ve done since is so varied that you’re not sure what you’re gonna get when you work with them.

Is there anything we didn’t talk about today that you wanted to mention?

No, I don’t have anything. Thank you very much, these were very thoughtful questions.

There’s a question I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to you. Can you share one thing you love about yourself?

I’ve read your interviews before so I knew this question was coming. In the past, I would’ve said that I’m super organized and I’m a reliable person, but I think that’s not the case anymore—I’m losing things all the time (laughter). I nearly left my guitar on the train the other day. I’m turning up late to things. But I’ve really enjoyed becoming a band leader in a very laissez-faire way. I’m happy with the way the band’s operating. It gives musicians the space to come in, even if it’s on a one-show basis, and do whatever they want. It’s easy to say, “Oh, it’s totally open, you can do whatever you want,” but then there are certain parameters and taste things where you’re like, “Mmm… don’t do that.” As far as I can tell, the musicians do feel like they can explore things within the music that are personal to them.

It’s interesting in the live-ness of it. When you’re doing a recording, you get the feeling that this is the only document that’s ever gonna exist that anyone’s gonna care about. But placing more emphasis on the live-ness means things can open up. If someone starts playing something where you’re like, “Well… that’s corny,” you still have to think about what you can do that can play well with it, to make them sound even better. And it’s a different proposition when you’re recording; you have a specific idea because it’s gonna be on an album. In a live set, it’s just what you’re doing now, and it might be different tomorrow.

Before the band broke down, we discussed the hypothetical fourth Black Midi album. The capability was there to make multi-track live recordings of any set. And it’s kind of what “Kick Me” is. We wanted to take the multi-track and treat every gig as a take of the song, so we’d be performing each night but also tracking the album. And then you can add loads of overdubs, or like with “Kick Me,” we’d just take every good bit from every show and splice them together. I’m interested in exploring that now, and all of the shows have been recorded—we recorded the Rewire show. We’ll see if something comes to fruition.

My New Band Believe’s self-titled album is out now via Rough Trade. The album can be purchased at the label’s website and at Bandcamp.

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Thank you for reading the 222nd issue of Tone Glow. You want potatoes or rice tonight?

If you appreciate what we do, please consider donating via Ko-fi or becoming a Patreon patron. Tone Glow is dedicated to forever providing its content for free, but please know that all our writers are paid for the work they do. All donations will be used for paying writers, and if we get enough money, Tone Glow will be able to publish issues more frequently.

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Cass McCombs (b. 1977) is a singer-songwriter from California. His catalog spans roughly twenty-five years and, likely, just as many places of residence—from demos recorded at home in San Francisco, 1999, to last year’s superb Interior Live Oak, transmitted from New York City. We spoke on April Fools’ Day before his show at Denver’s Bluebird Theater. Historically, published interviews with Cass tend to focus on his perceived evasiveness or mystique, ending up framed in terms of either interviewer frustration or perpetuated myth-making. For my part, I thought he was a pretty normal, quiet guy, more interested in talking about some things than others. It may just be a matter of taking him at his word when he says he doesn’t know something.

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Corrigan Blanchfield: You guys drove from Minneapolis?

Cass McCombs: Yeah, we had a day off. We stayed in North Platte, Nebraska.

I was surprised you didn’t have a stop in Omaha or somewhere, but I don’t know shit about tour logistics.

(conspiratorial whisper) I don’t either. I don’t even tour that much, we haven’t done a full US tour since 2019.

Has your appetite for hitting the road shifted over time?

Well, yeah it’s an ever-evolving monst— creature, you know? It’s also, I wanna play with certain people, certain friends, and certain musicians who are the only ones I connect with. I don’t play solo, and I’m not into playing with new people that much. Sometimes, like every few years, I’ll meet someone that I connect with, but it’s really rare. And then Joe, who’s [tour managed] us for almost twenty years, he lives in Edinburgh.

Would you rather do the studio hermit thing?

No, I hate the studio. It feels wrong, like you’re trying to capture an exotic animal that’s on the endangered species list, you know? It’s stuffy, and I don’t find it that creative. People who are good at it, it’s more like aesthetics and style and design—things that I’m not that interested in.

On tour, it’s a different song in a different room each night.

Yeah, every night it’s a different… chaos is your friend, actually.

I thought the credits for those demo records were interesting—you’re doing the songs, your friend has the machine and the kitchen table and whatnot.

Jason [Quever]’s great, he’s really really good. When I started learning to play guitar and write songs and stuff, I had a 4-track, and then I got a quarter-inch 8-track that we ended up using on A (2003). And I had that in high school, but it was almost a sketchpad for me. I don’t really… toil over it.

You’re kinda talking about auteur-ing your own songbook, live. But you’ve never gotten too much into standards, right?

Yeah, I mean I’ve done a lot of covers over the years, here and there, playing in bar bands. When I played with members of the Dead, not only would we play their songs, but they were really inviting of whatever thing that I brought. It could even be a song that you heard on the radio on the way to the gig.

So when it comes to your guys, the players for tonight, you’re thinking more about chemistry on stage than in the recording process.

Yes, I think so. Or at least it’s more enjoyable for me. The show is… it’s just exciting. I love performance, and theater, and circuses. Records aren’t—they technically are a performance, it’s a recording of a performance, or a broken-up simulated performance. Everyone is performing, maybe not at the same time, but it is performance. It’s just not as good of a form of performance as the theater (laughter). And this (gesturing to stage) is theater; I think about this as theater.

Do you have a theatrical or other extramusical arts background?

When I was a kid I did a little acting.

In the Bay? Were you tuned in at all to the rap stuff happening around then?

Oh yeah, that’s required. The first rap stuff I got into was local—Too $hort, Digital Underground. And then from there, I found out about East Coast rap, which is a weird way to do it. Too $hort kinda came first for me and the kids I was around. But then obviously Hieroglyphics, and Saafir, all that stuff that came in the ‘90s was huge as well for us.

How were you keeping up with new music?

I’ve always been hands and knees on some record store floor, and friends have always worked in shops like that. So it was shops, annoying people who worked there to get information, and I guess there was some radio. A lot of it’s really hazy, you know. KALX was always around, KPFA turned me on to Negativland and stuff like that. KPOO, you know K-P-O-O in SF was amazing. Ozcat in Vallejo.

What was your high school like?

I have brain damage, so I’m gonna try my best, you know? It was another century, and it feels like it was another century. It was a normal high school, public high school, whatever. All different types of people, but also I knew kids from all over the Bay because I was with the Unitarian Universalist… that’s how we all met. I met all these musicians from SF, the South Bay, and we were all weirdos. People didn’t fit in, that’s really what it comes down to. We’d have these conferences, subcultures even in that crew. The hippies and the punks, the goths and whatever. Different crews would take over kitchen duties, shopping duties. “Healing,” you know, it was all very Bay Area. I’m very fond of my time with the Unitarians.

Do you have any kind of explicit faith practice going on nowadays?

It’s hard to talk about, it’s not something really that I… I do, but I don’t talk about it. I don’t know how, you know?

You prefer to keep it private, or you find it difficult to even verbalize?

I think both. I’m a private person in general; I’m not a social person, really. I have the best friends (laughs), I have the best people. I love them, but I’m not going out there, you know, socializing. And I just always had a tough time expressing, honestly, things that are meant to be private. There are some things that you’re not supposed to tell other people, that’s just for you.

Preparing for this, I noticed that there was a period in your career where every interview opened with a description of you as this elusive, difficult guy, which the text never really bore out.

(laughs). Yeah. But press or whatever you want to call it, publicity… it’s all fake anyway, you know? Just even being in society, you have your family self and your social self and then a public self. I think people wear different, fake masks. And I don’t begrudge them, it’s a survival thing; people think that they have to be deceptive so they don’t hurt themselves. But yeah, I don’t know where that came from.

Do you think people have a hard time with the idea that you might be out here singing songs but not necessarily, you know, thinking of them as autobiographical statements?

Yeah, right. You know, being a performer is historically a job for extroverts, but there’s many, many exceptions. I just read this biography of Lon Chaney, and he was like that. He’s a top Hollywood actor in the silent era, but he wasn’t out socializing. He liked to go fishing and stuff like that.

How do you balance that relative inwardness with the need to observe and inhabit different perspectives, scenarios, etc. for songs?

I know what you mean. When I was younger, I attempted be a journalist through song, in a way. I loved Woody Guthrie, and I thought that’s what I was getting from him, reading Bound for Glory (1943) or something like that. But then I found that I’m not a reporter, and I realized that I like making characters in my imagination—like imaginary friends or something—and just communicating through my fantasies. And, you know, I’m friends with people from my childhood and stuff. I stay in touch with people, and I’m really interested to hear how they change. It puts my changes into perspective. I have some characters in my life who have become muses for me, and their stories blend with my stories.

With respect to literary influences, does musical inspiration originate in your pleasure reading or does the more explicit research follow the song idea?

I think it’s different for different songs; like “Bum Bum Bum,” I read a bunch of books for that, because I really wanted to get it right. I had a very specific idea, kind of like a painting in my head. So that, I didn’t really feel comfortable filling in the blanks with my imagination. It’s kind of all over the place, and I’m not always reading. I take breaks, you know, and it’s hard to read on tour. Yesterday, I don’t think I read anything. No—I read a little. I read one chapter in a Flann O’Brien book today, in the van. But I can’t read in the van, no one can.

What do you do in the van?

Talk, zone out. Maybe try to nap, but it’s a very restless nap. Because it’s just a van, it’s not a big vehicle.

Right, you’re cargo, it’s a cargo machine (laughter).

Yeah, exactly. We are the cargo.

Talking about touring, it seems like more and more there are these big hubs on the coast and then this wide range of spots that sustains the journey in-between. What makes a place stand out along that route?

Totally. It’s big, I like this one. But it’s just the day. You can think a town is great, or a venue’s great, and then you can return to that same spot and the spirits or whatever, the mojo isn’t there, you know? It was there last time. And then you arrive at some… even playing like an in-store, like at a record store, doesn’t seem like it’s gonna be fun, and then sometimes it just goes off the chain. I think it’s always the surprising places that create the magical experiences. I mean, essentially we’re just, like, a bar band. I think we’ll always be a bar band; I’ve accepted that, I’ve come to terms that it’s cool to be a bar band.

Was there some higher aspiration you felt like you had to give up? You don’t strike me as, like, a career trajectory, milestone guy.

No, not professionally. I’ve never really given a… whatever about the business. I’ve always been disgusted at the music business. And, just, shocked at how some musicians seemingly enjoy it. But, I talk about this with my old friends, we fully thought back in the day that we were gonna, like… whatever you wanna call it, this indie, DIY, punk, whatever the thing was… For one thing, we never labelled what we did, and I think that made it even more powerful. We were connected not through style of music, but just ethically. Pathologically, you know, it was some spirit that connected us. Totally different bands from all different styles, and we fully thought that we were gonna change things and destroy the music business (laughs), this dragon, defeat this evil monster, you know? We failed. But we failed gloriously (laughter).

You’ve been asked plenty about your songwriting process, which you don’t seem to have a real concrete definition of. I was wondering if, like spirituality, there’s a sort of mystic element there that you kind of want to protect from interrogation.

Right, I mean what’s the Van Morrison line, “Why Must I Always Explain?” My friend Jack Name, the other day, was talking something along those lines, that making music… it’s called “music,” so it’s of the muse. So we have to protect the muse, and the muse loves silence. The muse loves humility, quiet time. So, if you’re out there explaining away, you might lose the muse. It’s dangerous, I think; I guess you could say that I have a mystical faith that there is a thing called the muse, or there’s muses, actually. In antiquity, there’s multiple muses: there’s the muse of sewing, you know, and they’re all here to foster us and guide us to a more enriching experience with our own life.

I don’t know how much you consider the listener, but do you think of your music as having a particular utility to the audience?

“Utility,” that’s a cool word. I mean, entertainment is utility, right? That’s a huge utility. So hopefully we entertain people. We try to play rock and roll music, rock and roll is entertainment music. Guitar riffs, drum beats that move your body, make you move around a little bit. There’s a utility, I’d like to think, to that. Then I think there’s another thing that’s like the antithesis of that (laughs), which is the art side of it. ’Cause art does not have utility, in my… I think I think that. I think art might be something that is essentially worthless to everybody. But then as far as the audience, it’s like, I think the music is actually made by the audience. Or the listener, if you want to say that. The listener, the ears of that person, decides what they consider to be musical or not musical. There’s sounds happening, like what is this? (points to bar). That fan. Is that music? I hear a fan. Someone’s mind would say “that’s beautiful to me,” and another person would say “turn it off.”

What’s your favorite music to dance to?

Do I have a favorite type? Uh, probably New Orleans music. I’ve been down there a bunch of times, and when they’re really swingin’ it’s… there’s something about New Orleans music. All of it—Zydeco, New Orleans funk, the marching band stuff. They’ve got the New Orleans flavor that’s all their own. Every time I got there, I’m astounded—it’s the ultimate music city in human history.

Do you remember how you ended up there for the first time?

Yeah, I remember. I was driving with a friend across the country, I was in my late teens, and we slept in the car. I love it down there, and even deeper… Beaumont, Texas, but like, south of Beaumont. Right on the border of Texas and Louisiana, all down there is really cool.

Do you consider yourself a city guy?

I’ve lived in a lot of cities, but I’m real restless. I get restless, and I have to go. And then when we started this trip, as soon as we hit farmland it felt calm again. But I do love New York, SF, wherever. I guess I love it all, you know?

Do you find it difficult to capture that sense of rural calm in song? I feel like all the actual music of those sorts of areas, bluegrass or whatever, can’t really be exported.

You mentioned bluegrass—I grew up around bluegrass musicians. Bill Monroe, the inventor of bluegrass, I’ve always loved how jet fuel-powered music it is. So it is kind of like city music, and then later I grew up and started travelling around and meeting musicians that are, maybe, self-described “old-timey” musicians, that’s a whole thing. Some of ’em—you mention Bill Monroe, Stanley Brothers, Osborne Brothers, they spit on the ground and they’re like, “That’s not old-timey, that’s commercial, they whitewashed it. They bulldozed it, it was way more eclectic before.” So there is something kind of modern and atomic about it. And also the blues, the blues is modern music. But I might be getting near to hyperbole, because what is modern? The anxiety of urban over-development, I guess, manifested through Bill Monroe’s mandolin.

“One-hit wonder” is a concept from a completely different realm of music, but is it odd having one of your songs get way, way bigger than the rest?

Which one is that? “County Line”? Yeah, that’s weird. What can you do about it? We play it all the time, we don’t feel obligated to do anything. We almost feel obligated to mess with people (laughs), do the wrong thing. Go the wrong route, bother people a little bit. But you know, “County Line,” it’s a fun song to play. There’s a lot of ways you can do a song like that, it’s evolved. You’ll see tonight, we have a new arrangement. I think a great song does that; to kind of go back to recording, that’s what’s kind of not good about recording. It deceives us into thinking that there is one empirical, correct arrangement of a composition. A great composition should be continuously re-interpreted, each time, with every performance. That’s how you know it’s a good song. By recording music, it’s like you’re stepping on a flower. You’re stopping it from growing. It’s like a spell, an incantation.

Did you ever have a job that completely killed your ability to write songs?

A job? Yeah, hmm. Well, I’m trying to think. Movie theater, that was ok. Construction, that was ok. Demolition, that was good! That actually helped, destroying stuff. Take a sledgehammer to a wall.

What were the different roles on a demo crew?

You know, it’s been a while. As I remember, there was a sledgehammer guy. Person, sorry.

Sister Sledge.

Right, Sister Sledge (laughter). Good, very good! I love that. I don’t remember, someone has to pick it up, put it in a trash bag or something (laughs).

Honestly, I asked just because I was envisioning this whole hierarchy and then at the top of the heap is the guy who gets to push the button. But yeah, that would be good. They have those wreck rooms now, people pay for the privilege of doing that work.

I know! They should be paid, if they were smart. There’s a lot of things that need to be demolished.

What I was getting at, though, is the sort of musical middle class where you’ve got some kind of job with the explicit function of floating your musical pursuits.

A lot of my musician friends in New York are bartenders or something, and they tell me that they love it, and they enjoy thinking about music as their calm or something. They deal with these horrible people at the bar, and then they get music to heal them, and it’s really fulfilling. They say. But you know, we all gotta do something with our hands. We have these hands, and they’re itchy hands, for all of us. It’s not about money, really; I think it’s about your hands (laughter).

Prepping for these always involves seeing about fifty variations of the same press picture. Do you like being photographed?

It depends, you know. Sometimes I really don’t. There’s a few friends and photographers that have made it less painful, but again it’s kind of back to the recorded music thing. Who really wants to be captured in that way? I don’t, you know? I wanna live, I don’t wanna be captured. It’s such a drag to have someone point a machine at you. There’s several of them that I’m totally ok with, but photography… I take pictures, but I refuse to take pictures of people. I won’t do it. I don’t want to take pictures of human beings, it just seems wrong. I’d rather take a picture. There’s one I took the other day: baked beans had, like, spilled out over the concrete somewhere. That’s a good photograph, you know what I’m saying?

Cass McCombs’ Interior Live Oak (2025) is out now. McCombs is currently on tour and dates can be found at his website.

Thank you for reading the 221st issue of Tone Glow. Well, do you?

If you appreciate what we do, please consider donating via Ko-fi or becoming a Patreon patron. Tone Glow is dedicated to forever providing its content for free, but please know that all our writers are paid for the work they do. All donations will be used for paying writers, and if we get enough money, Tone Glow will be able to publish issues more frequently.

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Ethan Codylee Graham (b. 2004) is a rapper from California. Under the name ezcodylee, he’s released a slew of albums during the 2020s, the newest of which is the excellent rap-rock venture STUNT 4 LIFE (2026). Building on ideas he formed on Stunt and Die 3 (2025), this new album—one part of a double album, the second disc forthcoming—folds his love for punk music into contemporary rage rap. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with ezcodylee on April 2nd, 2026 via Zoom to discuss his “stunt and die” ethos, his upbringing in the church, and the ideas that animated his new album.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: Were you born and raised in California?

ezcodylee: I’m born and raised in South Central LA, between South Central and Inglewood, but I went to school in the Hollywood area for most of middle school and high school. I got a lot of insight just spending time in some of the richest and poorest neighborhoods in LA.

Having experienced both of those extremes, do you have any memories of being radicalized by what you saw?

Where I lived, I was seeing families worrying about violence and gang culture; they didn’t want their children to fall into that, so they’d send them to schools in different neighborhoods. But then in those “better” neighborhoods, like in Hollywood, there was still drugs and pedophilia and other stuff you had to avoid. There’s a lot of trauma and oppression that you have to face, regardless of how presentable the place you’re in is; every place comes with its own given problems. Still, I had friends who struggled with not knowing what they were going to have for dinner, and then I had friends who complained about what restaurant their family was going to. Seeing these different levels of problems was so interesting to me. Like, I’d have friends in high school who’d complain about how much they’d make at work, and then there were friends back home whose parents couldn’t even get a job… y’know what I mean?

Was your family super into music? Were they supportive of you becoming a rapper?

Very much so. My mom always loved music and was very big on dancing and singing—that was her personal hobby. And my father was a rapper himself. My next-door neighbor was this man named Uncle Ben. I didn’t realize until I was older that he was the uncle of Kanye West, and Kanye used to spend a lot of time in our neighborhood whenever he came to LA. My grandma went to school in NorCal for music, and my uncle was one of the final four contestants on a season of The Voice. So there’s all these things that influenced me to do music, especially church. My whole life, I kind of got forced to perform (laughter). Every time there was a concert or talent show at church, I was the oldest in my age group so I’d be asked to facilitate stuff. And I’d always be the finale of whatever event we put on. So when I was like 7 years old, I started writing raps because I knew that I’d need a rap ready for Sunday at church.

What rap were you listening to back then? And what was the first thing you wrote?

I actually remember it—my first rap was written to the instrumental for Wale’s “Ambition.” Lil Wayne was always my biggest inspiration though. He was my biggest inspiration in terms of wanting to rap and what a good rapper sounded like. I always liked Kanye for the music, for the whole [of his artistry], but Lil Wayne was always the coolest rapper, and I still kind of think that. He could get on any beat and spaz. I used to always do flows like early Wayne and early Drake.

Are we talking about Da Drought 3 (2007) and Tha Carter III (2008)? What era of Wayne?

Mainly Tha Carter III, Tha Carter IV (2011), and No Ceilings (2009)—that era.

Can you tell me about these things you did at church?

So the church would have some form of talent show or recital—just something to have kids involved in the arts. I would always like to have my own twist on it by bringing raps in, and I would literally make these verses about God and Jesus and whatever (laughter). They were super surface level, like, “I love God, I love the angels” and shit like that (laughter). It was super fun. I’m not super religious myself but I’m very involved in my church—that’s my family. I love church in the church environment; as a non-religious person, I would still recommend that people have some type of community and support system. And I know that some churches can be toxic, but nothing can replace that camaraderie.

I’m assuming your church is predominantly Black?

Yeah, and it’s super progressive. Church is where I formed a lot less religious opinions than societal ones, like truly loving your neighbor and not being judgmental, knowing how to treat people with respect and how to walk every day in an honest-to-God, positive way. Like, making sure that we’re all waking up each day trying to be a better person, even if it’s just by a fraction of a percent.

You mentioned all this stuff about your family being musical. Do you have any specific memories with your family that you feel were important? Maybe this was mostly at church, but I’m wondering what else comes to mind.

That’s a great question. There’s always been great moments. My cousin was so excited when she first got her Nokia flip phone. She downloaded ringtones and it was shit like Soulja Boy and I thought that concept was so cool, that a specific song would play when someone called you. My mom had this iPod that, once she was able to get an iPhone, she gave to me and my sister. We listened to these songs nonstop, and she had us when she was a young age so the stuff she downloaded was Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj, and Rihanna—all the women’s club music of the early 2010s. I had a lot of unsupervised access to the internet when I was younger; I had a computer and I’d go on LilWayneHQ and LimeWire. Since I was a baby, I was a big fan of music, and I was super connected to it. No matter if I was at church, at school, or at home, the only thing that was really catching my attention and that I felt passion for was music, whether it was live or an mp3; nothing else could give me that joy. I wanted to be able to contribute to music in my own way because of that upbringing.

Do you remember the first song you wrote that you were really proud of, where you were like, okay this is getting more serious.

That’s a great question. I got my heart broken really bad when I was a freshman in high school. That was the first time I wrote some music that wasn’t the low-substance trap stuff where I was trying to sound cool and mimicking n*ggas like Future and Thug and Lil Wayne—I was actually talking about stuff I was going through. It was really cathartic, and I really needed that moment for myself. That’s probably the pivotal moment when music went from a form of passion to a form of true expression.

Early on you’re already collaborating with a bunch of other people. On Untalented 3 (2021) you’ve got Prettifun, and then Stunt and Die (2022) you’ve got Skaiwater and ninexteen and all these other artists. How did you initially connect with them?

I never really stopped using the internet. I was using it as a music listener, and especially during quarantine, I got into group chats and online communities, and that’s where I met these people. I met Skaiwater through Lancey Foux fan pages, I met Prettifun through Yubo group calls, and artists like ninexteen I met through Discord. And artists like Midwxst, I was such an early fan that I was able to have great dialogue through Instagram DMs. He gave me a chance and listened to my music. So I was always active in the music community; I always used to DM people, like ImDontai and these people, really early into their reaction careers. I was really big on being part of an underground rap scene, first as a fan, but the more I get into the music, the more it became a network. So these were all people who naturally became a part of my world as friends.

This kind of relates to what you were saying earlier with church—you’re making sure that you can find this community no matter what. You’re making a real effort to reach out to these people and build something.

Very much so. I had a conversation with Skai recently where they said that I’m gonna be the torchbearer of the underground scene. And it wasn’t just as a way to praise or compliment me, but an acknowledgement that I take the initiative to do these things. I’ve been booked like twice, but most of the other shows that me and Slayr and Pretti have done have been thrown by me; I’ll always host them, set everything up, get in contact with the venue, and I’ve been very diligent about, “If I don’t do this, who will?” I’m very heavy on being some type of provider for spaces I love and feel passionate about. I try to make sure that everyone’s taken care of and is excited. That’s what the whole stunt thing is about—it’s about getting people to live life on the edge and try to do things they wouldn’t do otherwise.

I know you played a show with Snooper earlier this year, which I thought was cool. What was your first show?

My first actual show was in December 2021. I threw that myself. It was me, yvngxchris, and a few others. It was decent. It was my first experience, and with every show there are challenges and things you learn. That was what showed me my love and passion for performing; that’s when music matters most for me. I was the final performer of the night, and there was probably like 10 people left in the audience when the peak of the night was like 100, but I still had one of the best times I’ve ever had. To turn up with those 10 people… it felt like this was what music was all about.

I love everything you’re saying because so many punk bands in the ’80s and ’90s have similar stories of just doing what they could with the resources they had, and they were teenagers too.

I’m very big on not sitting around and waiting for it. The whole “stunt and die” motto is about living like there’s no tomorrow. I try to implement that in some type of way, every day of my life. I take that initiative to do something that I won’t regret.

Can you talk to me about your first experiences with punk music? How’d you get into that?

Funny enough, it was mostly just stuff in pop culture—Disney XD and MTV. Through their theme songs and bumper music and advertisements, it unlocked a whole new world for me. South Central Los Angeles, you’re not hearing much punk or alternative music, so it was through television where I was like, “Wow, this shit is so cool. It’s intense, it’s fast, it’s loud.” It was a third-eye-opening thing for me. I was someone who always gravitated towards music, so these shows would play and the actual show itself, while I’d be entertained by them, I was actually paying attention to these theme songs. That was what initially won me over, theme songs from shows Kick Buttowski and Ridiculousness by Rob Dyrdek [Editor’s Note: the theme song for Ridiculousness is a cover of Devo’s “Uncontrollable Urge”]. So that’s what introduced me to punk music at an early age.

Growing up, I got into SoCal stuff from people. And then there was the radio playing surface-level punk or pop punk stuff like Green Day. That’s when I started understanding that there was more of an actual culture and history—this wasn’t just shit that played on my TV. I got really into Pennywise in 2024. I got really into punk music both old and modern, to get more of an understanding of it; I was always a fan, but once I got the idea to implement it in my music, I wanted to be as true as possible to the culture and its origins. But that was also so I could break the rules—you have to know them first in order to break them. So I did a lot of research and deep diving. I wanted to be progressive and unorthodox.

What does that mean for your own music? Obviously you did some of this on Stunt and Die 3 (2025) but your new album, STUNT 4 LIFE (2026) has more of this punk influence folded in. And on tracks like “VOMIT !” you say that other rappers are being “punk for an aesthetic.”

The biggest thing to me is comprehension and ethos. I know a lot about punk culture but I’m far from knowing it all. I’ve grown a deep understanding of its purpose, so when I’m mixing it with modern-day trap and rage, I know there’s gonna be a lot of overlap but also a lot that gets me conflicted. My goal has always been to try and stay true to the heart of it while being honest to myself. There’s a lot of things in both the punk and rap worlds that I don’t agree with. The reason I became such a fan of both these things is because they really inspire me and because I feel at home with the music, but I never wanted to make it a point where I was being disingenuous and just trying to serve an aesthetic; I’m not trying to just make fans happy, I’m trying to be true to myself. These genres clash on topics like consumerism and other ideologies, but I’ve never been far left or far right with anything in life. When I’m blending and bending things, I’m trying to be authentic to myself instead of checking off boxes.

It’s interesting you don’t identify with the left since you hate on Trump on the album, you say “Free Palestine, Free Gaza,” and I saw that you were beefing with this guy online who was defending Charlie Kirk.

Oh, I’m a strong leftist, but I more so meant that I think human beings always see things in black or white. I never wanted to be considered a “punk” or a “rapper” because I think these labels take away from who we are as individuals. The most honest representation of who I am is Ethan Codylee Graham. That tells you more about who I am than just a “punk” or a “leftist.” But yeah, when I was saying “left or right,” I didn’t mean that in a political way—I meant it like “black or white.”

I wanted to ask what it’s like for you to make music that’s meant for moshing. Going to a punk show is different from a rap show with regards to moshing, and I’m curious about your experiences with that and how you think about your own music in this context.

I’ve been to both hardcore shows and rap shows and the thing for me is that I’m intentionally trying to make a crowd that’s loving on each other. The term “moshing” even stems from this misunderstood quote about Bad Brains and kids mashing into each other. I kind of apply that for my shows. I don’t want people to be afraid of the conceit of a mosh pit. What it’s supposed to be is a bunch of people coming together and having fun, whether that means you’re a girl or guy or something outside that or in between. I want you to have fun and enjoy the music. My thing is, as long as you’re having as much fun as you can, you’re moshing in my eyes. That’s why I like to call it “stunting” more than anything else.

Do you see yourself in the lineage of bands like Bad Brains and a more contemporary group like Soul Glo? I’m wondering what it’s like for you to be a Black man in this lineage of rage doing stuff that, while indebted to Playboi Carti and Opium, is still interested in punk music. And I’ve never really felt a connection between punk music and, say, OsamaSon, but it was cool hearing your music and seeing a clearer throughline.

I love Soul Glo. And thank you for saying that; you viewing it that way is part of the goal of what I do. I always reach these barriers where people have harsh takes, whether it’s hating on my political ideologies and criticizing the depth, or the fact I don’t play an instrument, which I don’t see happen with my white contemporaries. “Oh, he doesn’t play the guitar,” or “Oh, he wasn’t making this kind of music years ago.” I’ve always seen discourse as positive because it allows me to have a platform to express myself. I call myself a punk as much as I call myself a n*gga, but people only have a problem with one of them—and it’s not the n-word, y’know what I mean?

All of this is shit where it used to affect me heavily, but I had to set it aside because it’s all only getting me closer to an audience. At the end of the day, people can love it or hate it, but at least they’re listening. And I have a strong understanding of my goals. As long as another kid is hearing me say “Free Palestine” or “Free Gaza” or “Fuck Trump,” I’m grateful that it’s even being heard. As for my artistry, I make the music I make for me and my fans, not anybody who refuses to be one. I have to keep myself in check with not having to prove or disprove what genre or culture I belong to; as long as I’m true to self and my inspirations are what I’m interested in my own life, we’re good.

On “FAMILY FIRST !” you say, “I ain’t tryna sound like them oldheads, they dated/I ain’t tryna sound like the shit you got on your playlist.” And then you diss Che and RainingLol. What are these other rappers doing that’s bad that you’re avoiding? What’s the contention there?

It’s the lack of authenticity. I pay my fair share of homage and take a lot of inspiration, but I also break rules and do things untraditionally. When I say things like that, it’s about artist integrity and authenticity. A lot of artists now are just playing into an aesthetic without being true to the source material, without having enough depth of knowledge for what they’re drawing from. More often than not, people are making caricatures of these cultures that have a lot of purpose; these aren’t just for people to mock or use to come off different or unique in their scene, especially when so many people are doing it.

I like the music, don’t get me wrong. I’ll say it first: Che is a great artist. Raining is, I guess, pretty good at what he does. But I still don’t think these people are being authentic to the culture. I can’t speak for them because I don’t know them, but that’s what bleeds off to me in their art. Like, I like a lot of the music that’s coming out of the rage scene right now, but there’s a lack of inspiration from anything outside the Opium discography. I’d love to see a take on rage that was inspired by reggae or gospel or old pop music—just any genre that’d bring a fresh air to it instead of Whole Lotta Red (2020) six years later (laughter).

I wanted to ask about the album cover, which is an edit of a skateboarding photo. What’s your relationship with skateboarding?

It was just always a big inspiration on me—I mentioned Kick Buttowski, but also Zeke and Luther and even Jackass. Skating and stunting are so important to me and why I even got here with my music and my way of life. I don’t skate, but one day I’ll have to pick it up; I just haven’t yet.

I like how the intro to the album also has a quote from SLC Punk! (1998). When’d you first see that movie?

About a year back when I started working on this album. I wanted to get deep into punk media, and I felt like I related to that movie heavily with this concept of how gatekeep-y a culture can be, and this idea of who’s a poser and who’s not. At the end of the day, if you’re pushing what matters to you forward, the label that follows behind doesn’t matter as much.

How’d you get in touch with the Happy Death Men for “DIEHARD !”? I’m curious about that and just all the different punk and rock music instrumentals on the album. Are these samples at all?

There are actually no samples on this album. All of it stems from executive production from me and Chris Marek. All the guitar riffs and drum patterns were coming from songs that inspired me when I was diving into this corner of music. Happy Death Men came about because we both opened for Snooper back in December, and when I was looking for a punk band to shed light on, I didn’t wanna include any predictable features. I wanted to collaborate with an obscure, underground band that impressed me throughout the process, and Happy Death Men took the cake. When I saw them perform with Snooper, it was one of the most surreal experiences I’ve ever had—I needed to shed light on them and the scene they’re building in Portland.

Can you tell me about the specific bands and songs that you were inspired by while working on this album? It’s interesting to me that you have music on the album that’s more indebted to hardcore or skate punk and then you have some pop punk songs too; the flattening of all these different styles of punk that then gets folded into your music is cool to hear.

There was inspiration from Turnstile, Snooper, Fleshwater, Title Fight, Bad Brains, The Story So Far, Mannequin Pussy, Angel Du$t. I was listening to so much music while making this album, and we were inspired by artists and albums more broadly instead of specific songs where we’re trying to lift specific melodies or something. And I wanted to contextualize all this in rage. Rage has its own musical techniques, chord progressions, and sounds that I very much love—artists like Ken Carson, OsamaSon, Lancey Foux, PrettiFun, and Carti of course. And their producers, too. A lot of production doesn’t get enough credit for what a genre actually is.

Is there anything we didn’t talk about today that you wanted to mention?

Stunt and Die is the series that I’ve been building out the past few years, and it’s about this mentality and style of music. STUNT 4 LIFE is actually just one half of Stunt and Die 4. STUNT 4 EVER will be the second disc, and I wanna take even more liberties with that and have more collaborations. That’s what I’m currently working on and I’m excited for what’ll come out.

There’s a question I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

At my darkest hour, I chose to keep going. And I use that as a source of inspiration for other people who’ve reached similar times—I want them to keep going, too. “Stunt and Die,” “Stunt 4 Life,” “Stunt Rock,” all this stuff and this whole movement—it all stems from when I was suicidal. It was an awakening, in a way. The fact that I turned this into a community and culture—something that kids can wake up to and refer to so they can live their day to the fullest extent, that means the world to me. There’s nothing I’d replace for that.

ezcodylee’s newest album, Stunt 4 Life, is out now on various streaming platforms.

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Masayoshi Takanaka (b. 1953) is a Japanese jazz-fusion guitarist largely known for his large string of solo albums released throughout the 1970s and 1980s. During the early 1970s, he played in different rock bands, including Brush, Flied Egg, and Sadistic Mika Band. The latter group was the first Japanese band to tour the UK, opening for Roxy Music in 1975. The year after, Takanaka released his debut solo album, Seychelles (1976), and has continually released music since, including An Insatiable High (1977), Brasilian Skies (1978), and The Rainbow Goblins (1981). Throughout the past decade, his music has become increasingly popular with a new generation of listeners in the West, largely due to the the proliferation of Japanese city pop, jazz fusion, and soft rock via YouTube algorithms and beyond. He’s currently on a world tour, the dates of which can be found at his website. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Takanaka via Zoom on March 31st, 2026 shortly before he went on stage at the O2 Academy Brixton in London. The two discussed his upbringing, his first bands, and the way he approaches songwriting. Special thanks to Monika Uchiyama for interpreting.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: Can you tell me about the earliest memories you have? These can be related to music or not.

Masayoshi Takanaka: I’ll tell you a bit about some music-related memories, actually. Early on, I was only familiar with Japanese music—people like Hibari Misora and bands like Crazy Cats, which was more of a comedy group. Hitoshi Ueki was part of Crazy Cats, and they produced a lot of movies about this band. They had a song called “Sudara Bushi” (スーダラ節), which was about being a drunkard—I remember liking it a lot. Then around 6th grade, my brother who’s three years older than me introduced me to The Beatles and The Ventures. We watched A Hard Day’s Night (1964). It was a shock to learn about Western music after knowing Japanese music for so long. Soon after, I asked for an electric guitar and started taking lessons.

Can you share a little about your parents? I know your father is Chinese and your mother is Japanese, but what kind of people were they? Were they invested in your interest in the arts?

My parents had records at home. This was a time before discotheques; they had these dance halls where people learned to dance, especially Latin dances like the cha-cha or mambo, and my mom definitely liked that kind of music. Back then, records were quite fragile and I remember that, as a kid, I broke quite a few (laughter). Also, my house was right next to a late-night café, so there was always music playing. I’d go to sleep while hearing the vibrations of “Mambo No. 5.” I can’t say if that was a good or bad environment to grow up in, but I was naturally surrounded by music.

What was it like when you first got your guitar? Do you remember what guitar it was and the first song you learned to play?

The guitar would’ve been a Japanese one by this brand called Teisco. It would’ve been very cheap—like 10,000 to 20,000 yen. I didn’t have an amp initially, which made it pointless, but I did eventually acquire one. And because I couldn’t read music, I remember I had a book that taught you how to play guitar, but the examples were all children’s songs and simple guitar exercises. This was around the time when you’d see tabs of Beatles songs published in various magazines, but sometimes the chords would be incorrect—the person writing them did them wrong! (laughter). But otherwise, I was listening to a lot of music, and there were these kids who were older than me that’d take over a classroom and have band practice after school. I would watch them and learn their techniques. Like, I remember they’d bend a note by pushing on the guitar string and I’d think, “Oh, that’s how you make that sound.” So those were my beginnings.

Did you end up playing with these older students?

Initially I was just watching, but then I started getting better at playing guitar and some of the older kids asked me to play with them. These would’ve been students who were three years older than me, and I’d even join them in going to a kissaten after school. In a sense, I was a little bit of a bad kid because I was hanging out with older students.

You mentioned living next to this café, about living close to a dance hall. Were these places that you spent a lot of time at in general as you got older?

I did take part in band contests from as early as 9th grade. Yamaha, the music company, would hold these competitions and I remember that my band didn’t even make it through the first round. Later on, when I became a studio musician, I was eventually reunited with one of the older kids who was responsible for beating my band in that first round (laughter). He apologized, saying, “Oh, I’m so sorry I did that.” (laughter). That’s a good memory.

When was the first time that you performed in front of people, and not just in front of family or friends?

In the 9th grade, I played in the school music festival. Many people came to see it. But even before I was in a band, I would try to learn the lyrics to Beatles songs. A song like “I Should Have Known Better,” I would just listen and try to write the lyrics down according to the phonetic sounds—I’d write them out in katakana. I remember that instead of “I should have known better,” I wrote “I chewed have known better” because I couldn’t hear correctly. I thought I was good at this though—I was quite confident—and I remember me and a friend sang this song in front of our class. Looking back, it’s both funny and embarrassing.

The first time I was on a stage was at a Christmas party with some of the older classmates. I also remember that there was a rooftop beer hall in a neighborhood called Gotanda in Tokyo. You could play in the evening and get paid about 1,000 yen if you were part of the band. I thought, if I played there every night, I could make 30,000 yen in a year, which at the time was so much money. You’d just play for the people who were drinking there, and there were smaller stages in front of the main stage for go-go dancers. This would’ve been when I was 15.

I know you were eventually in the band Escape and played at US military bases. What was it like being in that environment and playing for these American G.I.s?

I was actually in two bands during that period. There was Escape, which was a band with all Japanese members, and then there was another band but I don’t remember what we were called. On the military base, I would play with other high schoolers, and these were American kids—I must have gotten paid in dollars. At these US bases, in places like Yokosuka or Tachikawa, there were these things called Teen Clubs. The singer of the band was Black and the drummer and bassist were white. I spoke a little bit of English, and because they were growing up in Japan, they spoke a little bit of Japanese. I remember it was a hodge-podge of both of those languages. The thing is, if you’re coming together to play music, it’s not like you’re gonna talk about anything complicated like politics, so we could understand one another well enough and play.

I know in the 1970s you were in bands like Brush, Flied Egg, and Sadistic Mika Band. What do you think was important about being in these groups? What do you feel like you learned that was crucial before you ended up making your own solo music?

So when I was 18 I was in a band called Flied Egg and that would’ve been with Shigeru Narumo, who was on guitar, and Hiro Tsunoda, who was on drums. And because they were older than me, they told me that I had to play bass. But the basslines at the time were quite easy, so it was very quick for me to learn them. Narumo-san took music quite seriously and he tried to teach me some music theory, taught me how to create harmonies by playing along to the piano, and he also went to England for—it wasn’t exactly study abroad, but he wanted to experience things there. When he came back, he wanted us to practice moving together to the rhythm with our instruments—that’s something he brought back. He’s someone I learned a lot from, as far as being in a band. Me and Tsunoda, however, would just hang out and play pachinko, so I didn’t learn anything from him (laughter).

I know that you were a studio musician and played for a lot of different artists. You played on an album by Maki Asakawa called Blue Spirit Blues (1972), can you tell me anything about that?

Ah, well I worked on so many records as a studio musician. So while I remember working with her, I don’t even remember the songs we did.

Are there any albums you worked on as a studio musician that stand out, then? Were any of them particularly challenging?

As far as challenges, it’s hard for me to say because I think for a lot of the projects I was a part of, they would let me play very freely. They would tell me the specific type of vibe they wanted me to go for, but they’d essentially let me play however I wanted. I really liked those opportunities because it allowed me to showcase the unique qualities of my guitar playing. I also remember there were times when they’d ask me to bring my guitar, my amp, and also my acoustic guitar to the studio. I’d have to cram all this into a taxi. I eventually bought a car, though, but it was a Toyota Century. At the time, this was a car that chauffeurs mostly drove with their boss inside. The back seat was incredibly lush and comfortable, but the thing is, I was the only person who had a driver’s license! I’d be driving while our roadie—we called him a “band boy”—would sit in these cushy seats with all the instruments (laughter). I thought that was pretty funny.

You eventually started making your own solo music with Seychelles in 1976, and you continue to make music today. Do you see any differences between the person who was making music back then and the person you are today? What things have changed?

It’s difficult to answer this because when I think about that time and the person I was, it was already 50 years ago. And as humans, our cells are continually changing over and, in a year, your body is that of a different person. From the outside, people might say, “Hey, Tanaka you’ve changed!” But I wouldn’t be able to answer that question. To do so would take me a month.

There’s a question I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

The fact that I’m pretty silly. I have these strange ideas and just decide to do them. If you think about it, hollowing out a surfboard and making a guitar is an absurd idea, but I thought it’d be interesting to try it out. So I think it’s my ability to think outside the box. I remember as a kid, there were these magazines you could buy where they had these cutouts of war planes and other things—you’d take out the parts and put them together. I quickly realized, though, that I could do the same thing myself with a separate sheet of paper; once I learned the technique, I could apply it to something else. It’s the same with music. Throughout my career, I’ve been constantly arranging and applying different techniques to generate something new.

Masayoshi Takanaka is on tour now. You can find the dates and other info on his website.

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Thank you for reading the 219th issue of Tone Glow. The wooden model kit to guitar hero pipeline.

If you appreciate what we do, please consider donating via Ko-fi or becoming a Patreon patron. Tone Glow is dedicated to forever providing its content for free, but please know that all our writers are paid for the work they do. All donations will be used for paying writers, and if we get enough money, Tone Glow will be able to publish issues more frequently.

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Gwenifer Raymond is a fingerpicking guitarist, astrophysicist, and video game developer from Wales. Her background in punk and grunge music support a raw and aggressive take on open-style blues picking in the tradition of John Fahey, reminding us why this music was termed “American primitive” in the first place. Her third album, Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark (2025), is a string- and soul-rattling solo guitar record that stood out as one of the best albums of last year. Raymond is currently touring in North America, and will be at Big Ears festival in Knoxville, TN on Saturday, March 28th. Alex Fields spoke with her by Zoom on March 5th, 2026 to discuss her initial interests in music, her approach to composition, and the inspirations behind her song titles.

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Alex Fields: I loved your album, It was probably my favorite of last year.

Gwenifer Raymond: Thank you very much.

What music did you grow up listening to, what was your background with music?

I had a revelatory moment when I was 8. I wasn’t really interested in music before, but I had this little cassette player because I was listening to books on tape—I was a dork. My mom actually bought me a cassette of Nirvana’s Nevermind (1991), and putting that on just blew my mind all of a sudden. That was the first piece of music I remember going, “Oh, I really like this.” I was a proper hyperactive little psycho as well—I’d basically run around the house with it on my headphones. My parents listened to a lot of music so I grew up with a lot: Bob Dylan, Velvet Underground, Neil Young. Then punk as well—I got that from my mom, stuff like The Fall and X-Ray Spex. So that’s a wide range of stuff, and that inherently led to casting a wide net and trying to find new stuff.

You got a guitar pretty young right? Did you want to start playing as soon as you found your music?

Yeah, I got Nevermind and then I asked for a guitar. I think it was for my birthday or Christmas or something.

You were in bands pretty much from then on?

Yeah, I played with friends. I was actually playing drums in bands before I was playing guitar, fooling around as much as I could, and then I really started gigging when I was about 14.

Did any of that get serious enough that you ever recorded an album or toured or anything or was it just fun with friends?

Not like touring touring, just gigs here and there. But you know, we recorded a few EPs.

And when did you get into blues or folk music?

It was a cross-pollination, with partly Nirvana to blame. I was a big Nirvana fan when I was a teenager—I still am, but especially as a teenager. On Unplugged (1994) they do that Lead Belly cover, and it’s a pretty straight cover that’s really close to the Lead Belly version. I love that song. Then with my parents listening to things like Bob Dylan and Velvet Underground, I heard early blues music. There was also music I liked that cited it as an influence, so I thought, “Okay, maybe this is for me.”

You used to get these really cheap CDs, maybe a few quid, it was like: The Blues Roots of So and So… and it was just a bunch of good tracks they’d scourge together. Got one of them, and it was like Mississippi John Hurt and Skip James—a great exposure to that pre-War blues. Especially players like John Hurt and Blind Boy Fuller, they’ve got that alternating thumb thing, that country blues kind of ragtime technique. I was completely convinced that it was more than one player. Discovering that it wasn’t, I was like, oh shit, I want to learn how to do this for myself. So that’s what set me down the path for all that stuff.

And it was through the blues that you found John Fahey and the primitive guitar tradition?

Pretty much, yeah. I was playing alternating thumb style country blues, Delta blues stuff. I don’t sing, and most of these pickers are accompanying themselves to sing. I’ve never been very good at learning other people’s songs anyway, so I’d learn bits and pieces here and there and then I’d use all the things I was learning to write my own tunes. But because I wasn’t singing, they tended to be a little more ornamental—a bit more of a composition than a song. I’d play these to someone and they’d say, “That sounds like John Fahey.” I didn’t know who John Fahey was and they played me a record. I was like, okay, apparently this is already a thing!

I’m from Appalachia and my grandpa’s a fingerpicking guitar player, my dad’s named Merle after Merle Travis—

Oh, yeah.

So I grew up around that stuff, but I didn’t discover Fahey until later when I was getting into free jazz and avant-garde music and saw some of his albums like Fare Forward Voyagers (1973) pop up on album lists. It blew my mind and I’ve been obsessed ever since.

It was a perfect marriage for me because I’ve always been obsessed with that left-field, sort-of-noisy, heavier guitar music. In the end, that’s how Fahey saw himself, how he was taken in, and how he saw himself reflected. He hated all that transcendental meditation guitar, but when he got picked up later in life by Thurston Moore and Sonic Youth, I feel like that was more him. So it’s interesting that he came from the blues to that music, in the opposite direction from me.

Yeah, and there are a lot more guitarists today who are descendants of John Fahey than there were for most of his lifetime. It’s a wider influence across genres and you can see different sensibilities of where people are coming from. A lot of the American stuff is more adjacent to ambient music and I’m way less interested in that relative to what you’re doing, which I think fits more into a raw and aggressive sound—that’s what I loved about Fahey in the first place. He finds in the blues and Indian classical music something that feels ancient and powerful, it’s not noodling or lounge music.

It’s almost classical music. People don’t really discuss in that way, but a lot of the best known classical music is riff-heavy. It’s riff-based music, not airy fairy. I know Fahey was into classical as well, and he talked about having an orchestra in his head that he was trying to get out by guitar. I have that same thing I think.

My partner was watching some John Fahey videos last night and in one, he was at a blues festival and the announcer introduced him by saying, “This next performer has elevated the blues to a form of classical music.” Then Fahey just says deadpan, “I didn’t know I did all that” and starts playing.

Nice (laughter).

But it is interesting how a lot of the classic blues stuff is built as a song with a clear ABAB structure, whereas what you do has a much… I don’t know if I want to say freer, but certainly more complex structure with long periods of development. How much of that is worked out intuitively with the instrument in hand and how much is mapped out and planned?

It just comes out, really. I’m not good at rigorous planning. I’ve changed, though. When I started it was more like ABABC, but the more I write stuff—and this may just be my piss-poor attention span—it just got boring to me. Things need to have a structure and call back to themselves or it’s unsatisfying; you want the end of the track to have a precursor in the earlier parts, but it’s more of a puzzle trying to figure out how to put it together. It takes me forever to write tracks, it’s like pulling teeth. Like, “Where the fuck does this go? It needs to go somewhere but I don’t know!” (laughter).

You’ve got bits and pieces and great riffs from just playing the instrument, but putting it together to something that feels like a structured composition is another thing.

That’s the hard bit, the proper bit. Everyone can noodle, but I’m not a fan of noodling.

Being a solo performer, you can compose pieces in a more open-ended way. If you’re playing in a traditional folk band there are roles for everyone to play and clear options for how to structure a song, but alone you can go off in any direction. There’s more freedom but more difficulty, too. How do you solve that problem or decide what works, is it just when it feels right?

It’s literally that. You fuck about with it for a while, and you’ll be banging your head against it for a month with something you can’t get past, and then you’ll play something and know it works. It’s really weird, it feels like a discovery more than anything else.

Do you still play in bands at all or just solo?

Well, I nominally have not quit my last band, but we haven’t played together in a million years. So not really. I like playing in bands, it’s a different energy, but there’s not enough time in the day.

Especially when you have a day job that’s not music.

Exactly, yeah.

So when you started, if you were listening to grunge, did you have an electric guitar or was it always acoustic?

No, electric. At my primary school, you got three free lessons or something and then had to perform “Jingle Bells” in front of everyone (laughter). Everyone else had that standard, cheap learner guitar that was acoustic with probably nylon strings, but I insisted I go out and get a cherry red Squier (laughter).

When did you first get an acoustic? Was it because you were getting into the blues or did you already have one then?

You know, I don’t remember when I got an acoustic. I don’t really sell or get rid of guitars—even my first guitar is in my mother’s house still. I must have had an acoustic guitar before I got into this blues picking, but I don’t remember what happened to it.

Do you ever play around with fingerstyle on electric, or thought about making an electric album?

Oh definitely, it’s more slide-y. There’s bits of electric on the last album, but I think people think it’s synth. There’s no synth on the album, it’s all guitar, just with pedals and electric lab steel and stuff. I have done bits and bobs like that for friends. I have a friend, the Australian guitar player Andrew Tuttle, where I used my microtonal electric in the background on his album.

You grew up in Wales—were you in Cardiff?

Well, I was in the Valleys.

Was there a folk music scene there, or have you ever been plugged into a folk music scene in the UK?

A little bit. Not when I was a teenager—that was all punk and noise bands and none of that folk nonsense when I was a teenager. But when I got into blues guitar and especially banjo and lap steel, I played a few instruments in a neo-folk band for a while. I had a stint playing banjo for a clogging group that met up at the community center too. But I was never part of any big, proper jams.

How did the banjo happen?

The two things I heard that made me want to play the banjo originally were “Country Death Song” by the Violent Femmes, because it’s got a sick ass banjo breakdown in it, and Sixteen Horsepower. There’s really nice banjo in some of that stuff. Also, there’s that great, pseudo-documentary by Jim White, Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus (2003). It’s got Eugene Edwards [of Sixteen Horsepower] playing banjo on a nice version of “Black Soul Choir.” And there’s Lee Sexton and Clarence Ashley on the album, and it’s all clawhammer banjo, which is basically what I like. So I decided to learn the banjo, and I got really obsessed with it. I played so much banjo the first week I owned one that I blew out my shoulder and couldn’t play for like a month (laughter).

Did you teach yourself clawhammer?

No, because when I decided I wanted to learn alternating thumb I actually found a teacher, this guy in Cardiff who was a really good alternating thumb blues player. I think he was really excited to not be teaching “Smoke on the Water” to eight-year-olds (laughter). He also played clawhammer, so when I mentioned I wanted to learn banjo he said he could play and taught me that too.

Here in Appalachia, clawhammer banjo is everywhere, but it’s obviously less common elsewhere. It’s cool to see it come up on a blues album from the other side of the Atlantic.

There’s a beautiful sound to it. It’s the most drone-y one and that ties in with American primitive, which is kind of like drone music.

There haven’t been as many banjo players in that scene. A few now, but not so many historically, other than Sandy Bull.

I think it’s hard to write this music for banjo. I’m a fairly competent clawhammer player and on my first album [You Were Never Much of a Dancer (2018)], there’s a few tracks, but I found it hard to write anything that wasn’t the same thing, which is why it went away on the other albums. I just had a few songs in me and they were stunt banjo, like playing really fast (laughter).

One of your banjo tunes is called “Bleeding Finger Blues” on your first LP. Is that based on a true story?

(laughs). It’s based on the continued life experience of that song. Whenever I played banjo I’d cut my fingers and spray blood all over the banjo skin. I thought that was really cool (laughter), so I’d save it for the end of the set so I could have a Gwar-esque display of bodily fluids.

It’s funny how much of that is there in folk music. I knew a mandolin player who sliced a chunk of his thumb off on the strings while warming up—was bleeding everywhere, wrapped a Band-Aid around it and went out and played a whole show.

Totally, it’s brutal. The one comment you hear a lot from guitarists is having tiny little cuts you have to superglue. I’ve pulled away the skin from my nail while on tour and used, not even medical glue, just airplane glue.

It’s gnarly. I’ve never played with actual fingerpicks but I assume that’s also an ordeal?

In a different way. The picks protect your fingertips more, although my fingers are really fucked. But if you want to play at any level of comfort in terms of them not flying off, you have to wear them really tight. They do cut off the circulation. The worst is getting them off at the end. Your fingers have gone numb, and touching them can be quite painful—that’s the worst bit at the end of a set (laughter).

You play very hard, too. Do you have any muscle issues in your right hand?

No, but I’ve got pretty strong. The main thing I have is a fucked-up shoulder, but a lot of guitarists have that. It’s funny, because I do remember when I couldn’t play some of my own songs; I guess I’ve just built up the muscles now.

My friend saw you perform and was wondering if you ever get your hair caught in the strings (laughter).

All the fucking time. The worst one is I play with a little gooseneck microphone, and sometimes my hair gets stuck in it and I’m trying to keep playing without being able to move my head. So if you see my head leaning sideways and weirdly not moving, that’s what’s happening (laughter).

Your day job is in video game programming, right?

Yeah, I’m technical director of a company that does audio for computer games.

I think I read that you worked on the Diablo games?

Not me personally, but the company does.

So your company doesn’t work on the actual music for the games?

Sort of. It’s complicated how it works. We do have a few composers we work with, but we mostly just ask them and take a tiny commission because they’re not really our employees. Video game music is complicated because it’s not a static piece of music where you play it and it ends. It has to come in and out and respond to what’s happening in the game. There’s quite a lot of logic to composing it and implementing the music into the game. So we do some of that.

As a musician do you have any interest in writing for video games or a film score?

I’d love to do movies. Games probably less so because of the way they are, unless it’s a static piece of music for a cut scene. But movies would be great. I’m always sniffing around trying to get into it. I’m more of a movie nerd than anything else, really.

What sort of movies are you into?

I’m pretty broad. My mom was a film director. Growing up, we never had a car or went on holidays, we never had a whole lot of money, but the one thing we did do is go to the movies every single week. So I grew up obsessive about movies. If I had to name my specialty, it’s horror movies. And all kinds, from your A24 “elevated horror” to your ’70s giallo to your 1980s, From Beyond (1986) or Society (1989). I don’t go quite to ’50s and ’60s atomic-age stuff.

What sort of films did your mom make?

She was a documentary filmmaker. She had this all-women’s company, and when they made films they didn’t actually credit their roles—they just had the collective name. They were called Red Flannel. They did a lot of stuff for Channel 4, the BBC in the UK. The most famous one they did was this film called Mam (1988) about women in the Valleys across a certain period, I think between the Wars. And that’s in the BFI National Archive—it was deemed important enough.

Is there any programmatic element to your music? It’s instrumental, but the names often refer to people or subjects you’re interested in. Do you have those in mind while writing or do the names come later?

The names mostly come later. There’s a few where I’m writing about a thing: “Laika’s Song” and “Ruben’s Song” are about dogs.

Yeah I caught the Laika reference, because you have a background in astrophysics, right?

Yeah, yeah. I studied astrophysics.

So Laika, and the Dog Star and all that, are your other interests shaping how you compose?

The specific names come later, but I assume that stuff is informed by whatever it is I’m into at the time. While writing the last album, I was reading a lot of pulp sci-fi, a lot of weird time and infinity. White Light (1980) and The House on the Borderland (1908) and shit like that. So the names, traditionally they come later, but they’re about what the songs sound like to me, which is usually this stuff I had in my head while writing. “Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark” is a lift—I nicked that line from a comic book: The Invisibles (1994-2000) by Grant Morrison.

What’s the context of that line in the comic?

So it’s like this occult, psychedelic comic where there’s a team of occult heroes. They travel back in time to save the Marquis de Sade. There’s a young lad who’s the protagonist and he gets taken under the wing of this mad hobo mystic called Tom O’Bedlam. Tom shows him around and is describing all the hidden, occult nature of London, like “Ixat” is a magic word you see reflected in a puddle on the ground from a Taxi. So he says all this barmy stuff, and one of my favorite lines he says in it is, “Last night I heard the dog star bark.” And that’s it, there’s no context to explain what it means, it’s apropos of nothing.

Just something that stuck with you.

Yeah, where I’m reading and have to stop and think, oh, I’m going to write that down.

Another song is called “Bonfire of the Billionaires.” Do you have plans for how we round them up and restrain them while we light it? (laughter).

I have to enter your country on a visa soon, so I’m saying, “No comment.” (laughter).

You’re still touring for Dog Star, but do you have plans for what you’re doing next?

I’m still writing. I’ve got a couple of tunes that I think are decent. My previous three albums have all been recorded at home, for no money. My last one was recorded in this room on a couple of mics that I borrowed, so the total cost was like 50 quid. I’m thinking about going into a proper studio next time because I feel like this sort of guitar music is great live and has a certain dynamism and immersion in that setting. I think on record it loses something.

So I think it’s interesting to see what you can do to make up for that on an album and somehow expand the sound. I’m not talking about replacing it or making an electronic album—I still essentially like acoustic guitar and writing everything for acoustic—but I want to see how we can explode things and make it different from a live performance. I used to have an attitude that I think comes from my punk background, like, “Fuck anything you can’t do live. Only record what you can play live.” I’m going away from that, but who knows, I may change my mind.

Your style in particular is very physical and immediate and timbral. The presence of the guitar, even on recordings, is very much felt—you hear the strings buzz and the fingers slide. That physical presence is central to the style. Do you think of it differently live versus studio or do you just think of everything as live?

Mostly I just think about it as live. The difference, to be honest, is that there’s fun to the dynamism live, and a certain level of risk. You tend to play more full-on and out there. You hit a duff note, you move on and you’re past it. That note on a record is there for posterity, for all time (laughter). You tend to be a little bit more well-behaved on a record.

And your style in general is pretty full-on, you play at a much faster average tempo than a lot of music in this tradition. Does that just come naturally for you?

Yeah, I can’t help it. On the album I’ve even slowed myself down a bit. I think I hear everything in slow motion because I’ll play something and think it was a good tempo, and then hear it played back and I’m like, Jesus Christ, that was way too fast. I have to really control myself. But if it’s live I’m going to fucking go for it. Again, I was in punk bands and noise bands, and you can probably tell I speak fast, I’m just a fairly rapid person.

Was your fingerpicking style always this style of alternating drones on the bass strings and melody on the higher ones, or have you explored other techniques playing out of chord positions?

I don’t really mess around with proper chords. I just like the big heavy sound. I do little sections with fretted chords, but only sections. I also have tiny, crap little hands; I can’t really hold a chord with these baby hands. There’s more room for the things I’m good at with the open style.

Yeah my grandpa also had tiny hands, but he played more closed chords so he’d constantly do the Merle Travis thing of fretting bass strings with a thumb wrapped around.

Oh yeah I do that all the time, that’s why I do it constantly.

Well, thank you for your time, and I really look forward to seeing you at Big Ears. You’ve toured in the U.S. before right?

Yeah, this is my third or fourth time.

Folk music has such a strong connection to place and landscape, and a lot of what you play originates in North America, does it feel different to you at all touring and playing here?

In terms of the clubs, as it were, they’re kind of the same everywhere. I’m playing fairly DIY places, and they tend to be pretty similar. But everything outside of that is super different. America feels super different. Just like getting around is crazy. I don’t know how you lot do it.

Day-long drives.

Well I don’t drive!

Oh, you wouldn’t make it.

I’ve got to go from Santa Fe to Albuquerque to catch a flight. I see there’s a train but it runs like twice a fucking day. It’s not even far! What is wrong with you people? (laughter). It’s crazy, and it’s not just the distance, it’s the absence of trains. High speed rail would be a great solution for America. Some of them don’t really make any sense how long they take. What are they going 30 miles an hour for, what is this?

Gwenifer Raymond’s music can be found at Bandcamp. She plays her set at Big Ears tomorrow, March 28th.

Thank you for reading the 218th issue of Tone Glow. American century of humiliation.

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Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet

The Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet is a guitar quartet made up of Bill Orcutt, Shane Parish, Ava Mendoza, and Wendy Eisenberg. After the release of Bill Orcutt’s Music For Four Guitars (2022), he eventually brought on the other guitarists to perform the music live. They’ve since played numerous shows together, and have released two live albums: Four Guitars Live (2024) and HausLive 4 (2025). Orcutt’s newest album, Music in Continuous Motion (2026) was made in continuation of this practice. The Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet will perform tonight at Roulette, with members also playing in different configurations or solo throughout the weekend. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with all four members of the quartet on March 5th, 2026 to discuss guitar solos, the mystery that still exists in through-composed music, and performing live.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: I wanted to start off by asking the non-Bill members, do you remember when you first heard Bill’s music? And for Bill, do you remember when you first encountered everyone else’s music?

Ava Mendoza: I don’t know if I remember the first time I heard his music, but I knew that there was a person named Bill Orcutt who played in Harry Pussy. We both lived in the Bay Area—I was in Oakland and he was in San Francisco. I don’t think I ever saw him play, but we played this multiple-guitar-player thing together with Rhys Chatham’s music—I think it was five or six guitars. That was the first time we met and also my first time hearing you. After that, I’d moved to Brooklyn and kept track of him and listened to solo records. The solo record that starts with “Lonely Woman” [Bill Orcutt (2017)]—I thought that was amazing.

Do you remember your first impression of him?

Ava Mendoza: I thought he was humble and understated and funny. We had people in common so I knew he was a weirdo (laughter). He sounded great in that band—he took an egg whisk or something and used that for his guitar solo.

Wendy Eisenberg: I was following VDSQ a lot, starting around 2012, so I heard Bill’s VDSQ record. But yeah, it’s the same thing—he’s humble and there’s this chill clarity.

Shane Parish: I saw Bill play at The Mothlight in Asheville, North Carolina. Old friends of yours moved to Asheville—Robert [Price] and Priya [Ray]—and I think that’s how I ended up at that show. It was a solo set, and it was cool. And then I think I met you at Brickside Festival in Durham at Duke University. My band Ahleuchatistas was playing and I gave you a copy of my CD, Undertaker Please Drive Slow (2016). You were a man of few words, you were a man of mystery. There was a beard (laughter). And it wasn’t until we were on a Zoom call for the transcriptions that more words were spoken.

Bill Orcutt: My answer is basically the exact same but in reverse (laughter). The first time I met Ava and heard her play was at this Rhys Chatham thing. I remember that everyone kind of knew each other, but Ava invited me to come along, and I thought that was so nice. I got to have a beer outside—otherwise I would’ve just been in the venue doing nothing.

With Shane, I forgot about that Duke Coffeehouse thing, but that would’ve been the first time I saw you play. I remember Churchill’s, when you came to Miami. We actually talked a little bit more. But I do remember that we had known each other and interacted quite a bit for some months, and then at some point you were like, “That’s the first time you’ve ever talked to me!” The six months we had known each other and exchanged words didn’t count as talking (laughter). I wasn’t sharing enough to break through, and then we had a heart to heart. It was probably on the ride down to Atlanta.

With Wendy, I had heard Auto (2020) when it came out. I listened to it and really liked it, and that made a connection. I was really intimidated by the idea of playing with them because I liked the record so much. But then I got to know Wendy and it was fine (laughter). I also think I’d heard their first VDSQ record [Its Shape Is Your Touch (2018)], but that might have been after.

Now that you’ve all played multiple shows and have gotten to know Bill more, I’m wondering—do the non-Bill members feel like they’ve learned anything about Bill, whether himself or the music, that is surprising based off those first impressions. And Bill, to you give you a question—do you think there’s anything you’ve learned about yourself after Shane transcribed your work?

Bill Orcutt: Not really, simply because Music For Four Guitars (2022) is different from what I consider to be my native tongue. I know how that album is constructed because I’ve seen it visualized in the Logic window. There are four tracks, I see where the patterns are, and I know how it works. It’s not as much of a mystery to me as when I’m improvising.

Shane Parish: When we were in France last year and doing some rehearsal right before the tour, he said, “Play harder!” I played really hard that whole tour (laughter).

Ava Mendoza: That’s the rehearsal in the hotel room?

Shane Parish: Yeah! I realized that Bill can really make the instrument sing in this incredible way. So much of that comes from the power he’s attacking the strings with, but at the same time he’s very relaxed and in his zone. I was stronger at the end of the tour because I was playing harder than I normally do. Like, fuck all this dynamics shit—I’m just gonna do this thing. And I think it helped me achieve new layers of tone. When I watch his hands I’m just like, where is this sound coming from? And it’s because there’s so much power there. And it’s not forced power either because he’s been playing for so long. Bill, do you think that’s an accurate description of your technique?

Bill Orcutt: Probably yes. I’ve learned something about myself from cooking, actually. I never do anything but put the heat on high, and at one point I was asking my wife, “What am I doing wrong?” “It doesn’t have to be all the way up! You can turn it down a little bit, and it cooks better when it’s not so hot.” (laughter). So I realized that this is my instinct, to turn things all the way up and to hit the strings as hard as I can (laughter).

Ava Mendoza: It’s unique to have that idea but to be relaxed. A lot of people will want things to be at 10 but be tense about it, but you’re not.

Shane Parish: At the beginning of the transcription project, Bill said, “I’m gonna send you a guitar because I don’t want you to fuck up one of your own.” He mailed me this Squier Telecaster that he toured with for a while with Chris Corsano. This guitar… the frets are destroyed (laughter). But since it’s a four-string guitar, the frets are pristine where strings 5 and 4 would be. There’s damage to the fretboard horizontally too, into the wood, because of the grip that’s going on.

Bill Orcutt: No, no, not true! (laughter).

Shane Parish: I’ll show it to you!

Bill Orcutt: I’m sure the damage is there, but it’s because at the last show of that tour with Chris, I attacked that guitar with a folding chair (laughter).

Wendy Eisenberg: Wow, what frets did the folding chair hit, you think?

Bill Orcutt: All of them (laughter). I put the guitar on the ground and I was just running the folding chair over it.

Wendy Eisenberg: That’s why we get into music, probably (laughter). Just echoing what’s been said, it’s all about maximum presence. I’m always thinking about this thing of how when you’re really in the moment, you’re not really there. Sitting next to Bill when he’s in solo mode, you can see “public Bill” vanish and it’s just full, loud stuff. I’m hanging out with the idea of headroom; I wanna play quiet in a loud context to see what will happen—in my solo songs, especially—so being next to someone who’s able to do with that headroom proportion, but with full volume, is inspiring.

What’s it like to play with the four-string guitar? And how has that informed your own solo work?

Wendy Eisenberg: It made me a better country player. It made me hang out more with thirds and sixths more explicitly. I was intervallic and wonky about shit before but because those strings are gone, it’s just taken a more central place in how I think about music.

Shane Parish: When we did that French tour last year, upon returning to Athens, I was hired to play at a funeral of the grandmother of one of my students. I had to do some arrangements for that and one of the songs was “Angel From Montgomery” by John Prine. I’d practice these arrangements in my hotel room at night, and when I was doing that song specifically, I didn’t have the two strings back on so it changed how I did the arrangement; I could only put the bass note on the sixth string. It gave me different voicings. It was probably like how Hendrix does it, with how he voiced certain things with his thumb over the bass. When I got back to six strings, I was playing the songs and my intuition was to go back to these notes on the other strings, but I didn’t like how I arranged them anymore. I ended up digging the arrangement I did on the four strings better, so yeah, I’ve been thinking about arrangements differently.

Ava Mendoza: For me, it’s helped me get some voicings that I don’t normally do on the top three strings. More broadly, Bill is a minimalist when it comes to gear. He takes away two strings and maybe uses one pedal, and while I’m not a maximalist, I like my pedals, and I like tone sculpture, but I don’t do it as much with the quartet; I limit myself to much fewer pedals. That’s been great for me because I’m focusing more on my right hand and the way I touch the instrument. So it’s deepened that at the most basic level. And when I go back to playing solo or playing with other people, where I’m using my full pedal board, I have a new appreciation for the stuff that I can do with it now.

Bill, you mentioned how there isn’t much mystery in a lot of this music for the quartet. Is there still room for surprise when you play live?

Ava Mendoza: The arrangements are set, but there is a fair amount of improvising in the set that we play. When we played the first record, we’d play it but then people will open up and solo, or strip it down into an unaccompanied solo. So there’s maybe 20% improvising in the set. My solos are certainly a surprise to me (laughs). I don’t know where they’re gonna go, but it varies with the audience and the room. And then in terms of our phrasing, everyone puts their own style on it, and Bill is very cool with that. He’s never said, “Don’t do that!” And so we keep doing it (laughter). We all have our own way of interpreting the music, and at least for me, there’s improvisation in that. I can put little fills in there every night that are different.

Shane Parish: I really like to be put into these situations where it’s like the way that classical music improvises. I play a lot of through-composed music, but there is something about interpretation that is improvisation. When you’re doing these repetitive figures and they need to lock in, everyone’s still putting their own spin on it, as Ava was saying. And for it to feel alive, you want constant instability or subtle variation on it, whether that’s vibrato, how you attack the string, or what finger you use on your left hand. Jim Hall was really into that, like, “The pinky has a nasal sound compared to the others.” (laughter). So you can get into that. We’re boxed in here because we’re playing this tight, looping thing, but then you can get into timbre and dynamics and articulation—there are things that give it life. It’s cool that we got to do those live recordings [Four Guitars Live (2024) and HausLive 4 (2025)] because there are documents of that vitality of the individual.

Wendy Eisenberg: I think the mystery is the ways that everyone’s interpretations change with the biology and the fact of the room. Another sweeping statement is that I’m always toggling between things that are written and things that aren’t. It often feels like improvisation is the less mysterious thing because it’s a state of being, so you’re kind of just inhabiting that, and that itself is the practice instead of the thing being sounded. When I get to play with the quartet, it feels like such a mysterious thing because it’s bigger than us, so the composition is just the precondition for the mystery rather than the mystery being the thing that you didn’t expect to be played. I want the things that I do to set the stage for what is possible, to be surprised. Every night is different because if you’re in a tiny, tin-ceiling room in Philly versus Roulette in New York versus The Lab in San Francisco, all that shit is its own setting. But also the four of us, phrase by phrase—no matter how repetitious—our hands get tired, some finger gives out, and one will be stronger. You won’t have as much control over that as you want.

Ava Mendoza: There’s a narrow window of improvisation in classical music, but there is always improvisation in terms of the tempo, the amount of rubato that you use, the dynamics. You can choose to lean into those variations, and that’s true for any kind of written, through-composed music. We all kind of know that and play with that every night. It’s subtle things that are different in the way that we groove and gel with each other, whether we play in front of or behind the beat.

Bill Orcutt: One thing that hasn’t been mentioned is the monitor situation and our ability to hear each other. That’s something that can be awesome and great or nonexistent, and then you’re watching Shane’s hands to figure out where we are (laughter).

Ava Mendoza: The sound person causes improvisation every night.

Bill Orcutt: The fifth member of the group (laughter).

Tell me about a time when the monitor situation was rough and how that impacted the music. What was that like?

Bill Orcutt: That happens all the time. I think the Duke Coffeehouse was a show where that happened.

Shane Parish: They’re students, man (laughter).

Ava Mendoza: There’s that show we did in Ghent where we turned our amps backward. That was a sound apocalypse for me.

Wendy Eisenberg: We did that at Roulette and it worked really well.

Ava Mendoza: Oh, it wasn’t backwards—they put baffles in front of our amps to keep us from being too loud, and then they had us only mic’d and going into the house. That was a disaster—just no attack at all, just this big (makes mushy-mouthed sound).

So would you say the consequences of this have only been negative?

Bill Orcutt: It’s never really positive. So one possible result is that I’m watching and seeing where we are, but I also might say “fuck it” and go off on my own, and ignore everyone and let them follow me (laughter).

Ava Mendoza: If there’s somebody I can’t hear, it’s usually Bill, and that’s because Shane and Wendy are on either side of me. It’s a better show if I have Bill in my monitor really well. I’m trying to think of a positive and it’s like… less hearing loss? (laughter).

Wendy Eisenberg: I can think of a positive. It makes me believe in the directionality of things. I feel like I’m an idiot because in most bands, I could always hear most things fine. If I was in Editrix, I’d be like, okay, the bass is loud—sure, things are different each night. While the directionality of an amp being important was something that I knew was true—I’m not that insensate—now I can feel it. The reason we can’t hear things is because of direction, so that’s a mystical way of thinking about it.

I learned when I was talking with Bill that all four of you sit in the same order every time you play. Why not switch things up and cause more—

Ava Mendoza: —improvisation (laughter).

Shane Parish: So that was literally the first way we ever sat down at our rehearsal in Brooklyn before our very first gig. It was just how we happened to sit down, and I’m kind of a Capricorn so it’s like, that’s how I do it now. It just felt really good. I have a direct line of sight to Bill because we’re in a semicircle and on different ends. I’m sort of the timekeeper—I guess we’d defer to my foot tap if we were confused—so I guess it makes sense for me to be seen by everyone.

Ava Mendoza: We all have a good eyeline on you.

Wendy Eisenberg: With where I’m sitting, I feel like I have the cheeky reverence of a viola player. It’s kind of a post-hoc analysis, but I relate to my seat (laughter).

Bill Orcutt: I was just looking up if string quartets change positions, and they don’t! Also, the truth is that I’m completely unadventurous so if I find something that works, I’ll do it over and over. I’m not really interested in surprises, at least when it comes to things like that.

Ava Mendoza: It seems really normal to me. Every band that I’ve played in has a stage plot that we do every night. I don’t think it’s unique to this band. There are bands I play in where if there’s a unique situation, we’ll say, okay we’ll switch tonight. I played in one band where we did it differently every night and it was phenomenally frustrating and time-consuming (laughter). That was in my 20s. But every ongoing project I’m in, there’s just a way we do it.

Shane Parish: Now that you’ve mentioned that, I’m always stage right.

Ava Mendoza: I usually am too. I think that’s normal as a guitar player. If you’re playing any kind of jazz-related music, the bass wants to be on the hi-hat side of the drummer, which is stage left.

Earlier you were talking about different audiences, so I’m wondering what your experiences have been with playing in different cities. How have the audiences’ behaviors and demeanors impacted your playing? Does that energy play a role?

Bill Orcutt: We’ve had pretty good audiences. I don’t think we’ve ever had a bad response.

Wendy Eisenberg: I think it’s more the room because the audience is always excited.

Shane Parish: I think that show we did in Los Angeles at 2220 had a particularly high vibration. Somehow it felt crowded and hot, like you could feel the body heat in the room. I also think it was because our Tiny Desk Concert had just been released and I remember when we came out, that one guy announced us by saying, “And a band that needs no introduction!” And I was like, oh, that’s new (laughter). So that was a high-energy situation.

Ava Mendoza: The audience definitely changes it for me, like if they’re more hyped up, but we’ve never had a dead or cold audience. The LA show was especially amped. That was the happiest I’ve seen LA in 15 years, period (laughter). And I had old friends there so it was an emotional show for me anyway.

Wendy Eisenberg: I think it also depends if we’re on a platform or not. In Victoriaville, we were on a platform that felt like we were at a convention center, and no disrespect, but it was harder for me to get into the catharsis of it. My entire life, if I’m going to a conference, I’m not supposed to get hyped (laughter). If we’re lower to the ground or there are people above us, then the vibe is usually higher. Roulette felt like that. At 2220, it’s a slanted-up audience. That’s my instantaneous theory about it.

Ava Mendoza: You want the panopticon (laughter), with the audience staring down at us.

Shane Parish: Kings Place in London was like that. The audience was seated but there was a balcony that circled the stage so there were people behind us, actually.

I wanted to ask about the new record, Music in Continuous Motion (2026). What are you noticing that’s different about this record compared to the last in your practice? Is something new coming out of your playing? What’s different about your parts this time around?

Shane Parish: I finished transcribing it at the end of January, maybe February 1st. It feels like a blur now though because I’ve been following this other stuff so much.

Bill Orcutt: When Tom Carter was writing the one-sheet, he was like, “Give me something, you’re not giving me enough.” And I said, “No triplets,” which is a flippant way of saying that it didn’t have any jig and reel rhythms that the other record had.

Ava Mendoza: It’s got some, though. But it feels less jig and more rock and roll.

Wendy Eisenberg: It’s less sweaty. There’s less of a Celtic sweat (laughter).

Ava Mendoza: Yeah, there’s less friendship with Morocco and Gnawa music, and less friendship with Celtic music, and more friendship with rock and roll.

Shane Parish: There is a song in 15/8, but we’re not playing it at this upcoming gig. It’s almost like a jig for part of the measure, if you think about it.

Bill Orcutt: I didn’t know what it was gonna sound like, and that’s one of the reasons I was reluctant to do it. I figured out a process, but I didn’t know what the process would produce. I was reluctant to put another quarter in and see what would come out (laughter). I’m happy with it, it’s different, and it’s surprisingly fun to play. I can’t wait to play with these guys. I think “Unexpectedly heavy” is going to be unexpectedly heavy when we play it at Roulette (laughter).

Shane Parish: To speak to my experience of transcribing it, when I transcribed Music For Four Guitars, it was all new to me because I hadn’t toured the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet yet. And on the guitar, there are multiple ways to finger things, though taking away two strings reduces that a bit. When I did this new transcription, I just felt that I categorically knew how Bill was playing them with 99% accuracy. I knew what his hand was doing. So it was neat to put that quarter in. I think of different left-hand and right-hand techniques as like a dremel tool where you can attach different heads for different jobs, and it’s like I was screwing on my Orcutt hand (laughter). There’s all these fingerings that he does and I knew them! So this time, I wasn’t on the learning curve of style. As Susan Sontag said, style is what is repeated. When Bill first hired me, he said, “I basically have one lick I play over and over again.” (laughter). But you were quoting B. B. King or something.

Bill Orcutt: A musicologist did a study of B. B. King and said that he had 10 licks and that he was a master of putting those all together to tell a story.

How do you guys feel playing in this band versus other ones? Is there a specific posture you’re in when playing in this quartet?

Ava Mendoza: I try to compose the rhythm section with Shane. He’s the conductor and I’m sitting next to him and I think of us as the “hold it down” part. That’s not all the time, but I try to think of myself as that.

Wendy Eisenberg: It’s hard to think about how it’s different because it’s already written and all you have to do is show up and play it well and listen to everybody. I do think it’s iconic that we all have our own actual postures—there’s a shape that we form (laughter). Bill’s hunched over or leaning back.

Bill Orcutt: I have horrible posture (laughter).

Wendy Eisenberg: And then there’s the dork shit I’m doing. There’s the sway of Mendoza, and it feels like you’re on a different axis than Bill. And then Shane, I feel you have fabulous posture. My guitar neck is up and then yours is lower; our necks are up at different angles. Mine is highest, I think Ava’s is second, and then Shane’s and Bill’s are similar.

Ava Mendoza: They’re horizontal!

Shane Parish: Everyone’s pick grip is a little different too. When we’re in the zone when we’re playing for a while, I notice a lot of subtlety about posture and grip and what’s going on in people’s hands.

Wendy Eisenberg: It’s especially cool when you talk about this Shane because you’re such a scientist of the instrument. It’s so convivial. When you’re in a band, you usually don’t have someone saying, “Oh, it’s cool how loose you are on the pick in this way.”

Bill Orcutt: One of the things that comes across is that Shane is a teacher. You can tell he is one by how generous he is in his interpretations.

Do you guys mind talking about your relationship to guitar solos? How has that changed over the years and how do guitar solos show up for you in this band? What makes a guitar solo successful? Are all guitar solos successful?

Ava Mendoza: No, god no. (laughter).

Bill Orcutt: As a listener, I love them and sometimes all I wanna do is listen to the solo. Most of them aren’t great, but when you hear one that is, it’s special. As a player, I didn’t really get to play any! When I’m playing with Corsano, there’s no soloing—it’s a dialogue. I spit out some little thing and he kicks it back. Part of the reason I wanted to play with Steve Shelley and Ethan Miller was so I could do guitar solos.

Ava Mendoza: Now you’ve turned into a monster. You have guitar solos in BOGQ and Orcutt Shelley Miller is like you having all the guitar solos.

Bill Orcutt: I have one in the quartet. Playing in a trio, I get to do a lot of solos, it’s not a dialogue it’s a monologue.

Ava Mendoza: I like guitar solos but I also like anti-guitar solos. I like Robert Quine, who I think is as good as it gets for his type of guitar playing. And he hated guitar solos, and the stuff he plays on Lou Reed records or The Voidods’ records, he has traditional chops but he’s trying to deconstruct what people play and not do the things that usually happen in solos. I love how a guitar player who hates guitar solos sounds when they do one. Coming out of that, I love them and I’m always trying to deconstruct and reconstruct while doing them. There’s all kinds of terrible and wonderful things you can do in a guitar solo, and you can combine them every night.

Wendy Eisenberg: I think they’re the perfect opportunities for some combination of pastiche and transcendence—I’m always interested in that. I really love soloing in BOGQ. And in Editrix, whenever I’m playing a rock-hero solo it’s kind of like an anti-guitar solo in a way because I’ll be making fun of it, but it’s also the best thing you could be doing with your time. The older I get, the closer I get to the latter (laughter). Irony is a cage. When you play one ironically, you realize you have to get good at it, and then you realize you like it for itself.

Shane Parish: I like guitar solos. I like playing variations on a theme and exploring thematic material more than scale and arpeggio knowledge. When I took the soli in “Only at dusk,” it basically became a deconstruction of that riff and seeing where it goes. I like shreddy solos but I don’t like to play them; I want to harken to some material that I’m working with, and then I can find my way into some other zone. That’s my take on monophonic improvisation.

Do you guys feel like there’s an influence with how you approach the guitar that would maybe be unexpected?

Ava Mendoza: For me it’s so intertwined with the drum set. The electric guitar and modern drum set are around the same age, and they’re both these renegade instruments that we’re still trying to figure out—there’s all these happy accidents happening all the time. And in terms of the actual strings being pieces of the drum set, and being able to play rhythmically and polyrhythmically over all six strings—there’s no other instrument I relate to as much as the drum set. The more I get to play with awesome drummers, the more I feel that.

Shane Parish: I just like the way the guitar sounds. I know that’s very simple, but seriously, the way the strings sound… when we do this band, I’m always like, “That sounds good,” even if we’re just making noise. I’ll take that into a lesson where I’ll try to have them dial into what it is to just make a sound on the instrument. Someone’s inclination might be like, well this is really boring to just play one note. But this is what you do, you play guitar—listen to the sound of this thing. You can almost do no wrong with the instrument. I feel that way with “Barely driving,” which is this sprawling, open thing. Bill says it’s our “Sister Ray.” It has riffs but it deconstructs over 10 minutes and it becomes pure timbre. It’s a very transcendent feeling, and it’s really just the sound of the instrument.

Wendy Eisenberg: I like that it means a lot. It means something very different all over the world and people do different things with it everywhere. It feels like this symbol of a populist and honest instrument. It’s something everyone can find. And because it’s a physical experience to play it, it’s more than what it means but it’s also only exactly what it means. The guitar is such a global force.

Is there an example of a dishonest instrument? (laughter).

Wendy Eisenberg: It’s lying to you but it sounds like it’s not, and it’s telling the truth to you like it’s fucking with you (laughter).

Bill Orcutt: Unlike the harpsichord (laughter).

Wendy Eisenberg: It’s honest to me in the way that people say humble, not honest in the sense that it’s not lying.

Ava Mendoza: It’s meat and potatoes. With guitar, it feels like you’re equals—maybe you’re friends, maybe you’re enemies, but you’re equal. When you play the clarinet, you’re the clarinet’s bitch (laughter) for like the first half of your life with it, and then when you become good, then you’re equals.

Wendy Eisenberg: And that’s not a question of honesty, but power relations.

Ava Mendoza: Exactly. The clarinet is a top (laughter) and it’ll be a diva.

Wendy Eisenberg: And it’s not honest. It’s a top that sounds like it might be a bottom (laughter).

Shane Parish: The guitar is always kicking my ass—I don’t feel equals with it. I guess it depends on what we’re playing.

Ava Mendoza: I feel like it’s different with different guitars.

Bill Orcutt: I’ve been playing for a while so I think of it as something that’s part of me more so than something I have to force into submission. I was gonna say earlier that talking about influences on the playing, and the starting point for me was realizing that it’s just me. If you accept yourself, you can play whatever you want and it doesn’t matter what anybody thinks. When you’re being yourself in your day-to-day life, more of it will come out when you play guitar.

Is there anything we didn’t talk about today that you wanted to mention?

Shane Parish: I’m really excited to reconstitute as a guitar Voltron. We haven’t done this in over a year.

Wendy Eisenberg: It’s bittersweet. I’m really excited to play at the end of the month. It’s gonna feel invigorating.

Bill Orcutt: Thank you for asking us to do this.

Well, I have one more question that you’ve already heard, but there’s a twist: Do you mind sharing one thing you love about the other band members?

Shane Parish: I don’t ever feel like there’s too many cocks on the block in this situation. It’s a very supportive environment. And everybody, excluding myself, really shreds. I’ve never felt like there’s some kind of ego struggle with the four of us, which seems kind of rare in guitar land, in the realm of shred guitar gods. Everyone’s a team player.

Bill Orcutt: Each of us has our own zone so carefully carved out that there’s not a lot of overlap. If there were two players playing in a similar style, maybe there would be. There’s also the disorienting factor of playing with only four strings, which kind of makes you all the victims (laughter).

Bill, were you initially choosing the members of the band knowing that they all played in their own way?

Bill Orcutt: No, I wasn’t that smart. I got Shane to do the transcription, and then we did a duo version. And then the whole thing really started because Ava wrote to me and said, “If you ever do it live, I’m interested.” Shane knew Wendy, and I know their music, and Wendy’s music came up immediately. And that was it. It felt right from the get-go.

Wendy Eisenberg: I wanna round-robin compliment everyone. The thing that I like most about Bill is the clarity of every thought in speech and in playing. You can tell what the flavor of the thing is before it’s even coming out, but it’s never like he’s doing the thing that I do, where I’m constantly editing—you hear the straight thing, and it’s so grounding as a band member. Just really good stewardship as a band leader, and it’s of a piece with how he plays. I never get the sense that there’s any hedging. It’s just, “This is what I need right now.”

Bill Orcutt: I have no filter, sorry (laughter).

Wendy Eisenberg: But the flavor of your “no filter” is generous. And Ava, there’s this searching aspect. You play only like Ava, but you only play like Ava because you’re interested in the history of extreme head shit. You’re a researcher. Your playing comes out informed—you’re not a mimic—and you’re trying to prolong the things that are interesting to you. Combing through your discography, it’s so wide, and it’s because you do things like email Bill and ask him to be a part of this. You’re an active citizen in this world in that way. For me, I can be a passive songwriter, so I look to you and am inspired by how you seek things out. That’s a bold way to live in the musical world; it’s not alienated, and it’s not paying fealty to some idea of a lone genius. Shane, I mentioned the generosity of your observational prowess, but you also never think the work is done, which can maybe feel like a sentence to some people, but for you it opens up the world. And then you approach the world in this way without narrowing the focus. It’s amazing to see you engage in repertoire, and then also do the Autechre thing; you’re showing that you can’t be satisfied with one depiction of the thing you love, you have to touch it too. I think if more people did that, it’d be a more empathetic world.

Ava Mendoza: I find this band to be a nice combination of people who work really hard, learning the music backwards and forwards, but also trying to grow. Even though the music’s through-composed and we’re playing what on paper looks like the same set, everybody always does something that feels like healthy growth. Hearing everyone play unaccompanied solo, it’s such distinct styles, and everyone is so secure in what they are and how different they are—everyone’s really confident in their style, but also not an asshole. If we have to address anything about the music, everybody’s willing to work and be open with each other. It makes it possible for the band to continue.

Bill Orcutt’s Music in Continuous Motion is out now. Two live albums have also been released: Four Guitars Live (2024) and HausLive 4 (2025).

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Thank you for reading the 217th issue of Tone Glow. They pronounce BOGQ as “Bach,” by the way.

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Wendy Eisenberg

Wendy Eisenberg (b. 1991) is a singer-songwriter, composer, and guitarist based in New York. Throughout the past several years, Eisenberg has performed in numerous bands, from Editrix to Squanderers to whait. They’ve also released several solo albums, including Auto (2020), Bent Ring (2021), and Viewfinder (2024). Their newest album is self-titled, and is out April 3rd via Joyful Noise Recordings. Eisenberg is also part of the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet, who will perform this Friday at Roulette. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Eisenberg on February 27th, 2026 via Zoom to discuss love, improvisation, and how those two things aren’t so different. Kim previously interviewed Eisenberg in 2020—find that interview here.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: Since our last interview, you’ve had your solo albums, the three Editrix albums, the two Squanderers albums with David Grubbs and Kramer, the Strictly Missionary album, and the whait EP with Mari [aka more eaze]. There’s been a lot, and I got really emotional reading that again.

Wendy Eisenberg: It was heavy.

Something I was surprised by was that you said you were “afraid of romantic relationships.” And now you’ve been with Mari for a while, and I’m wondering if those fears have been assuaged. So much of this new album is about change, too, and I’m wondering how much you feel like you’ve changed since then.

A shitload. I feel like an entirely different person. But of course I’m still afraid of it—that’s why I’m doing it, you know? That’s why I’m able to commit. At the time of that interview, five or six years ago, we had a lot of time to think about ourselves. You could pretend that you didn’t, but if you were lucky enough to not be an essential worker, you could just… think. It seems as though my thoughtful self is a more fearful one. I was starting a relationship with someone who I’m clearly no longer with, and I was wondering what I was doing.

That specific moment of my life is very foreign to me, and I was thinking about it today. The person who made that Strictly Missionary record [Heisse Scheisse (2021)] is way less legible to me than the person who made the Squanderers records, for example. Some things are still continuing into my day-to-day life, but that being said, I’m trying to access the part of me who said that, and I think they said they’re afraid of romantic relationships because of spaces that are encroached upon, or the values that are subsumed into the couple form.

The way that I’m afraid of it now is that it can truly erode the boundaries of yourself if you’re not careful. I love Mari so deeply and I’m so inspired by her that I sometimes get this paranoid feeling of, like, “Should I be learning all the crazy shit that she’s doing on her side of the studio?” In being so inspired and in love with somebody, you wonder about the boundaries you’ve thoughtlessly put up and if this way of living is amenable to you, or if you want to, as Chris Weisman would say, traverse the chasm of your differences. That’s way scarier to me. But back then, I was shut down, everything felt new because I had just moved to the city, and here’s this person who is lovely I dated, but was it correct? I don’t think I believed in it yet like I do now.

Believed in love?

Believed that love could do what it’s doing now. All the ways that people talked about it, it’d be like, “Okay grandpa, go to bed.” (laughter). It didn’t knock me on my ass yet. Love had knocked me on my ass when I’d been broken up with or been hurt, but now it’s so destabilizing—and stable, paradoxically. I didn’t know what I was saying when I said I was afraid of relationships—what I was afraid of was far more shallow.

So what has love done to you? What has it taught you about yourself?

I didn’t know I could be accepted for exactly who I am, even if it’s truly disgusting. I had microdosed that, and I had good relationships before, but I hadn’t been in a situation where, like, Mari will be stoked that I’m bringing up a really obscure David Grubbs song because she actually knows it, and then in the same breath will be ribbing me for whatever disgusting household habit I might have. And I could do the same thing to her. I don’t have to act perfect, you know?

It’s a balm against shame because I know that if I’m not acting my best, there’s somebody who’s genuinely on my side and who doesn’t want to leave. I don’t even necessarily have that relationship with myself. Having somebody practice that, where they’re like, “No, I’m good with you, you can just be there,” is an antidote to so many feelings I’ve learned through rejection. Knowing that there’s somebody who’s like, “I think it’s cool you have an opinion on this one singer on a Funkadelic track, and I think it’s cool that you never turn off the espresso machine.” (laughter). And that’s like the most benign version of the shit I’m talking about.

What’s it like playing with Mari live? Obviously you two perform together, you have the whait project, and she played a role on this new self-titled album. How are your professional and romantic relationships related, how are they separate, and how are they informing one another?

I cannot write with her in the same room as me—the songs can’t have her in their origin. That’s one of the fears of romantic relationships, where I’m very protective of my work as some concrete, undistorted signal. I’m just like, leave me the fuck alone (laughter). When I’m working, it’s like the same space I get into when I’m dancing, where you’re not existing and instead in this weird flow that’s beyond and through you. It’s really hard for me to let somebody into that level of the creative process, so that’s remained untouched.

As far as letting her into the process in the studio, we work really similarly. First, second, or third idea is the best—any more than that, no. We’re also fast and efficient. If she’s coming up with a string arrangement, it’s the same as when I’m coming up with an arrangement on my own, where I know the second line has to be in a certain place. For my features on her record [sentence structure in the country (2026)], I was doing vocal overdubs and piano and I was like, “I know it has to be this way,” and she was accepting of that.

Even though there are ways our tastes diverge, we both know what we’re looking for because we have such a shared bank of knowledge musically. We have really close tastes. When she was producing my record, Nick [Zanca] really understood what my songs needed, but having somebody who lives with you say, “Oh, I’ve noticed you’ve been listening to Aldous Harding a lot, what do you think of that mix?” “I love the amount of air on it.” And then it’s immediately actionable. It’s pretty clutch—it’s gorgeous. Maybe it is true that I’m afraid of romantic relationships because I’ll be like, “Why do you know me so well? How do you know that I want that?” I’ll get a little fucked up about it, but mostly I’m like, “Holy shit, I can’t believe this is a way I can relate to another person.” Sometimes we can be stubborn, and I was afraid of that entering into how we relate to each other outside of music, but when we’re out of the studio, we’re still always gonna make dinner and watch TV.

What’s on the TV nowadays? What are you watching?

I’m in girlmode, hardcore. My entire life I’ve just been rewatching Buffy. Mari’s tried to show me The Expanse, but she always shows me that when I’m pretty high, and It’s really hard for me to follow. I’m trying to get into it. And I’m showing her Sex and the City and she really likes that. She’s a Charlotte (laughter).

What draws you to Buffy?

I too am a put-upon person who likes wearing leather accessories (laughter). I think the show’s weird ethos of “you owe the people in your crew—and pretty much every human being—everything” hit differently this time. It feels different than watching art—it feels like I’m watching therapy. There’s this episode where Buffy is catatonic because she lost a family member and is being beaten handily by the season’s big enemy. She’s really feeling her powerlessness. Willow does this spell where she’s entering Buffy’s catatonia and talking to her, seeing how she’s on this crazy-ass timeloop and seeing these different images from stations of her mind. It’s amazing to see what it feels like to be in a PTSD timeloop like that.

Do you think there’s something you took away from the show this time around compared to previous watches?

I was rewatching Buffy when I was making Auto (2020) and the thing that was really inspiring was this episode where Buffy essentially trips balls and sees her sister both existing and not existing in the present. There’s something of these ulterior states where people can exist or not exist; your memory is a weird space for a second. The supernatural is obviously metaphorical, but I find it really nice to see these processes that feel like therapy but then represented in a world that’s separate from my actual life—a world of different outfits. Also, their commitment to fight scenes in every episode is awesome, and the pop-metal theme song is iconic. They don’t do that anymore, so there’s nostalgia, too.

Now, I’m really struck by how deep the community is around her. Some of them happen to be supernatural and they can kick ass, while others are just dudes who hang out. It honestly feels like my friend group. And the genesis of this new record, really, was playing with Ryan [Sawyer] a ton, and playing in Darlin’ [Eisenberg’s trio with Sawyer and Lester St. Louis]. There’s this feeling I got with him that’s like, oh that’s my sibling. And then meeting Mari and instantly feeling like, that’s my wife. And then Steve [Cameron] from Editrix moving to New York and feeling like, that’s family. And all these newer people, too. So that coterie that Buffy has is something that I see more of in my life, especially when they solve problems without her.

Tell me about playing with Ryan. What has he brought to you, in the broadest sense?

I have this memory from 2021 or 2022 of hanging out with gabby fluke-mogul and telling them that I really wanted to make improvised music that feels like a song. I think Ryan has that same priority. There’s this siloed thing with free-improvised music where people want to preserve the practice of it—which they should, it’s a gorgeous thing we do as human beings—but I didn’t feel like I’d met anyone in New York who was concerned with this same thing. When I heard his solo album for the first time, Your Heart Will Be Your Skin (2020), I was like, oh, he’s doing that. It’s not just that he’s doing free jazz versions of songs; there’s a real aesthetic intent to communicate this loneliness at the core of the desire to do both.

For whatever reason, we’ve become very versatile in differing styles of what we do. We play these vernacular modern instruments, but in his case kind of ancient—the drums and the voice—and we can do them in whatever style we want to do, and the things we choose to do together always makes sense. Even if he’s doing something that’s busier than what I was imagining in my head, or weirder or on a different level of pulse… sometimes I’ll bring in something that I’m thinking about in 9, but he’s thinking about it in a different subdivision, it’ll always sound right because our hearts are in the same place.

What makes something sound like a song? Is it because of the form? Is it because it’s more reined in and because there’s revisited themes? Or is that something you don’t want to explain and it’s more of a feeling?

It’s mostly a feeling. From where I’m coming from, there’s a sense of melody. And on just a brute level, we both sing. When a free improvisation feels like a free improvisation, there’s no other feeling in the world. It’s like dance in that way—you’re just beholding the fact that somebody is contending with what they’re contending with. You’re not exactly external to it, and that’s when it’s really good. With a song, you know that there’s a level of externality to it; I know somebody else is telling me something. But whatever point of view is external to me is not genuinely external to me; it’s a feeling I had that I didn’t know. I want songs and good improv to do this, to reach out from something that’s alien to me and make me remember that I’m not alone. And while improv and songs can both do that, songs are more direct, at least formally—mostly because someone’s singing to you.

I love that one of the ways that improv and songs differ is the way that a listener will respond to it. It’s not necessarily about the thing itself, but what it’s doing to the person.

I think that’s what I think. But I’m probably gonna read this in print and be like… what, bitch? (laughter). It’s giving square-rectangle vibes. When I listen to Derek Bailey improvise solo, it feels like a song, y’know? Does that make a song? Probably categorically no, but does it affect me the same way that a pretty Willie Nelson song will? So it’s actually a structure of relation and feeling rather than any musical technique.

This is making me think about Bill Evans and how so many people have talked and written about his music in this way where it feels like he’s your friend somehow, that it feels like you’ve known him forever. Like, how does he do that?

Because he’s playing a song! It’s interesting hearing you think about this with respect to him because when I hear really good free improvisation, it’s more the quality of how it hits you. But when I hear someone like Bill Evans, I hear somebody who’s bleeding out to be understood. , I feel the same way when I listen to a SOPHIE song that doesn’t have lyrics—it’s just that it’s modulated differently. When I’m listening to Martín Escalante, who I’m a big fan of, it feels totally different—the emotional level. Or when Rafael Toral is playing jazz standards, it feels like songs to their ultimate limit, but it also doesn’t feel like songs in the way that I’m looking towards songs. I still find that very valuable, though. Like damn, songs can do that too?

Are there things you try to avoid when you’re writing songs versus when you’re in an improv mode? Have you noticed any specific tendencies when you’re in one mindset versus the other?

Oh man, that’s such a cool question. Usually I’m kind of blacked out when I’m writing a good song. I’m solving problems on a very individual level, like, “Do I play this chord one more time or twenty more times?” (laughter). I’m in brain-idiot mode (laughter), which I feel is me being honest to whatever the feeling is. When I was starting to write songs, which is also when I was starting to really study free improvisation [at Eastman], I was trying to get into that no-man’s-land psychic space—the space that Radigue was getting to all the time—but articulating it with a different relationship to form. So maybe it is based around the original iteration of this question, where songs are just about singing and forms you can discern. But when I play with Ryan, it feels like all bets are off and it just takes the form it takes.

So then what’s the headspace you’re leaning into when playing in something like Squanderers?

I don’t know if it’s actually different. I don’t think I’m trying to write a song in Squanderers, and that might be because David is coming in with something that has an implied form, or because it’ll be completely improvised. I’m not protecting my song either, or exploding a Lana Del Rey song with Ryan, so what’s happening is that I’m trying to see what’s happening. When you’re playing a piece by David for this band, you’re a session musician in this weird way; you don’t know how the song’s going to sound, but you know you have to be really honest about what it is. It’s the same as when I’m writing a song or playing free improvisation by myself—I’m listening to the characteristics of the world around me and hearing it for what it really is. I might be writing a song and I know that the feeling I have is anger. Who knows what it’s gonna sound like by the end of the written tune, but either way, I have to be present to this feeling as I would a bandmate. It feels like we’re really theorizing here and it’s exhilarating, it’s the first thinking I’ve done all day (laughter).

What has changed about the way you approach music now versus in the past? I want to know about this with regards to the people you’re playing with now.

Thinking about Caroline Davis, she is so rigorous and so committed to the work—she’s the hardest working person in show business. It’s been really inspiring because, with her, I’ve learned that I can’t do everything—there are certain things I’m gonna be bad at. I already knew this, but it’s been driven home by how great of a writer she is. Another thing I’ve taken away is that there are certain things I really like and want to stay loyal to. We as a duo can kind of do anything, but it’s so cool that we’re always coming back to unison singing, and we’re coming back to some relationship of songwriting as melody. The improvisations we have are pretty melodic; they’re not textural free-jazz improvisations, and are an outgrowth of song in that way. That might be what she might hear in my approach—I know it’s what I hear in hers. When we play together, I know my strength is not crazy, virtuosic guitar shit, but it is a quality of listening that’s deeper than what’s just happening around me—it’s towards a gestalt of what people are doing.

Playing with her directly influenced the way I engage with Squanderers, for example. I would really suck if I didn’t have to contend with how someone is playing in the moment, which is the most important thing. There are certain things that Caroline will do when we’re singing a duet. If she’s doing a melody by herself, she’ll be really expressive, almost like R&B. It’s so charming, and something I would never do, but it’s exactly what she would do and I never expect it to come out exactly as it does. The acceptance of that—and how I react—is part of what’s coming across. I hear her history in it, and I also hear how she’s really loving music in the moment. It makes me so joyful.

With Kramer and Grubbs, they have a really different relationship. They’re not playing jazz gigs in Amsterdam every day, and they’re not all over the place like she is. Kramer has this history as a curator and producer, and Grubbs is a true poet and theorist of a certain dissemination of musical materiality, and while he’s been around for so many different types of music, he’s not a journeyman in that way. Maybe he has been in the past, but he’s a committed parent and educator, so there’s a core of calmness with how he lives. If I know these things, the person inside me who should’ve been a novelist is just like, well, I know they have these characteristics. I’ve learned through certain duets that beyond any musical tendencies, it’s people’s psychoanalytical tendencies that determine the choices they make. So I learn all that shit in the day to day, but when I’m actually playing with these people, I ignore that—and in ignoring that, it becomes an articulated thing in the music.

When I’m practicing with Ryan, we’ll just be talking shit, or he’ll be talking about his dating life, and that is so the music that, when we play, we’re not worried about getting the shit right, we’re worried about encountering each other where we are. You have to encounter the person you think you are and the person you think you’re playing with, and then ignore both of those things—then you’ll figure out who you are after that. That psychological approach seems like a paradox, but it does put you closer to the sonic present than if you ignored the reality of someone’s life.

I love this idea of finding who you are after playing, and that it’s maybe different from who you initially think you are. Is there an example of a recent gig where something like that played out?

I had a Buffy-esque timeloop thing at this solo gig a few weeks ago. I’ve been really identifying myself as a guy with a band now—I play with Mari and Ryan, and when he’s in town I play with Trevor [Dunn], and then sometimes Lynn [Avery] will play keyboards with me. That’s a band that I now have, and when I’m solo I’m seeing what songs will work. I played at this tiny, perfect place called Brothers Wash & Dry. I thought I was gonna do improvisations, but I really needed to play my songs. I had driven my dad to the airport at 8 in the morning, and this was after having so much family time after not having any for a while. It was such a trip. I saw my grandma, and she has pretty advanced mental stuff and is in a facility—it was intense. It was like a hero’s dose of family access.

When I got to Brothers and played my set, I felt myself reverting to a certain age, or whatever you’re doing when you’re triggered by your family. It wasn’t like, “I’m a guy with a band doing a solo thing,” it was like, “No, this is exactly who I was when I was doing my first solo-songs show at the Midway in Boston.” I’m learning how to command a room every time I do it, and I’m seeing which of these songs work. The stakes are low enough—I’m not playing a crazy-ass gig with a giant guarantee, as if I do that every day—but I was playing this smaller thing with musicians in the room I really respected. I realized that truly nothing had changed: I’m always gonna be this person playing a smaller gig, who wants to know if the songs can make someone feel something. I could feel my mood lift because at the heart of all this was somebody just trying to communicate. All of these caked-on versions of myself disappeared and I was left with the reason I do all this.

That’s what I’m talking about when I’m playing with other people. My best job in a collaboration is to facilitate them being in touch with their core reasons for why they do this too. It’s a really generous thing to improvise with that in mind rather than, “Let’s make the sickest shit we’ve ever heard!” That’s also important, but getting to why you do it keeps you actually doing it.

On “The Ultraworld” you say, “Only a month ago all of the habits of my old life died.” What died, exactly? Did you want them to die? And was it easy for this to happen, or did it take some effort?

Around December 28th, 2023, I played a Darlin’ gig and had gone to this miniature train museum—I was really depressed romantically and had no idea what the fuck was going on. I was trying to date after my relationship had ended in August, and I felt so much romantic despair. I had the blues. Something was supposed to happen around then—I was going to see Theo Parrish for the first time—but I ended up staying home and vomited for hours. My friend Shane Kerr, who is the Lord of the Dance in my heart, had come back from the show. He was gonna bring me but I was freaking the fuck out; I made it to the venue but forgot my wallet at home. The gods did not want me there. I let him into the house around 7am and we started walking. I was walking for hours every day, for days, and then New Year’s happened and I felt really in touch with some spirits or something. I felt like a thorn was coming out of my side. And it was like… so now I just walk? And I have visions?

What’s happening in these visions?

I was going to [artist, performer, and dancer] Gillian Walsh for body work and I saw this iris just wiping shit away around my back. Just weird stuff. And it was amazing because I felt like I was fully accessing the part of me that’s in that other space when I’m writing songs or improvising. It was just a trippy fucking time. It sounds so pat to be like, “Oh, now I know I need to date only women,” but I did feel that way. I’d been with women before, but I had never been like, “I’m gonna be a lesbian with this haircut.” I had never been that committed, but I realized, “Oh, I actually have to be that committed. It’s not possible to not be that committed.” And then I was like, you know what, I need to not drink caffeine. So yeah, these different habits that were getting me through the blues period of fall 2023 did not exist for me anymore. I was Herculean bummed then, and now I’m like a newborn with no skin (laughter).

Earlier you mentioned the fact that you maybe should’ve been a novelist. And the last time we talked, you said that you thought you’d be really good at writing fiction. Do you feel like in writing your songs or lyrics that you’re doing something akin to that?

I think what’s happening is something akin to what poetry can do at its best, although with different metrical constraints. The thing that I come to poetry for is not an empty theorizing of the human race—I want to feel someone’s autobiography told not as an autobiography. I wanna hear their theory of reality depicted in a glimpse, with a single word choice. Even if it’s in the structure of a joke or some chill, funny James Tate thing, I feel like there’s a glimpse of eternity behind it—not to sound like Jim Morrison or whatever (laughter). Really good fiction does that too, but it’s a much more longform thing.

I really don’t think what I’m doing is fictional at all. I was taken by the idea of autofiction because I thought it could afford me the same access to that eternal, inexpressible thing, and it’s because it had to come from something that has to be a misreading: your experiencing of yourself. It’s going to be a misreading because this reading of yourself—this autofictional self—is already a distortion, that then is distorted by novelistic or quasi-novelistic form, but also by the fact of an audience. Poetry doesn’t seem as concerned with that in the same way. It’s trying to bring you in, but it’s not trying to be like, “This is exactly me.” The lyric “I” is not really the same. Not to be bloviating and say that my lyrics are poetry (laughter), but the goal is something close to what I get when I read Hedgie Choi or Diane di Prima. There’s a worldview that’s articulated in it, but it’s articulated as a byproduct of this other god they’re serving.

I fetishize the idea of myself as a novelist because that would mean that I have enough focus and command of an imaginary world to make it feel as real as poetry. But genuinely, I don’t think I have that skill, like, I’ll just practice the guitar instead (laughter). The goal would be to think about things on a longer-form level, like a Roy Harper or Joanna Newsom song, but right now, it’s way more short-form and way less of a lie than a good novel would be.

Is there a reason you haven’t explored something longform?

I’ve written some longer songs, especially on Viewfinder (2024), but as Emily Dickinson taught me at a young age, I like the short-form, slap-in-the-face encounter. Still, my songs are always longer than I expect them to be—in my demos, they’re always two minutes. I like the glimpse of an eternity that’s in a moment: I like a short film, I like a bite of chocolate, I like a shot of espresso. I think partially it’s fear—to make a long thing really good, you have to have a better relationship with time, you know? Duration is as much about faith as rhythm is about faith. You have to engender the listener with a sense that they have to keep doing it. That’s a craft I’ve been building up to, but maybe not consciously.

So then what changed with “After Image” and “Set a Course” on Viewfinder?

When I write songs, I tend to write them as if I can always do them alone. I don’t know why I have that value but I do (laughter). And around the time when I was deep in the blues period, I would play these really long versions of songs from Viewfinder. Like, I’d play an entire set of the title track for 30 minutes, and it was awesome. But I feel like I’m interested in the lengthening of an already-condensed form more than I’m interested in stacked forms. And with Viewfinder, I had this weird dare where I needed a fourth side. I had myself breathing down my own stupid neck (laughter).

Why do you feel you’re more interested in the lengthening of an already-condensed form?

Because I wanna view it up close. And maybe this is a perversion of scale, but when something’s stretched out, I feel like I can hear artifacts in it differently, even just literally. I’m a massive fan of that version of “Wichita Lineman” by the Disk Slessig Combo. It’s 42 minutes and it’s so slow, so sexy, so sad, so imagistic. And that rocked my world because it felt like Radigue but with a pop song. I didn’t know about that piece when I did these longer versions of my own work, but now I just wanna do that all the time. What would “Meaning Business” sound like if it were 30 minutes? What does it mean to stay on those first two chords for so long? When I listen to really longform stuff, that’s usually when I’m the happiest. Early ’70s Miles. Jetsun Mila (1987) is the best thing in the world. I love Feldman’s For Bunita Marcus (1985). I also love those really longform Sarah Hennies pieces.

So why aren’t you doing more of that?

I think it’s because it’s some final frontier shit. Or maybe I’m trying to do “late work” correctly (laughter). I’m such a shortform guy and I think so fast that putting myself in that position would be fun for me. I am obviously allured by it, and I wanna do it, but I think it’s mostly that I just have a lot of work to do. I’m a full-time professor now. Though, it’s not like longform work is a young or rich man’s game, it’s just that it’s a newer interest. And this interest probably wouldn’t have arisen if it weren’t for the guitar quartet. Those are short songs that we can play forever. Experiencing that kind of prismatic relationship to these shorter forms made me think that I could do that one day.

It could also just be familiarity—I’ve had years of practice of writing very short songs. The deeper I get into writing these songs, it’s fun to have them be so dense because of some version that could be long. Songs are propositions in this way. I came to jazz because I liked the songs that jazz musicians played on, and I liked the way they played them like songs. So it’s not just “Wichita Lineman”—people do “My Favorite Things” forever, not to be thinking about The Doors so much.

I know you teach the Lyrics and Lyricism class at The New School. How do you teach someone that? Is it similar to teaching an English class? Are you also having people read novels?

It’s a motherfucker, I’ll be real. And I’ve been retooling this class for as long as I’ve been teaching it. It’s mostly been like, read this insane essay, see what they’re doing in terms of structure, talk about the essay with each other, and then write whatever it is you need to write. And then we talk about that seminar-style. You might not be the best lyricist in the world by the end of the semester, but what I will do is make you read Adrian Piper talking about her work. And then you’re gonna have some ideas about persona that you maybe didn’t have before. Then when you write a song from somebody else’s perspective, it’s also yours. Or hey, I’m gonna have you read an essay that’s entirely plagiarized and see if you can find the references. Could you write a song that would have a really obvious reference in it? Did you find a song in your listening that samples anything, and is it doing the same thing? So we’re not just looking at lyrics, but at the structure of a performer. What does it mean that people rap choruses that are so long and there’s only one verse for however many bars? What is that structure doing? So we’re doing things like this, but backing it with theories of language and performativity. I’m taking a really circuitous route.

When I edit students’ lyrics, it’s this thing of, is your grammar so horrible that I don’t understand what you’re saying? I’m cool with bad grammar if it’s expressive or vernacular, but when you don’t know what the fuck they’re saying, it’s a problem. Having them read about stuff they care about from good writers teaches them the importance of clarity—and in a way that’s creative. However, clarity is not always the clearest articulation of an ideal. Clarity is about getting to that same emotional thing we were talking about earlier with improvisation. If you’re saying something doesn’t make any sense but it feels right, that’s still clarity. Sure, I’m having my cake and eating it too by saying that, but it’s true. Also, do you care about someone’s voice? If I give you something from Adrian Piper and then Simone Weil, how are they different from each other? What do you notice relationally between these two voices? And then when you’re in your black-out period writing a song, you won’t be thinking about any of this, but your verbal diet has hopefully improved.

The thing that makes editing a student’s work difficult is that you can’t really know if it’s right until they perform it. Through showing them essays or lyrics or poetry, there will be elements that they can learn from, and I’m letting them see people meaning what they’re meaning. Or, I’ll have them listen to whatever lyricist they really like and ask, “Do you know that they couldn’t sing anything else?”

Wow. That’s an interesting thing to ask.

Yeah, the stakes are high.

How much of that would be indicated from the lyrics versus the performance, though? And of course the lyrics will inform how the person will want to perform it.

The best lyrics will always feel essential, no matter how you perform it. You could perform something shittily and the words would still feel urgent, or you could perform something amazingly but the words wouldn’t have real heft. And maybe it’s the production that’s the thing that’s essential—it depends on where your focus lies. And that’s what’s so great about teaching; you’re always engaging with the fallibility of the tools of communication. I’m glad you asked about this class because it’s actually one of my greatest insecurities as a teacher—there’s no way to prove if the students really get it until they start writing songs that mean a lot to them, and that’s kind of on them.

I think that’s one of the great things about teaching, though. I like that you never really know the impact that you have on your students.

Sometimes you feel it, but mostly you don’t. You’re kind of going on faith.

It’s an essential part of the job, to be honest. That unknowability is crucial, and motivating; I wouldn’t want to know the full extent of my impact. And the students might not know it either. It’s all in the ether.

If someone aces a test, you don’t know if they’re gonna forget it in two weeks. But what they will remember is your carriage and how you move through the world. When I’m teaching the lyrics class, I try to confront my insecurity by saying that at least I’m exposing them to authors that changed my life. And even if it’s not the same for them, at least I can show them the ways it did for me. Then they can relate to the work that does affect them with the same level of care. I’m glad that we both love teaching—we’re so lucky.

Is there anything we didn’t talk about today that you wanted to talk about? Is there a question you always wanted to be asked in an interview?

That last question is funny because it speaks so directly to the things we were saying about improvisation. I would never want somebody to ask me something because I wanted to be asked it; I want to be faithful to the moment. So, I’ve never thought about an interview like that in my life. I will say that I think it’s a joy that we got to speak again. Whenever we do, I think we learn so much, and I just want to share the love because since our first interview, you’ve taken on such a hilarious role as this person of the internet. You’re really public, and it’s cool that I don’t see the effect of that on you. It’s just amazing to be contended with by one of the great contenders-with that I know (laughter). You’re always thinking about shit and you’re always encountering art, and it’s a joy to have your brain caring about my work and talking to me on such a deep level about these arcane practices. I usually feel like it’s better left untheorized, but to talk about it with you feels like a joy, so I just want to thank you.

Thanks for saying that, I really appreciate it. And now, I have to ask the question that I always ask. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

I’m a really good cook—you should ask Mari about it. You should just interview her about that (laughter). I have a real knack for crazy-ass flavors and I can whip something up in 20 minutes that’s real good. As far as things I can do when I come home from work, to feel creative without feeling the boot of capitalist production on my neck as a musician… well, I’ll cook something that’ll blow your mind. It feels amazing.

Wendy Eisenberg’s self-titled album is out April 3rd on Joyful Noise Recordings.

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54321: Recommendations

I asked Wendy to send me a list to accompany this interview. The following is what they sent.

5 (Best) Songs from The Music Man

1. “Sincere”

2. “Til There Was You”

3. “Shipoopie”

4. “The Sadder-But-Wiser Girl”

5. “Goodnight My Someone” / “Lida Rose” (tie)

4 Books (with commentary, because “Writing”)

1. Septology by Jon Fosse

   1. The last night of the Guitar Quartet tour in November 2023 I was in Stavanger Norway and mentioned to some dudes after the show that I was reading this book. They made fun of me for pronouncing his name like the choreographer but they hadn’t read it either. It’s long and there is a concept but it’s easier than you think and it feels like prayer. You find yourself crying, without knowing why, like in a Radigue. Something essential is touched. I love it when the flow of language itself functions like music. Sometimes I try to imagine the doppelgängers taking a selfie or drinking a Celsius. It’s impossible.

2. Flower by Ed Atkins

   1. Reading this after a dry spell, where no book hit, felt like someone pouring a daiquiri straight into my mouth. Amazing sentences amazing form extreme reality so sweet.

3. The Romance of American Communism by Vivian Gornick

   1. It’s been very easy for me to feel hopeless in the face of war and genocide, and this book documents what it felt like for America’s communists to care and to see that caring splinter. Incisive, wide-eyed, and romantic indeed.

4. In The Blink of an Eye by Walter Murch

   1. A student of mine who studies film in addition to being a fabulous songwriter recommended this to me. It’s about the craft of film editing, and trying to translate what he’s talking about into musical situations has been a joy, especially when I disagree with him.

3 Records

1. OLD - Formula (1995)

2. Jeanne Lee and Ran Blake - The Newest Sound Around (1962)

3. Worldwide Seagull - Strays in the Craft Bin (2026)

2 Memes From This Carousel

1. #3

2. #9

1 Catatonic Youths Video I Think About A Lot (this was hard to narrow down)

1. This

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Ava Mendoza

Ava Mendoza (b. 1983) is a guitarist, improviser, and composer based in New York. Throughout her career, Mendoza has played in numerous bands, including the bluesy Bolivar Zoar, the no wave group Mute Socialite, the noise rock act Unnatural Ways, and the jazz-rock outfit Mendoza Hoff Revels. She’s also released multiple solo records, such as New Spells (2021) and The Circular Train (2024). She has an upcoming album titled Alive Alone, Alive Together (2026) coming out this spring via Burning Ambulance. Mendoza is also part of the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet, who will perform this Friday at Roulette. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Mendoza on February 25th, 2026 to discuss the mining history of her ancestors, her recent love for solo music, and how she’s grown as a guitarist.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: This is a bit random, but I know that you were on an album with Kurt Heyl called 1, 2, 3, Infinity (2004). What can you tell me about him? I think he’s the same guy who used to live in Chicago and make experimental films in the 1960s.

Ava Mendoza: I didn’t know he did all that, but he was an eclectic guy. He’s a trombone player who used a lot of preparations, and he used to play with Jack Wright—they were like music brothers. I lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico for one year when I was 19. I played with a lot of weirdo improvisers in the area and Kurt was one of them. He lived off in the mountains with his wife. They had electricity and water, I think, but it was a zone where some people lived without that too. They were just all about that nature life.

Speaking of nature, I know that your mother and father both have these histories related to working in mines. Do you have any relationship with mining in general?

It’s not directly my mom and my dad—it’s going back a few generations. My mom’s from Montana and my grandfather was mine-adjacent—he was a mining engineer—and my great-granddad was a miner who eventually passed away from black lung. Other people in my family worked in mines on their way from Ireland to Montana—they worked at these mining camps that led out West. They eventually landed in Butte, Montana, which is a mining town. For my dad, the woman who raised him—his grandmother, so my great-grandma—is Quechua and from this area of Bolivia that’s famous for its silver mines. As far as we could put things together, she was one of these women—palliris—who sat outside the mines and broke the rocks apart, cleaning them to find the actual minerals. She did that when she was very young, and then she hooked up with my doctor great-grandfather and had a slightly more cush life after that. I’m able to trace her family through online church records that go back 200 years. According to those records, her family lived in that region and it seemed like they all worked around the mines because that was the only economy there.

I have never mined, but I have been in mines a few times in the US and in Bolivia. It’s kind of a recent thing where I’m realizing that both sides of my family were involved with mining—we weren’t totally aware of this on the Bolivian side. 15 years ago, I took a tour of the most famous mines in Bolivia, in this city called Potosí, and it has all these silver mines. I felt a lot. It really had an impact on me and I kept thinking about it for years afterwards. There’s something about being inside the earth—and coming from where I’m coming from, where I never had to work in mines—that felt so good to me. I’m aware that it’s really difficult and dangerous and there’s tons of toxins getting inside your lungs, but when I was there, I just wanted to stay.

There’s a deity of the mines in Bolivia called El Tío, and he looks like the Devil—he’s this syncretism of Andean religion and Christianity. There will be altars to him within the mines. You’ll go into a tiny room off of one of the tunnels, and there will be El Tío with his horns sitting there, and people bring offerings to him—booze and cigarettes and cocoa leaves and packages of food. He’ll be covered in confetti with all these offerings, and that’s just a facet of life in the mines. He protects the miners. And that mythology has really stuck with me. The thing about El Tío is he’s not just in the mines, he’s everywhere in Bolivia. similar to Mexico and lots of places in Latin America, devils aren’t bad and can be fun—they’re part of Carnaval and all of that. It’s hard not to think of El Tío when you go to Bolivia.

It wasn’t until five or six years ago, when I had this awareness of my mom’s side being involved with the mines, that I started to get really curious about my great grandma. She’s everyone’s favorite in the family—everyone loved her. I didn’t understand until more recently that she was Quechua and had come from a country background and moved to a small city to raise her family. She left this life that had all this Quechua culture and work in the mines, and I’ve been trying to learn more about that over the years.

What’s been the most nourishing thing you’ve learned while looking into this?

Hmm. That’s very interesting. There’s a lot of hardship that I’ve found out about. She left really young, and hopefully it was consensual, but it’s not totally clear. What is nourishing is that she was this extremely loving person. She left a child behind in her hometown, so she had to distance herself from a lot, but she stayed this extremely loving person who raised a new family—her new children and grandchildren.

What was your own childhood like? Can you tell me what it was like growing up with your parents? I know your mom had an art history degree.

Whoa, how do you know this? Well, there was always music around in the house, and a lot of different kinds—she liked classical music. Both my parents liked Andean music, but also music from all over Latin America. I grew up with lots of Andean music, Caribbean music, Brazilian music, Afro-Peruvian music. There wasn’t that much contemporaneous American pop, but there were oldies from the ’50s and ’60s. I remember being fascinated by it all. In terms of the art background and where my mom came from, I remember looking at art books with her. She’d tell me who people were and we’d go through the same books again and again. When I was a little I’d be like, “That’s Max Ernst!” (laughter). That’s something that stuck with her because there was a fuzzy creature in one of his paintings that I liked. I remember she was really into Marc Chagall. We’d go to museums together and spend a long time there staring at paintings, wondering about the colors and shapes.

What Andean music were you listening to? Stuff like Los Kjarkas?

Yeah! We definitely had Los Kjarkas records. Savia Andina were big, and Inti-Illimani were Chilean but had a lot of Andean folk music. Those were the two big ones. There’s also Atahualpa Yupanqui, who is this super awesome North Argentine guy.

How do you feel like they shaped your understanding of the guitar? I know you played classical guitar growing up—Carcassi, Giuliani, Bach—but what about this Andean music?

I couldn’t articulate it for a long time, but they absolutely did play a role. The approach to rhythm in that music—I grew up hearing a lot of shifting between different feels, like from a 6/8 triplet feel to a 4/4 feel. The approach to syncopation and polyrhythm is distinctly not Western American. That all definitely shaped me.

When you get into the proggy territories, do you feel like you’re drawing from that? Or do you feel like you’re just drawing from American and European prog rock bands?

This is a question of the chicken or the egg. I’m definitely drawing on American and European prog, but even if my frame of reference is Captain Beefheart, it’s like, why did I like Captain Beefheart in the first place? It’s because my ears were already opened to hearing this shiftiness; I was already comfortable with this idea of, “Where’s the 1?” I didn’t necessarily know where the 1 was, but I liked that feeling.

Do you remember the first things you were listening to and searching for on your own? Based on your age, you were a teenager around the time Napster came around.

I lived around 45 minutes south of LA, so things would trickle down. I got into the Dead Kennedys and Black Flag and stuff like that. I wanted to find bands that were more current, and I was a fan of LA punk bands that were around. The Geraldine Fibbers were a big one, the Red Aunts were another. I remember downloading Lunachicks when I was 14 and thinking I needed to hear Pretty Ugly (1996). That was all stuff I got into on my own, and definitely with discouragement from my family.

Is there a moment you can pinpoint when you knew you needed to pursue music?

There were so many different moments, I would say. There would be moments of practicality as well, where I was like, “No no no, I shouldn’t do that.” So it was back and forth. I pursued music really seriously in high school—I went to this boarding school in Northern Michigan called Interlochen. It’s a hardcore and traditional track for straight-ahead jazz and classical music. I was on the classical guitar path, and I was serious about it, but what really solidified it for me was when I was in my second year of college. I thought there was no future in studying music, so I thought I should just play it for fun on my own and study something else. For one year, I studied anthropology and, by the end of that year, I realized that I just couldn’t not play music. I went back, and that’s what kept me going.

So this is completely separate from when you were at CalArts?

I was at CalArts for one year, then I went to Santa Fe for one year, then I went to Mills for one year for anthropology.

You did anthropology at Mills College? I didn’t even know people did that (laughter).

Dude, it was a really bad department (laughter). It was such a mistake. I wanted to move to Oakland because I knew a couple people there and liked the music. I also knew Mills had a good music department, and I knew an anthropology department existed, so I thought, oh I’ll just be around all this music. But yeah, their anthropology department sucked—it was like the last 40 years hadn’t been processed. Everything was dated.

You were traveling all throughout your mid to late teens. Do you feel like there’s anything significant about all the travels you did at that age?

My family moved a few times when I grew up. I was born in Miami, we moved to Evanston when I was 2, then we moved to Chicago proper, and then we moved to Southern California when I was 10. I was there for three years before I went to Interlochen. So it was a lot of moving, and my parents also liked to travel, so we would go to Bolivia when we could and we took a couple trips to Europe. Travel was a constant for me, and it’s definitely a huge facet of my music, especially my solo music. I think of a lot of it as music for cars and trains, and I’ve written a lot of it on the go. I write a lot in the car. If it’s something I’m working on for the first time, I’ll sing something into my phone, I’ll come up with a rhythm and drum it on my wheel. As a piece evolves, I keep working on it in the car. I’ll record it at home, I’ll drive around and listen to it, I’ll think about how it fits with the mood of the landscape or city I’m in. I’ll come up with new arrangement ideas, too.

Being in motion is very natural for me, more so than being in one place. That, actually, can actually be harder for me. Sometimes to get my music ideas going, I’ll need to take a ride, or it won’t come until I’m on a train or in the airport. I think I just got really accustomed to the feeling of going, growing up the way I did. There wasn’t a house that was constant, there was no home I went back to. But at some point in my life I had to be like, “I’d really like a home.” I couldn’t just tour and travel my whole life; it’s not healthy. But for a long time, the feeling of being in motion was the most comfortable thing.

Can you tell me about Santa Fe? What was going on there?

There was a guitarist that I went to study with. His name is Stefan Dill—he played with Cecil Taylor and other people I found interesting. I met him at a friend’s wedding and I liked his playing. I just said, “What if I come and study with you in Santa Fe?” I liked the desert and the land around there, and while I didn’t know if I liked the actual city, I wanted a year out of school, I needed a breath. When I was in Santa Fe, that was my first time gigging. There were enough opportunities to play and enough musicians who were willing to take me under their wing. It was a really fun and relatively safe place to start playing for a 19-year-old girl. It was great on that level. And Stefan hooked me up with some of those gigs, too.

One thing I’ve noticed about different places I’ve lived in is that the smaller the bubble, the bigger risks people are willing to take. It felt like people took more risks in Santa Fe. If you did something where you looked stupid on stage, it wasn’t career-ending—it was for friends and family. So it was positive in that way; it was easier, mentally, to go out on a limb. And once you learn how to do that as an improviser, you can keep that with you when you go to a bigger bubble. I went to the Bay Area, which is bigger, and then I moved to New York, which is arguably the biggest bubble for this kind of music in the country. I’ve noticed that people really don’t take risks here.

I know you were in two different bands while in Oakland. Bolivar Zoar had this bluesy improv thing going on. And then Mute Socialite is more of a no wave band. What was it like playing in those two bands? You were in your early 20s then.

As far as I remember, they formed around the same time. Bolivar Zoar was with these two girls who went to Mills with me—Theresa Wong and Maryclare Brzytwa. We were all just friends and I think we played Theresa’s birthday or something. She said, “Let’s just come up with two songs!” There was this chemistry there. I was listening to The Jesus Lizard at the time, Theresa was a cellist but wanted to learn basslines, and Maryclare was a really good flute player but wanted to play prepared acoustic guitar and scream. So we all had this chance to do these things in Bolivar Zoar, and it didn’t sound like any of the stuff that we were referencing. It was a lot of fun. That went on for two years, but it was never a weekly rehearsing band; we’d do a couple rehearsals before a show.

I loved the writing aspect of that band. I was so ready to play songs and rock out, even though Bolivar Zoar isn’t exactly about rocking out (laughter). And that came very naturally. Like with any band, we all had different backgrounds and artistic differences, so we had different songwriting styles. Listening to Bolivar Zoar today, it’s so hilarious hearing each song next to each other. The chemistry was so great and interesting, but it was inevitable that we’d go our separate ways because we had such different interests.

At this point in my life, it was very much about finding myself, writing-wise. With Mute Socialite, I was listening to The Birthday Party and The Blue Humans and trying to write no wave-y stuff like that. I had been listening to that music for a long time, but I just never found people to play that with. We were so loud—there were two drummers—and it was so fun to play that loud. And then there was my first solo record, Shadow Stories (2010), and that was, for lack of a better word, Americana standards along with some of my own writing. It was me figuring out what was possible for me on solo guitar, and it was vastly different from the bands I was playing in. My solo work came in part from my classical background—a lot of things on that record are fingerstyle—and what I loved was the chord-melody stuff, and accompanying your lines on guitar. That’s not really a thing when you’re playing in a no wave band. I think of that time as a time of developing; I was figuring out different facets of my playing and seeing how they could be combined, and whether that worked or not.

What’s it like when you write songs now? Are there specific strategies or ideas you’ve leaned into as you’ve gotten older?

Back then there were these ingredients: fingerstyle, blues, swing, heavy rock, no wave. I didn’t know how to do them together fluidly, and as the years have gone along, I just don’t think of genre in the same way. It’s more of a technical thing now—there’s fingerstyle, and then there’s playing with a pick. Part of my technical development has been to get those things to be very fluid. I want to get the same tone with my fingers as I do with a pick; I want it to be unnoticeable when I go between one or the other, or if I’m hybrid picking. As I’ve played my own music and have played with more people, those different ingredients have become more congealed—they’re a world I inhabit, and I pull what I want, when I want.

There’s been a good amount of time between your own solo albums. You had the split with Sir Richard Bishop, Ivory Tower (2016), where you have your own songs. And then there’s New Spells (2021) and The Circular Train (2024). Throughout all this time you’ve had numerous collaborative albums. How do you decide when it’s time to write songs for a solo LP?

I would say that playing solo is my main thing now, but that’s only been in the past five years. I also have a new solo record coming out this spring called Alive Alone, Alive Together (2026). But for a lot of years, I wasn’t thinking about it so much. I was thinking about writing for my band, Unnatural Ways, and also writing for this quartet I had with Devra Hoff, Ches Smith, and James Brandon Lewis. So I was focusing on bands for a while, and solo was something I did when I got called to do it. From playing solo more and more, I just realized how much I enjoyed it on so many levels. It used to be that I’d do a two-week solo tour and really miss playing with other people. And while I still really value playing with other musicians, I don’t miss it when I play solo now. I have enough stimulation from what I do on guitar and electronics that there’s new exciting things for me on any given night.

I didn’t even know you had a new album coming out. How does that compare with the older works?

It’s four solo tracks and then four tracks with Hamid Drake—it’s the songs I play solo all the time, but with Hamid playing on them. That’ll come out in May on Burning Ambulance. About half the tracks on New Spells involved having other people write songs for me. I did that because I liked these people’s writing—Devra Hoff, Trevor Dunn, and John Dikeman. I thought their writing would suit how I’d play solo. I also love interpretation, and I didn’t think of it this way at the time, but this was also a way to find myself. It’s the same way that interpreting standards can be a way to find your own vocabulary without writing music. Also, some technical things have gotten better with these last three records. My time has gotten more solid, for example. And then New Spells is all instrumental, but I sing on a few tracks on The Circular Train, and I also sing on the new one. Playing with Hamid is really cool. He’s such a great drummer and he’s being as interactive as possible, so even though we’re playing my songs, I’m still being open and spontaneous with him.

What does it mean to be as interactive as possible? Is it about posture and mentality? Is it about being a good listener? Is it about being deferential?

I’ll talk about this in relation to Hamid because I think it’s different with everybody. Hamid is a great listener and he has great phrasing. I’ll be playing these lines that are previously composed, but I can alter the timing of the phrasing to communicate with him, and something it’s as basic and as nuts-and-bolts as “we’re gonna hit three quarter notes at the same time here,” or “we’re gonna go really fast and then go (makes explosive sound).” I’m having open ears for where he’s going with his phrasing so it’s not just him accompanying me. He really frees me up when I play with him; I’ll play in a more lead guitar fashion.

I have all these electronics and, when I play solo, I’ll normally play a song, I’ll hit a freeze pedal, and then I’ll loop something. I go between tunings all the time from one song to the next, but with Hamid, he’ll play all this great shit with the loop during the time I’m tuning. And then I’ll come back and improvise with him over the loop, and that’s something that I never really did solo. One of the tracks on the new record came out of that.

I wanted to ask about your singing. What do you think singing has taught you about yourself?

I was definitely way more about guitar than singing growing up. I did sing, and I was in choir for a couple years when I was little, but I never really worked on it until my 20s. I’m a guitarist first and a singer second, and the singing in solo work came out of writing lyrics and wanting someone to sing them. The first thing I’d say that singing has taught me is just… breathing. I’ve relearned breathing, in a way. I just pay so much more attention to my breathing now, and I’m mindful if I’m breathing shallowly and stressing myself out. Like, okay, it’s time to take a deep breath. And I notice it in other people, too. When I talk to people on the phone, especially, I can hear how deep or shallow their breathing is and if there’s tension in their voice or if they’re relaxed. I pay a lot more attention to the diaphragm than when I used to.

Does that shape the music itself and how you write it?

That’s a good question. I tend to be a less-is-more singer. I don’t like to cram all the words in there; I’d rather have too few than too many. Part of that is physical—when I’m playing guitar, there’s only so much I can do in terms of breathing and coordination. In terms of writing, I try to make sure that I have time to breathe, that I have more space.

Can you tell me about Mendoza Hoff Revels? What’s it like playing in that band? And can you talk to me about your relationship with Devra?

We’ve known each other for 20 years, and that was back in our Oakland days. Devra was in The Nels Cline Singers at the time, and I would play solo, opening for them. A couple of bands I was in opened for them, too. We hit it off right away. We had a trio with Weasel Walter called Quok. That’s when I played, for lack of a better word, fusion. Me and Devra’s ears were really compatible, both with the stuff we wrote and the stuff that we improvised. Then all three of us moved away from the Bay Area and didn’t play together for at least 6 years, and then me and Devra both landed in Brooklyn. We were already friends, but when the pandemic hit, we started talking on the phone and thought that we should form a band to specifically play stuff like this—this modern jazz-informed take on instrumental Black Flag. I was really obsessing over The Decoding Society and listening to those records all the time, too, so we decided to make a band that used that as a springboard. Ches and James were the first people we thought to do that with, and they’re great. This was all through the pandemic—we wrote the music, we did socially distanced rehearsals, and then it was partly while we were coming out of it too. Because everyone’s schedules are so busy, I think we only played five gigs—maybe less than that. So, we’re not a very ambitious band in terms of touring and gigging, but I was really happy with that record [Echolocation (2023)].

You said you had really good chemistry with Devra. Are there specific qualities that you notice come with all the people you gel with?

I remember after one of the first Quok rehearsals, Devra said, “I can’t tell if you have really fast ears, or if we just think the same harmonically.” And I couldn’t tell either, like, “Do we just have the same taste in terms of what chord we’re gonna shift to?” And that’s chemistry right there, like, “Did you do that? Did I do that? Was that a decision? Did I just adapt to you really quickly?” That band was really fun. We’re all very different, and in terms of the rhythm section, Devra is a pocket player, she’s a groove player, and she’s great at that. Weasel is absolutely not that—he’s a lead drummer. So it was an interesting rhythm section where Devra is committed to holding it down while me and Weasel are going off. At some point, me and Devra basically became family, and some of it’s from actually playing together. We both love to mess with time—that’s a big part of it. And it’s like that with Hamid, too. This love for playing with all the time, with time in the most expansive sense.

Do you have any specific goals in mind with your upcoming tour?

I have this dream where this is going to be the best rehearsed solo tour I’ve ever done (laughter). I’m at home for three weeks leading up to it, so it’s like I’m at boot camp. So that’s one goal. Also, I wrote a bunch of new music that’s in different stages of being finished. Some of it is in Spanish, and that’s the first time I’ve done that. Using lyrics in both English and Spanish is something I’ve wanted to do for a while, and with ICE and everything going on right now, I really want to do it now. Getting that together and making it really solid is my other goal.

Spanish is my second language, so I’m less good at it. There’s one song I’m doing that has lyrics that were originally written in English and that was then translated to Spanish, but it’s sort of slightly wrong on purpose to mess with this idea of how well languages can actually reproduce each other. And then I’m singing a cover of a song by Violeta Parra, “Gracias a la vida.” I was working on this song last year when I was living with an ex, and they were like, “Your voice sounds different when you sing in Spanish. It’s open in this different way.” It’s one of those things I can hear and recognize now, and while I can’t really control it yet, I’m really leaning into it.

There’s a question I end all my interviews with that I wanted to ask you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

I’m sure that I’m a good judge of character. I think I always had that, and I think a lot of people who tour all the time develop this because you’re meeting people in foreign places and you need to size things up right away. When you’re dealing with so many new people, you have to gauge if what they’re saying is correct and if they’re trustworthy, if they’re someone you can rely on.

Has that come into play recently?

It comes into play with collaborators. I’m slow to choose them now; I’ll wait and see what I can learn about somebody before anything happens. And because of that, I feel really fortunate about the people I end up collaborating with. Like Hamid—he’s one of the greatest people ever.

Ava Mendoza’s music can be found at her Bandcamp. More information about Mendoza can be found at her website. Mendoza is playing shows in the US and Europe throughout March, April, and May. Dates can be found here.

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Shane Parish

Shane Parish (b. 1978) is a Florida-born, Georgia-based guitarist who has spent the past 30+ years making music. He’s been in multiple bands, most notably the proggy math-rock trio Ahleuchatistas and the improvisatory folk group Library of Babel. Parish has collaborated with numerous artists over the years—from Tashi Dorji to Wendy Eisenberg, Tatsuya Nakatani to John Fernandes—and has released several solo albums, including Undertaker Please Drive Slow (2016), Repertoire (2024), and his latest LP, Autechre Guitar (2026). Parish is also part of the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet, who will perform this Friday at Roulette. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Parish on February 21st, 2026 to discuss his childhood mentors, the writings of Bruce Lee, and the making of his new album. Also: Parish lists his favorite South American musicians.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: I know that when you became a father, you stopped gigging as much and started teaching. What do you feel like you’ve learned about yourself as a result of being a father? What have you been surprised by?

Shane Parish: Wow. Well… so much. I’ve learned how to slow down and be present. Becoming a father was, really, a decision—it was important to me that I became an active participant in this. I didn’t want to be out at the club or a dive bar gigging all the time. The things that I experienced growing up… I wanted to be a cycle breaker. I didn’t want to yell at my kid, I didn’t want to hit my kid, I didn’t want to neglect my kid. I didn’t want any of these things that could happen when one’s goal isn’t to give the best to their child. I was 36 or so by the time I had my daughter, and I’d already been to therapy and examined some of the things I would’ve repeated had I been in my 20s, or at an earlier part of my career; I would’ve been struggling to get my footing while having the responsibility of a child. I slowed down and watched them grow, watched them make their own choices instead of imposing things or penalizing them. I want to honor my child and say that I also learned the greatest love of all. I learned that there are things more important than everything else in my life.

As far as things I learned for myself, I pivoted towards having a lot less time to focus on my craft but being way more productive in that time. Previously, I’d spend all day tinkering with something, but the results weren’t as great as now, when I work 30 minutes very productively. It felt good to better manage my time. Fortunately, I still have a lot of time to do what I want because I’ve stayed in this realm—of gigging, teaching guitar, and recording. It’s still my job, and while I sometimes wonder if I should’ve done something else, it would’ve been a lot harder to record Autechre Guitar (2026) or transcribe Bill Orcutt’s record [Music in Continuous Motion (2026)] if that were the case. These things take a lot of time.

You’re talking about how your daughter taught you about the greatest love of all, and I’m wondering what qualities you see in her that are both similar and different to who you are.

One of the things I see in her is this earnest enthusiasm, the kind that society can strangle out of you. There’s also a real ability to foresee an outcome, and maybe this is different from me. When we’re reading a story or watching something, she’ll know exactly what’s going to happen, very early on. Any clue that’s present, she has this hyperawareness. She also has a deep emotional intelligence. While I don’t think that’s different from me, it wasn’t allowed to flourish in the environment I grew up in. That sensitivity and care, and being able to anticipate needs or outcomes, is super sharp. And she’s a lot more athletic than I was as a kid. I’m athletic now, but as a kid… no (laughter).

You’ve just described your daughter, but now I’m wondering about yourself. Who was Shane as a child? I know you got a guitar when you were a teenager and had a band called Union Prayer Book.

I got a guitar when I was a freshman in high school. I immediately wrote a song when I got it called “Home”—I could play the riff for you right now (laughter). The lyrics were like, “I am by myself, I am alone/I am in Hell, I am at home/Dead stares at the bare white wall…”—something like that. I was a troubled youth, and I would write lyrics and poetry. At one point I decided that I was gonna drop out of school, make music, smoke marijuana and take LSD, and that’s it—I’d left this domain and went into a musical realm. It was a form of escapism, but also a lifestyle I chose to lead. It wasn’t quite time to do that, though, and it became a thing of, “Oh, we have to institutionalize this person.” I became someone that needed to be “controlled” because I was going down a wayward path, but here I am now—I don’t feel so different from the person who was making those choices.

My decisions were a response to the chaos in my home, and the guitar became a form of moving into another timeline. I still had the encroachment of living in the parents’ home, of school administrators and police and the state and medical professionals, but I was having the time of my life, honestly. I had music, I had my guitar, I had people coming in and out of my life who were playing music, we were renting a warehouse and playing all night long, we were going to these open mic nights, we were having wild psychedelic adventures in South Florida on dangerous interstate highways.

Was it an easy decision to pursue music then?

It was all-in immediately, but it’s strange because I didn’t have an academic support structure—there were no guitar lessons, and it’s not like I was gonna go to music school. I’m happy that things went the way they did, and it’s only because I had mentoring moments with great musicians in the area. I would see this guy named Michael Bianco, who was a Stanley Jordan-type, finger-tapping, jazz-fusion guitar player. He had a regular gig at the Now Art Cafe in Hollywood, Florida. I’d go there to see him all the time. I’d pick his brain, asking him theory questions, and I also had his phone number. This was pre-cell phone, so I would call his landline, like, “Hey, I don’t understand what a minor 7th flat 5 chord is… it’s a half-diminished chord?” He’d try to explain it to me. I wanted to grapple with theory and harmony and understand jazz.

The thing is, this is a lifelong pursuit, and I didn’t have the resources to understand it in a digestible format. I didn’t have David Berkman’s The Jazz Harmony Book (2013), which is so conversational. I didn’t have those fundamentals and foundations. But it didn’t matter to make music, right? All you needed was this feeling, to care about music and to love it. I always wanted to do something different and creative, and I didn’t want to do what was popular. I remember auditioning this keyboardist for Union Prayer Book, who was gonna go on to law school and become a judge. I told him, “We’re not really into girls and partying, we’re serious about the music.” I remember him saying, “Uhh, I kind of wanna get girls.” (laughter). But that was my MO at the time—music was the most important thing.

Another mentor was Dr. Lonnie Smith, the organist, and his drummer Danny Berger. They would have regular gigs at downtown Fort Lauderdale. Seeing those guys play bebop… it’s like they were passing magic around on stage with how they communicated in their improvisation. Me and my friends were too young to go to this club, but they loved us being at the front and just freaking out while everyone else was drinking and talking. They told the bouncers we could come in because they really wanted that energy. I would have conversations with those guys, like, “How do you balance dating and being a musician?” (laughter).

Do you remember what he said? It’s a good question.

I do! Dr. Lonnie Smith was like, “You gotta find someone who really supports what you’re doing. I’m playing music and this is my life, and if you have a conflict there, it’s just not gonna work.” He said it in some funnier way though, like, “Me and the guys are down in the basement playing music, so fuck that!” (laughter). But it was very much this idea that you need to find your soulmate, someone who totally gets it.

Danny Berger is an amazing drummer. He had a very Frank Sinatra attitude—just very confident and cocky, a badass old guy. We’d go to his apartment in Las Olas Boulevard to hang out after shows. I remember me and my friends going in there once, and I brought a cassette with music that me and my friends had made. I wasn’t very confident about it. People were saying it was good, but I was apologizing. “Sorry, this is bad, it’s whatever.” He said, “No, you listen to me—if someone gives me a compliment, you know what I say? ‘Yeah, I kick ass!’” (laughter). It was just really funny because I couldn’t believe he said that, and he did it in this really bravado way, but it actually helped. Like, don’t convince someone that they don’t like what you made when they already said they did. You don’t have to go on and on about the things that went wrong, you can just say thank you. That’s really important with performance.

You’ve talked about how the guitar was a path towards escapism, but it was really a way for you to understand who you are. Do you know when you started realizing that?

This goes back to what I said earlier, about feeling like the same person I was back then. It’s like, oh, I was right about everything (laughter). There was a guidance counselor, and I told her I was going to quit school—I had gone to six different high schools—and play music instead. She said, “You seem like you really know what you’re doing, you should do this.” She understood I was basically going to be a tradesman. It’s still a job to transcribe and play music at weddings and stuff—it’s not this vague concept. And while I had some delusions about being a huge rock star, this was something I wanted to work hard at and pursue. That was a little moment, but I felt like I was being heard, that something was being reflected. When you’re in a desert for affirmation, it feels incredible when someone sees you.

I’ve been teaching for 18 or 20 years, and I’ve ended up having these years-long relationships with my students. I’m not trying to sound grandiose, but there’s a part of me that’s like “the wounded healer”—I went through that shit, and now I want to pay it forward. And on the musical side of things, I didn’t have the knowledge or technique to actually participate in specific idioms or traditional musical communities, so I had to find my own way. Seeing the struggles that come to me from my students, who are at all levels—some people have played for decades, some have just started—I know what it’s like to operate with suboptimal mechanics, or how to navigate the confusion behind specific concepts. I’m gonna keep trying to find the simplest solution, but that’s only because I went through these circuitous routes.

What sort of things do you emphasize when you teach?

My biggest guiding philosophy is that teaching is learning. There’s this idea from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) where he says that we’re not depositing information; we’re having a conversation about something that we’re both mutually interested in. It took me a few years of teaching to understand this. I remember the day that I let go of being responsible for what someone learned. I thought that I had to perform for the parents of these students and produce results. I remember going into this school I was teaching at and thinking, that’s not my job—these students can practice or not. It was very freeing to realize that I can’t do this for them. It relieved a lot of stress, too, around being a teacher and having imposter syndrome and if I had to have them jump through hoops with recitals. I gave up on all that because that’s not what this is. Everyone gets treated differently, then. I want to find their interests, and if they don’t know, I can steer them in different ways.

I always try to raise body awareness. I want them to harness the forces of nature, to be aware of their physiology and gravity and inertia. And I try to do that for myself, too. When you play difficult music, you want to be in a state of dynamic relaxation where you can be in motion while also relaxed and releasing. I encourage my students to think about what they’re doing. But if people aren’t feeling it, I don’t want to steamroll them with theory. Plenty of music that I love, probably most of it, come from people just going for it. Like, does it sound cool? (laughter). We can codify that, and I do find that interesting, but I have no real books where I say, “You must go in this order.” I build from the ground up and pull tidbits from the sky.

The way you’re talking about the guitar reminds me of how you got into Bruce Lee many years ago. It’s hard to not think of martial arts in this way, and also in relation to dance—there’s a deep awareness of the body and the self.

When I was reading Bruce Lee’s journals, it was a cross-discipline thing where everything he was talking about was directly applicable to what I was doing as a musician—I just had to replace “combat” with “music” or “improvisation.” It’s been some years since I read that—probably eight years—but I’m realizing as I say this that so many things he wrote have permeated into things I regularly say. For example, in lessons I’ll talk about baseball or martial arts or dance. Like, what is martial arts? It’s kicking and punching. Now, what am I doing? I’m plucking the string or strumming or fretting. There are these basic motions, and that’s all this is at the end of the day.

When I’m teaching a lesson, especially a group class, I’ll say, “Now we’re going to pluck a string.” These things aren’t very sexy compared to the sort of videos you find on YouTube. There are so many resources online, and it’s interesting that people still come to weekly lessons, but I think it’s because you’re not gonna have these conversations. “What does it mean to pluck a string? We touch the string, we put some pressure on it, and then we release through the string. And now what’s the angle of your pick?” It’s all these details. And while this stuff is out there, it’s not what’s getting popular because of the algorithm. At the same time, there’s this “going for it” thing that has to happen. Another thing that Bruce Lee said is that “classical forms are organized anguish.” I’m over here learning Villa-Lobos etudes and that shit is beautiful, but fuck—it is organized anguish.

Around the time I was reading Bruce Lee, it was like, “Why wouldn’t you want a modicum of ability to defend yourself?” I realized that I didn’t have that at all, so I joined a kung fu school and went like five days a week. I saw a picture recently and I was like, damn, I was in shape—and it’s because I was getting my ass kicked five days a week (laughter). But at the core of it, it’s just a set of reflexes. I didn’t keep going at it because COVID hit, and I also thought I’d end up destroying my hands, but I do love the idea that this is organized anguish. I just related that to certain etudes or learning bebop heads. At the same time, there’s this “know thyself” thing that he was all about with Jeet Kune Do—the way of the intercepting fist. That was all super inspiring; it became a central thing inspiring my music.

You talked about body awareness, and I realized that I didn’t have any body awareness until way into my late 20s or 30s—I always found it hard to quantify space. I was always bored by shred practice; I was more interested in the color of sound than the technique it took to play clean and fast. I took some lessons with this guitarist named Freddie Bryant over a three-year period, and it was about a half-dozen lessons. This was someone who came and watched me play Villa-Lobos’ Etude No. 1 and said, “Oh, your finger isn’t hitting in the same place every time.” That’s not something that ever occurred to me. He observed me and was able to talk about what my hand was doing, about the tension in a particular spot, that I wasn’t hitting at the same place.

There was conceptual stuff in these lessons too, but the technical and physical stuff was a lot about observing. It completely changed my technique. Of course, it took me like three-plus years to do the remedial work to feel secure, but in doing that, he gave me the tools. And now I do that with my students—I’ll get down low and look at their hands, get different angles, and I’ll say, “Let’s slow that down tremendously. What are you doing in the silences in between the motions? You can be totally relaxed and play really slow, but move really fast between playing.” In music it’s “play slow, move fast”—you’ll play a note, but you have to get to the next note. You want to move in a nanosecond and be relaxed before you play the next note—and I really wanted to dive into that space. My lessons with him were where I realized how to quantify space. So that was really beneficial.

I’m thinking now of all your different practices—you’ve played standards, you have your proggy work in Ahleuchatistas, and then you have the new Autechre album. With Autechre, how are you aiming to capture the weird swing of the beats they have? You can feel how your body is affected by the specific cadences or rhythms they’re going for—were you trying to capture that?

Pretty early on I ruled out this percussive thing. I certainly thought about it, but that’s never really been my thing. I can see how I could make sense of it, where I get into tapping, but it’s not who I am as a musician. I’m more interested in counterpoint. It was like, how do I get that rhythmic thing? It ended up being that the kick patterns were the scaffolding, and if you zero in on a kick pattern in their songs, there’s really complex things happening, but you can locate it. For me, I have to engage with things visually at first. Transcribing is a learning tool. When I see it spatially organized, then I can deal with the different sides of the counterpoint. And this is the skeleton key that opened up the record for me.

I’d worked on “Slip” and “Bike” and I was like, damn, there’s so much there, how is this gonna work? Then I went to “Eutow, “ which is the first song I completed, and then I felt determined. I had a process, and as soon as I locked into that kick pattern, I could write it out and find the melodic material that, for me, was the emphasis of the piece. Sometimes I had to include guitaristic language, and “Eutow” is a good example of that—the kick and the single notes weren’t enough, so I would throw in a drone string to make it full and engaging. With something like “Corc” it’s like, what is going on? That was the hardest one to transcribe.

So this was a very regimented process. I’ve done records like Undertaker Please Drive Slow (2016) where Zorn was like, take as long as you need. And that took about 9 months. But this was Bill telling me that he wanted to announce the record on December 5th, and we’d been talking about it for a while—about a year—before we locked into this. At the beginning of August I had a three-month window. The trajectory of it was like, I need a month and a half to transcribe, I need a month to demo, and I need two weeks to record. And that’s what happened. It was brutal in terms of time. My friend Cyrus Pireh said I wasn’t burning the candle at both ends, I was just throwing it into the fire (laughter).

“Corc” in particular took two weeks or so. It’s super spatial at first and it has these bass notes that act as this spatial scaffolding, then you have a melody and a countermelody, and then there’s a coda. It felt like I had a pick axe and was going through a tunnel with that song. I was in the car transcribing this, waiting for my daughter who’d be in a class for an hour. There is this joyfulness, though, in the revelation of decoding. There are these different instruments articulating these lines, and I had to do things like octave displacement to make things playable, I had to subtract things so it could fit on the guitar. That song is the high watermark of transcription arrangements on the record—it felt like I had climbed a mountain.

I’d say the hard part is over. Now I’m at this stage where I have gigs coming up and practicing is really enjoyable. Andrés Segovia would talk about how he’d polish one phrase for months until it glistened in the sunshine. I’m trying to give these songs that same TLC—can I pull more resonance, can I pull more glow out of this music? So they’re evolving in these subtle ways.

What sort of things do you feel like you learned from transcribing and playing this music as opposed to all the proggy and bluesy music you’ve done in the past?

It’s about the rhythmic aspect of where Autechre locates melodic material. A lot of the time, it’s syncopated off the 16th note. It’s a subtle division of the quantizing, but they do it so much that there’s this really kaleidoscopic aspect to something like “Corc” or even “Eggshell,” like (hums downscale melody). At first you’re like, oh it’s this simple melody, it’s this scalar thing going down in thirds, but then you realize it’s syncopated in this weird way against the beat. I was talking with Courtney—my wife and champion over this project—and I’d ask her about these arrangements. She knows this stuff better than I do and she said, “That melody is always so hard to sing. You think you can sing it but when you try, there’s something off about it.” So from looking at these songs closely, I started to intuit those types of syncopations more naturally. And when I look at other things, like Grant Green guitar solos, I’m like, “Oh, this isn’t on the ‘and’.”

With prog music, you have these longform phrases where it’s hard to detect the repetition. I just had this flashback of being 20 and playing with a bunch of musicians and asking, “Where’s the 1?” That’s a common thing with Autechre’s music, certainly their later music. There are repetitive themes you can pick out in the earlier stuff but it’s still like, “Where’s the 1?” There was always this ah-ha moment when I realized where the repeat was in a sequence. It was like, “Oh, okay, it doesn’t go on forever, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. I can move onto the next part.” That’s really interesting for me because it’s how I want to play the guitar. I’m not a soloist, I don’t want to shred scales, and I don’t tend to improvise like that either—I tend to improvise around thematic material. You have these themes, and then there’s a playfulness within them. I feel like I’m getting closer to doing that naturally as an improviser.

What do you feel like you wouldn’t be able to do with the guitar if you hadn’t made this album?

A lot of guitar music is beholden to the quarter-note pulse, which is great, but it was also like… how do I get out of this? I’ve definitely thought about this in the past, like oh I could do a tumbao rhythm in the bass. I put a quarter-note pattern in “Slip”—I morphed that song into an American primitive-type vibe for various reasons—and that’s because it was too unwieldy. I tried other approaches, but that was it. The two questions I always ask are: Does it sound good? Do I enjoy playing it?

One of the biggest things is the amount of patience that I’ve learned in developing this music. Autechre’s music connects with people on a deeply emotional level, and that’s what I’m trying to evoke. These songs breathe so much. The way that “Eggshell” ends… the endings, man. They’re these codas that are very sparse and slow. “Bike” does that too. You’re allowing it to simmer down, and to play this music and for people to connect with it, I’m learning that I can really slow down, that I don’t have to play an insane amount of notes. I kind of knew that already from playing folk music, but it was even more so with this. The original tracks are nine minutes long, but mine are reduced, mostly hovering around the six-minute mark. That’s long for me in solo guitar land, especially through-composed. And I cut some stuff out that felt monotonous on solo guitar. The long intro on “Maetl” was just boring; I love the original track, but they have this whole sonic universe at their command while I only have a guitar (laughter).

You mentioned that you need two things: for music to sound good, and to enjoy playing it. Was that always the case?

I’ll ask my students about the best fingering for a song and they’ll say, “The easiest!” And I’ll say, “No!” And then some people will say, “…the hardest?” And I’ll be like, “Fuck no!” (laughter). So what’s the answer? It’s the one that sounds the best. And what does that look like? You have to figure that out, you have to try different ways of playing it until it sounds the best. It’ll maybe be the easiest way, and we hope it’s not the hardest way, but this is something you have to explore. When I’m working thematically, I want to be whimsical and play it in every register, with different fingerings and open strings and with specific chords that get reharmonized. There’s only so many hours in the day, though, so you need to get a handful of things at your disposal, otherwise you’re stuck with one thing. And then you can start mixing things up. That’s when things get interesting and complex—there’s this flowering quality where it’s blooming in different directions.

Can I be expressive while I’m playing? That’s the fundamental question. And am I living it? There are things that straddle that boundary. For example, “Avril 14th.” That’s a beautiful song to play and listen to. The ending is really hard. I had a bar gig in Athens the other night and I completely butchered the ending. And it sucks because it’s such a beloved song, so I feel a big weight of responsibility, least of all because that’s when people bust their phones out (laughter). I need to have the ending of that in my routine. There’s a psychological thing that happens when you get towards the end of the song—you have to psych yourself out of that. I saw someone say that you can change your mindset and say, “I get to play this really cool part” instead of, “Oh shit, here comes this really hard part.” And that actually does work wonders. To be honest, I just haven’t practiced it enough because I’m trying to play this Autechre music live. I haven’t played the song in 2 or 3 months, and to just bust it out… it’s just not ready-to-hand.

Any classical guitarist will talk about this too. In Julian Bream’s memoir, he breaks down his practice routine and it’s like, “an hour and ten minutes of watching the hands move, then an hour and a half of just the hard parts of the repertoire, and then I go for a walk and I come back and work on some things and then I play my gig.” He would book his tours around that routine so he could do that every day. People think this guy just shows up and plays the Bach Lute Suites every night, but no—it doesn’t work like that. It’s constant maintenance. It’s like Bruce Lee.

There’s a question I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

I love that I know that I don’t know, y’know? (laughter). I am so excited by learning and I constantly feel my own ignorance, but not in a bad way—it’s like wow, this is so interesting.

Oh, I wanted to ask—is there a reason your name is Shane Parish now and not Shane Perlowin?

My biological father’s name was Randy Heath and he was a boxer. He was in an accident in the ring when I was 4, and he became paralyzed and brain damaged for 16 years after that. My mom and him split when I was an infant, and she remarried this guy whose last name was Perlowin, and he made me take his last name legally—it’s an adopted name. He was very abusive to me for the ten years I lived with him. Around the time my daughter was born, in 2014, I had not been in touch with that side of the family for years. But I got this insane message from his step-son—though I think it was him pretending to be his step-son—and I had to explain that I had turned this page in my life, that there was no future for us. There was a lot of gaslighting involved with him saying that none of the things I said actually happened. At this point, I’d had a bit of a career using the Perlowin last name, and the last thing he said was, “If you don’t want to be a part of this family anymore, why don’t you throw away everything you’ve built with this name and change it?” And I did. That day, I took my grandmother’s last name, which is my mom’s maiden name, and I made a public announcement. My grandma was a source of light for me as a kid.

Do you mind sharing about her?

Her name was Martha. She’d take me out of school—I’d have my “Tuesday headache”—and let me come over to her house. We’d watch TV, she’d make soup, and she’d just sit with me, see me, and listen to me. She died when I was 14, but she was the person in my family who’d say things like, “You leave him alone! He’s a good boy!” It was clear to her that I was in an abusive environment. I have this one memory that I always remember, and it’s the place I always go to when I’m dealing with my inner-child shit. We were at her house and had these lawn chairs out on the driveway, and we watched a meteor shower together. There was this total peace, this warmth, this presence as I was talking with her. She was a shelter and a harbor, and it was so simple—it was just someone being with me. Our conversations were simple too. “Oh, look at that star!” It was life-saving.

Shane Parish’s new album, Autechre Guitar, is out now.

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Shane’s Picks

I asked Shane to send me a list to accompany this interview. He sent a list of “South American guitarists, composers, and singers whom I dearly love and who have influenced me.”

• Luiz Bonfá

• Atahualpa Yupanqui

• Violeta Parra

• Jaime Guardia

• Agustín Barrios Mangoré

• João Gilberto

• Heitor Villa-Lobos

• Baden Powell

• Bola Sete

Thank you for reading the 214th issue of Tone Glow. Life-savers.

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Bill Orcutt

Bill Orcutt (b. 1962) is a Miami-born, San Francisco-based guitarist and composer who has spent the past 40+ years playing music both solo and in various bands. Orcutt got his start in the Miami-based rock outfit Trash Monkeys before eventually forming the more raucous guitar-drum duo Watt with Tim Koffley. Later, he’d start the influential ’90s noise-rock and free-improv band Harry Pussy, featuring Adris Hoyos on drums. Orcutt has spent the past couple decades releasing a slew of solo albums—including A New Way to Pay Old Debts (2009), How the Thing Sings (2011), A History of Every One (2013), Bill Orcutt (2017), and Odds Against Tomorrow (2019)—as well as collaborative albums with Chris Corsano. More recently, Orcutt has released a self-titled album as Orcutt Shelley Miller (2025), and two guitar quartet albums, Music For Four Guitars (2022) and Music in Continuous Motion (2026). In May, Orcutt will release an album with Mabe Fratti titled Almost Waking (2026). Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Orcutt on February 16th, 2026 to discuss his first bands, his evolution as a guitarist, and the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet. Also: Orcutt shares some of his favorite films.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: How’s your day going?

Bill Orcutt: I’ve been dealing with my anxiety around Roulette by trying to rehearse every morning. I got my rehearsal in today so I’m feeling good. Practicing is good because it makes all the abstract things you’re worried about real and concrete, and then they can go away.

Was it the same when you were in Harry Pussy?

I was just playing all the time so it wasn’t the same thing. There was no goal other than playing, and when we played live, we mostly played at [Miami venue] Churchill’s to nobody on Thursday nights. Frank [Falestra aka Rat Bastard] had an open mic thing, which nobody was invited to, so nobody was there—it was like two or three people performing to two or three people in the audience (laughter). When I first started playing again, I missed that. I don’t miss it anymore—I’m way too old to hang out at a bar—but I missed the idea of a place where you could just show up and play. I thought for a while I’d perform in some informal way like that, but I never got around to it.

Do you remember the first show you played?

I remember exactly where I was. When I was in college, I tried to form a band and was weirdly able to recruit two drummers but nobody else. I wasn’t able to corral them, though, or organize anything, so I wasn’t really in a band until I got out of college in ’84. I came back for grad school—I went to the University of Miami—and that’s around the same time I met these guys who did a performance art thing called Verbal Circus. It had words and saxophone and guitar and some kind of percussion. It wasn’t exactly music; it was like poetry, but not. Like, there were words that were artistic, but not in a bad way (laughter). I saw them at some event, and everyone was dreadful except for them. Luckily, my friend who brought me there knew them. It was meant to be.

I hung out a bit at their house and I was like, oh, these are the people in Miami I wanna be friends with. They needed a drummer so that’s what I became—I bought a drum set just so I could continue hanging out with them. We eventually formed a band called Trash Monkeys. For the first show, I remember counting off with the sticks and (laughs) nobody started—everyone in the audience laughed (laughter). That’s my first memory of performing.

What was the musical environment in Miami like?

I only knew my little corner of it. There were a lot of things happening that I wasn’t privy to, but in terms of rock music, it was a lot of cover bands or acts that were essentially cover bands—the songs they wrote sounded like covers even if they weren’t. I couldn’t find anything to get excited about until I saw Verbal Circus, and they were around the same age as me too. And even though I wasn’t playing my chosen instrument, it was nice to find people who had an aesthetic I could relate to and contribute to; it became a place to operate from. I needed to do something.

I played with them for three years. I had met this other guy, Tim [Koffley], and we started a guitar-drum duo [Watt] and played in that. It was a different kind of music, and it was instrumental. It was just two people, which was good. And that’s the band where I started playing the 4-string guitar. There was a lot of stuff to work on and I think it went well for about a year or two, then we started growing apart in terms of what we wanted to do.

I’m curious about Verbal Circus because you’ve mentioned your interest in Gertrude Stein in the past, and then you have those counting albums—Pure Genius (2020), A MECHANICAL JOEY (2021), The Anxiety of Symmetry (2023)—which could be understood as both plunderphonics and sound poetry exercises. Can you tell me about your interest in literature, poetry, and language and how you decided to make those albums?

It’s interesting you mention this because the Verbal Circus had a lot of repetition, a lot of repeated phrases and sounds, so it had a bit of sound poetry in there. Regarding those counting albums, I had previously made sound software projects that were influenced by Max and Pure Data. I spent a lot of time working on those, and by the time I finished, I was really sick of that visual programming interface and wanted to come up with a new API, a new way of structuring the sounds in code, and so it was more of a technical reason as to why I made the software [Cracked]. And when you’ve spent a year writing something, it’s like… well, I have to use it (laughter).

I started to make music and learned what I could do with that software, and at some point, I did something called New Words From The OED (2019). It used pronunciation examples from online and I incorporated those into a piece. I thought, oh, what else could I do with pronunciation examples? And that’s when I made Pure Genius (2020), where I used the number pronunciation guides. That led to thinking about counting, like… where else do people count? And that led to the Ramones. There’s a version of Pure Genius—I’m not sure if it’s the released one—where there’s more of a harmonic element to the counting, and that led to The Anxiety of Symmetry (2023). I went on Fiverr and hired a woman to sing the major scale with numbers and different note values—whole notes, half notes. All this evolved in a very step-like fashion; it wasn’t like I was interested in counting and went straight to it.

I know you were an English professor at some point.

Adjunct faculty. Initially, I had an assistantship when I was getting my MA at the University of Miami, and after I graduated I worked at different colleges in South Florida.

Were there specific things you sought to make sure your students understood? Was there a guiding philosophy to your teaching?

Not at all, really. I was a terrible teacher. Thank god this was before Rate My Professors because I would’ve gotten terrible reviews (laughter). This was something I just did to make money while doing a bunch of other things, so I wasn’t as devoted and attentive as I should’ve been. It got to a point where it was the beginning of a semester, I walked in, I looked at these people and I was like… haven’t I seen them before? They all looked the same. And I could tell what everyone’s grades would be before the first day of class was over, and that’s when I knew I needed to quit—if you’re having these thoughts, you’re really not where you need to be. And so I quit without a backup or anything. It had all run its course—there was nothing else for me to do there. As I get older and look at the jobs I’ve had, I always think I could do that so much better now. But at the time, you’re involved with other things and you’re behaving in a way where you’re cutting corners and just doing it for the money.

Why’d you choose to study English?

When I was in high school, I painted every day. I would come home from school and go into the garage and paint. What I really wanted to study was art, but I was the first one in my family to go to college and nobody was signing off on me studying that. I said, “Well, what if I study architecture?” I was enrolled in architecture and I discovered that it had nothing at all to do with art—it’s something completely different. So then the fallback from the fallback was English, and it was because I liked to read books. It seemed like the only acceptable thing.

Did you have the same mentality of, “oh it’s just a job,” when you eventually got into computer programming?

No, and that was interesting. I got my MA in English, I taught for a while, I dropped out of that, and I got interested in film and was making some myself. I got some grants and was living off of that, and I got involved with a group of people who had a not-for-profit called Alliance for Media Arts on Miami Beach. I ended up running that and became the Executive Director. I ran that for seven years.

They had started out doing screenings in bookstores, and Miami Beach at the time had a lot of real estate. It eventually became really expensive, but at the time they couldn’t find people to occupy the buildings, and these guys got a 10-year lease. There was a falling out, though, and people left—I was the only one who stayed. There were people moving into the area, and we changed up the programming to be a little more eclectic, and people came until the lease ran out. The lease was in the ’90s, so what was a 100-seat theater showing? It was South Beach, so we played a lot of New Queer Cinema—Todd Haynes and stuff like that. Anything that J. Hoberman liked, I was like, “Yeah, let’s play that.” (laughter).

Toward the end of that, the internet came. I still remember the first time I read a hyperlinked document in a browser. It was a drug—clicking links and jumping around. It was a whole thing. And this sounds silly for someone younger who grew up with it, but for someone like me who was in their 30s, it was insane. I had no interest in computers when it was just spreadsheets, but with browsers you had text and pictures and primitive animation and video and I just started playing around with it because I wanted to get involved. The gold rush started out here [San Francisco] during the dot-com boom, and so I left before the 10-year lease was up. I saw that the rents had gone up so high. Our building had been owned by a patron of the arts—Micky Wolfson—and he had to sell it, and our new landlord was not gonna cut us a deal. I knew that gig was gonna be up when the lease expired, so I left.

Do you remember the first websites you made?

Before I left Miami, I made a handful of websites. I know I made one for [filmmaker] Doris Wishman. Doris lived in Coconut Grove and she would come down because, in addition to the theater, we had a film co-op across the street and she taught a class there. She was working on her final feature, Dildo Heaven (2002), after hours and a guy there was cutting it for her. So I made her a website, and that was the most memorable one. I must’ve made one for the theater too, but I don’t remember doing it. When I moved out here, my first paid job was building something for Oddball Films. The guy who founded it has since passed, but he had a warehouse or loft in The Mission, and it was just stacked to the ceiling with educational films and other things. They had no web presence, so I built their first website.

You’re talking about Doris Wishman and New Queer Cinema, and I’m wondering how all of this exposure to indie and DIY films informed the way you thought about art. And maybe it wasn’t a direct influence, but I’m curious if there’s a connection given that a lot of this stuff was made with lower budgets.

It was just part of the mix of stuff that was inspiring to me. When we first opened the cinema, there were no movie seats per se—it was just plastic seats we got from Home Depot—and there was no projection booth either, it was a table at the back of the room. One of the first things we showed was Warhol’s early stuff. The MoMA had just made them available. That very minimal, structural work was the biggest film stuff I felt connection to—it was the outrageousness of it. But even the commercial stuff was all very inspiring. It was before you had this avalanche of everything getting reissued on DVD and being available on YouTube. It meant something. There’d be a print of Gun Crazy (1950) and you could watch it instead of some crappy VHS. It was exciting.

How did you manage to balance these different worlds of work and art? Or maybe you felt it was necessary for both of these things to exist.

There’s the time management aspect of it, and I don’t really know how I do what I do—I just do it. But then there’s this thing of worlds that don’t know anything about each other. I dealt with business people because I had this storefront on Miami Beach, but I was also playing in this band called Harry Pussy that’s getting mentioned in the local alternative weekly, and people knew me from that. How do you explain one world to the other? (laughter). I still don’t know how to do it, and you just have to put your head down and accept that not everyone’s gonna accept what you’re doing. You just have to do what you wanna do and ride the waves of miscomprehension (laughter).

Yeah, I understand that. It’ll happen often at work. Some of my coworkers know about the stuff I do outside of teaching, but others don’t. None of them have come to my film screenings, but I’ve had some students show up, which is exciting.

My kids are 20 and 22 right now, and it’s always more interesting to pick their brains. Like, how do they know all this stuff? Where is it coming from? They know so much about music and internet culture that it’d be a full-time job to even know half of what they do.

What have they shown you recently that you didn’t know? What stands out?

They’re both in college now, so my access to them is limited, but sometimes it’ll just be words and phrases that never clicked for me. It’ll turn out that a word has been around for 10 years and I never noticed it, and I’ll be like, ooooh (laughter). It’s interesting talking to them about music because they’re also really skilled at pandering to old people. On road trips they’ll DJ in the car, and they can put together some perfect “music for 60-year-olds” playlist and I’ll be like, “No, play what you’re into!” (laughter). It’s always more fun to let them drive the music conversation than for me to tell them about things that old people like. And the thing is, they’ll already know!

Is that how you approach collaboration then? Like, you’ll have the other person take the lead?

That’s a good question. I feel like it’s my idea to start with for sure, and then I’m trying to make it real. But on the other hand, you have to respond to other people. With the guitar quartet, I like the idea of taking these songs and turning them into something you can play in a room, but you have all this talent—this improvisatory talent—that they’re bringing and you have to create space for it to happen. If somebody’s better at something than I am, they’re absolutely gonna do it; it’s about making something together, so it doesn’t matter who does it.

Is this something you always knew how to do back in the day when performing in Harry Pussy or To Live and Shave in L.A.? Were there growing pains at all?

You know, I don’t think I ever played with To Live and Shave. Tom [Smith] did everything on his own. I mean, he played with Rat and later versions of the band had bandmates, but I think he just sampled me. For the longest time, I didn’t think he did, but when we were doing the box set, Rat sent me some photos and one was a wall of DATs, and one of them had my name on it. It was like, “Oh, he did have me!” Everything was so mashed together that nothing was identifiable.

Playing with Harry Pussy was a different thing. It was just really interesting in that Adris [Hoyos] hadn’t really played anything before, and it was a lot of figuring things out. It was like crossing a stream by leaping from rock to rock, like, “Okay, we’re here, now how do we get to the next one?” At some point we added a second guitarist, Mark Feehan, and that allowed us to try new things. And then Mark left and we had a new guitarist, Dan Hosker, who had a different skillset so we had to learn different things. In some ways, it involved a lot more inventing things from scratch. The guitar quartet is a lot more conventional in that it can be notated and taught to other people.

When Dan joined, I taught him a song, but it took a long time to convince him that he could learn it. We had to do some basic things so he could see that I was trustworthy. Like, this may sound like noise, but there’s a way to actually play it. I remember we spent seven hours learning 15 seconds of music (laughter). It sounds like an exaggeration, but we really started in the morning and worked until night. It was a whole process, you know? But then after he mastered the idiom, he could contribute to the creation of the music. We did one record together but nothing beyond that, so we didn’t get to build on it, but it was a really interesting experience and collaboration. Playing with Adris really just broke my brain open because I had to invent a new way to play in order to do something with her, so wherever I’m at now as a guitarist is filtered through playing with Adris.

Have you needed to invent a new way of playing the guitar with your solo records, or do you feel like you’re just refining things you already know?

A lot of times, one record will lead to another. The first solo electric record I made, which is the eponymous one (2017), has a song called “The World Without Me.” That’s something I stumbled onto when I recorded it, and that one track became the basis for the next record, Odds Against Tomorrow (2019). That whole album is nothing but attempts at capturing the magic that happened on the record prior. So a lot of the time you stumble onto one thing and it leads to another mutation, and so on. I hope that I’m learning and that my brain is still flexible to encounter new things, to incorporate them into what I do.

Do you think there’s a regional approach to how you approach music? Is there something distinctly Miami or San Francisco about your work?

I lived in Miami until I was 35. Though my kids were born in San Francisco, I feel like I’m forever stamped with Miami, and we go back there every year for Christmas. Miami at the time had a lot of extreme stuff, and Frank aka Rat had this studio that was by our house. I think I have come to accept that seeing Tom Smith work on his earliest records was influential. They were so wildly over-the-top and completely beyond what any sensible person in Miami was doing at the time. I probably would have denied it back then, but I do think living in Miami and getting to see that led to this feeling of, “What are you holding back? Just go for it.” And of course Rat was encouraging people. He had great taste in music, and he was always pushing people to do things that could get out into the world.

Talk to me about this new guitar quartet album, Music in Continuous Motion (2026), and what you did here that built on the previous one, Music For Four Guitars (2022).

I was really trying to avoid making another one because I didn’t know how the first one happened (laughter). I made it strictly because someone challenged me to do it, and it took seven years of occasionally fiddling with the idea to eventually stumble on how to do it. The challenge came from this guy I knew from Miami who moved to Columbus in the ’80s. We stayed in touch. At one point, he had a guitar quartet and he asked me to write something for it. I told him sure, but I couldn’t come up with anything, and it no longer became relevant because his guitar quartet broke up, but the idea stayed in my head. So for a long time, this idea stayed as a dream.

The guitar quartet music is so different from everything that’s come before—I thought nobody was gonna like it. I only made 300 copies of the first LP because I thought it was a throwaway thing, but then it became much more popular. And then it turned out you could make a whole band around it. The first album took a long time to make, and one of the first things I said to my booking agent was, “I don’t have to keep doing this, do I?” (laughter). She was like, “You can do whatever you want.” I have the Roulette thing coming up and it was like, am I gonna bring the quartet back together and play the same stuff? That sounds lame. In October or November, I finally came to the realization that I needed to do something new.

So yeah, I don’t know how I made the first album, and I don’t know how I made the second one. It has some wonderful moments, and Shane [Parish] has transcribed it all, and I’ve been learning and playing it every morning. There are some moments I love playing that feel really great—I’m having a good time. One of the things I said to Tom Carter when he was working on the one-sheet was, “I don’t understand how the same person, the same gear, the same procedure can produce different results, but it did.” (laughter). He’s a great writer. I’m surprised every publication isn’t hiring him to write for them. So few music writers have a thesis about something and then support it with a series of observations. It’s such an elemental thing, but it’s almost never done (laughter). I love Tom—great writer, great guitar player. Harry Pussy used to tour with Charalambides, so we’ve done van time together.

I love that the album was born out of a pressure to not be lame.

To not suck (laughter).

Is that something that happens often? Like, that’ll be a motivating factor for why you do things?

Sometimes an idea will burst into your brain and you’re done—it just lands fully-formed with a title and cover and it’s complete before you even play a note. Those records don’t need a lot of motivation. But then there are others where you’ve given yourself a task and you don’t know where it’s gonna lead and how it’ll happens. One of the first things I did when making the new album was go back and listen to all the discards from the first one—these were things that didn’t work that I threw out. I wanted to know what bad Bill Orcutt Guitar Quarter sounded like. It was terrible! It wasn’t holding together! A lot of the things I did on the new one, I tried to do on the first one—in terms of the sound and phrasing and techniques—but I knew what bad Bill Orcutt Guitar Quarter sounded like this time around. I needed to establish a baseline for what a failed version of this music sounded like, and when I was done with the second album, I liked it.

Was there ever a point in your life where you were playing guitar and it wasn’t fun? Maybe this was something technically complicated and it ended up being strenuous.

When I was working on A History of Every One (2013), the constructions were so thorough. I was taking every aspect of a song and crushing it, shredding it, and putting it through the Bill process. It required an intensity that I wonder if I possess anymore. My version of “Zip A Dee Doo Dah” was so difficult to play mentally, for example, and I had to get myself into that state to technically execute it. I don’t know if I would want to do that anymore because I… enjoy music (laughter). Music should be nice to play—children understand music! But that version of “Zip A Dee Doo Dah” is not music; it’s a very unnatural way for a human to move their body, it’s not good.

When you play guitar, do you make sure you feel comfortable, or are you still gonna contort your body and fingers in ways that are uncomfortable?

It’s definitely straining. And when I’m done at the end of the night, I need to come down a little. But it’s still music. By the time I got into A History of Every One, I was really pulling up everything by the roots. It was really hard and it was not healthy music to be playing—I was trying to do things that aren’t fun. I’ve moved into playing things that are, well, they’re not “normal,” but more understandable—they have rhythm and harmony.

I know with Harry Pussy that you had a rule that you’d never play any chords. And you also once said that at the core of your music, you’re ultimately trying to find your own way of playing the blues. Do you still set certain boundaries for yourself? Do you still feel like you’re trying to find a way to play the blues?

At this point, I have a pretty long tail. I have all this history of playing—decades now—and I don’t have to search to find who I am because it’s already there. As far as imposing rules, there’s a little bit of that, but it’s been fewer and fewer. There’s this tuning that we used in Watt that Tim came up with—it’s like standard tuning but you tune the low E up to a G. I use that all the time now, and it’s probably the most common tuning I use. But in Harry Pussy, I could never have used it because it’s too consonant—it’s impossible to get the kind of sound I wanted. We did have tunings there, but it was standard tuning with everything a half-step down, like Hendrix.

So yeah, one of the rules in Harry Pussy was that there were no chords—as in, sounding multiple notes simultaneously in an organized fashion. My computer music, by necessity, is rule-based because that’s all you’re doing: you’re creating rules. And playing with Steve Shelley and Ethan Miller… those guys are their own rules (laughter). We have no explicit rules there, but there are specific types of things they’ll play. I should say that none of this is dogmatic, but sometimes you need those rules. For example, Dan joined Harry Pussy and he came from a normal rock background. He wanted to contribute, but the things he was contributing were not appropriate, so there had to be rules.

I want to ask about How to Rescue Things (2024). With that album, you’re playing alongside this schmaltzy pop. How’d you approach that? And do you often think about your guitar playing and how it gets recontextualized in different contexts?

That started pretty early on, leading to A History of Every One and Twenty Five Songs (2013). At some point I had this way of playing, and you could call it a style—I’m not sure if that’s right—and I started to wonder what else I could do. I didn’t want to improvise over and over again; I wanted to find different settings where I could do this thing. So this all started over 10 years ago, and one of the ideas was Orcutt with Strings. I was familiar with Bird With Strings, and all the history of jazz records that used strings.

To me, the album was kind of an ironic thing, and it was another record where I thought nobody was gonna like it—it’s just way too goofy. Working on the project was really about finding the strings, finding what would work harmonically with me to play against, that would have the right tone. I hadn’t anticipated that people would react to it so emotionally. I thought it’d be like, “Orcutt with Strings, ha ha.” But people were like, “Orcutt with Strings… it’s beautiful!” (laughter). People also associate it with Christmas, and I’m like, “Christmas? I don’t wanna go to Christmas at your house if that’s what it sounds like.” (laughter). It took me a long time to find the strings because I was starting from blank, and then I realized that it had to be gospel strings, and then the second revelation was big band, old-time crooner-type strings. That was the search, and it led me to all the music I use on that.

I’m always looking at history, and I have a utilitarian mentality… what can I steal, what can I plunder, what isn’t locked down that I can cart away? (laughter). The people who buy my stuff are fairly knowledgeable, so if I make a reference, I assume that people are gonna get it. Like, what guitar players do I like? What have they done? And how can I adapt what they’ve done to what I’m doing? There are those Derek Bailey drum ‘n’ bass recordings, and it’s an unusual idea for a record to play along with other people’s recordings, and it struck me that I was doing something similar for How to Rescue Things. Though, that wasn’t the original thinking.

What’s it been like performing with the guitar quartet? What do you think you’ve been able to learn in this new context?

I like them all as people, so it’s fun to hang out with them. One of the interesting things about it is that I’m playing the same thing every night. When I’m playing solo, it’s not the same—it’s improvised. And even playing in Orcutt Shelley Miller, that’s different too. Even though half the guitar quartet set is improvised, it’s interesting to go to different cities and play the same things. I like to have a balance of stuff, and it’s interesting to hear them every night in a new room, to learn about the songs from playing them in front of different people.

What’s something you’ve learned from playing in front of different people?

One thing I’ve learned is that our songs are very short (laughter). When we play “A different view,” which is the first song on the first record, we play it and then we stop, and the audience is completely confused because we’ve only been playing for 90 seconds. They’re like… what? Listening back to live tapes, I’ve noticed that there’s always double the gap before they start applauding because they’re not really sure the song’s over.

Also, hearing the rhythms… one of the things is that we come from different worlds. Ava [Mendoza] in particular is very precise about everything. The way the sound tends to work out is that the band separates into the left half and right half. Sometimes, the two halves of the band aren’t always hearing each other as well as they could. I have come under some criticism for not being in time, and I had to explain to them that when John Lee Hooker played live with a pick-up band, he’d turn the beat around, he’d do things that an idiosyncratic folk musician that is used to performing alone would do, and the band would have to adapt to whatever he was doing. And in this metaphor, I am John Lee Hooker (laughter). Just adapt to what I’m doing!

Do you four sit in the same order every time?

Yes, we do.

I also appreciate that with this Roulette residency, you have other musicians playing, including those whose work you’ve championed. You have Chuck Roth on the bill, for example. watergh0st songs (2025) was one of my favorite albums last year. Are you constantly keeping up with new music, are people showing you these acts, are you seeing these artists live—what’s the situation there?

I’m paying attention to whatever is out there that I stumble upon. Those DMG [Downtown Music Gallery] videos are very useful to me and I’m always looking at those. If anybody is holding a guitar, I’m definitely turning on the volume and Googling their name. I’m interested in people who are underappreciated, unknown, or just starting out, and solo guitar is the focus of what I release. I’m rarely finding but always looking.

I like that your new album’s cover art references Leonard Cohen. Are you a big fan?

I like him, though my main reference point is McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971). I mean, I paid for that font, dammit, so I’m gonna get my money’s worth (laughter). But at this point I think I’m sick of it.

Are you often thinking about films and the feelings they provide as a way to approach your own music?

It’s not a film, but at the San Francisco MoMA, they have a room devoted to the paintings of Agnes Martin. It’s a beautifully designed room with central seating so you can look at these hallucinogenic paintings. I always come out of that room thinking, that’s music—there’s music there. And I always try to come up with something but it never works (laughter). It’s like the quartet—I spent seven years trying to write something and I couldn’t, and then I eventually did. So one day, I hope to figure out music that sounds like Agnes Martin. I know that John Zorn has Agnes Martin pieces, but some day I hope to figure it out.

Earlier you were talking about things being musical or not. Is it important that your songs are beautiful and accessible?

Lately, I’ve been feeling that I need to make something unlistenable (laughter). Like, I need to do something unpleasant—I’m selling out making this pretty, toe-tapping music! (laughter). I say this, but I have a record that is on the verge of coming out, and it’s another computer music record. Maybe that’ll fulfill that mission. So, I’m at a crossroads at the moment. The second guitar quartet album is not new ground. Even though it’s different, I’m not doing something from scratch. I have ideas, but the thing is you never know what’s going to work and what’s not. I have a list of ideas on my phone, and it’s nice to just take it out, look at them, see what I was thinking about, and see if I have any new thoughts. I’m really busy right now but I have some time blocked off in the summer. I’ll see what happens.

Is there anything we didn’t talk about today that you wanted to mention?

You know where I’m going after this interview is over? My wife and I are gonna go see a movie—Wuthering Heights (2026). I haven’t seen Saltburn (2023) either, but I got pissed off because everybody was like, “Bill, you’re not gonna like Saltburn, that’s not your type of movie.” I got so annoyed at people telling me what my type of movie is that I was like, “I’m gonna see Wuthering Heights!” My wife was like, “You’re gonna walk out.” But I won’t! I won’t walk out! (laughter). We’re gonna go see it at the mall here.

Is that something you feel is also true about your career? You don’t like being pigeonholed?

I like to upset the applecart. I like to challenge myself with things that are outside of my zone. When they first announced that movie I was like, along with multiple people, this is ridiculous. So I’m excited to see it since I’ve decided I must see it—it’s a challenge.

Do any albums come to mind where you felt you were really going out of your comfort zone and it maybe sucked?

I did some poetry. I did one for Chocolate Monk [Daddy’s Got a Spice Rack (2014)] and one for another label. It was similar to what I was saying before, where I just stumbled upon these ideas. When I was working on A New Way to Pay Old Debts (2009), I had this verbal tic that popped up, and I was repeating this phrase, and I couldn’t get through the phrase. I thought there was something there that felt deep, and that turned into a couple of records. Nobody wants to hear me doing poetry (laughter), so those are things that are rarely discussed, with good reason (laughter).

With good reason?

Well, you asked about records that were beyond the pale (laughter).

There’s a question I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

I feel like, for better or worse, I am a continuation of my father and grandfather. I look at their lives and see ways in which my life is an extension—and is somehow derived—from their own. I don’t know why I love that or if I love it, but it’s the first thing that popped into my head. They had their own way of thinking about things, my grandfather especially.

Bill Orcutt’s Music in Continuous Motion is out now. Bill Orcutt’s residency at Roulette happens this weekend. More info can be found here.

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Bill’s Picks

I asked Bill Orcutt to send a list of films that were important to him. The following is what he sent, reproduced here in the same exact order.

• The Incredible Mr. Limpet (Arthur Lubin, 1964)

  • Saw this as a kid, stars Don Knotts as a near-sighted loner who turns into a talking fish. I’m super near-sighted and immediately related. I later had a similar reaction to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce, 1916)—one of the great works about myopia.

• Monty Python’s Flying Circus, “Royal Episode Thirteen” (1970)

  • Saw this—specifically the cannibalism sketch—as a tween completely unprepared in a motel room in Lake Placid, Florida. Life-altering.

• Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (Jean-Luc Godard, 1970)

  • Took a seminar with Alain Robbe-Grillet when he came to Gainesville for a semester. We saw a bunch of his movies, Buñuel, and other classics, but this one, projected in 16mm on a classroom wall, blew my head off.

• Bad Girls Go to Hell (Doris Wishman, 1965)

  • I met Doris Wishman after inviting her to a screening at the Alliance. She stood me up at the last minute, but we became friends and she worked on her last film “Dildo Heaven” at the Alliance Co-op and taught a filmmaking class there. Impossible to pick one, but this is my favorite title.

• Poison (Todd Haynes, 1991)

  • The Alliance showed this first run when it came out. Inspiring in every way.

• Hippy Porn (Jon Moritsugu & Jacques Boyreau, 1991)

  • Called the director Jon Moritsugu at home without warning and booked this. Good phone call, think we were both stoned.

• I Shot Andy Warhol (Mary Harron, 1996)

  • Iggy Pop came to a screening at the Alliance while I was there and I hijacked the end credits, inserting The Stooges’ “1969” over the Yo La Tengo track that was on the soundtrack.

• Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1950)

  • I read J. Hoberman and tried to book anything that got a good review. This rerelease was one of them. Great movie!

Thank you for reading the 213th issue of Tone Glow. “It was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles, but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn.”

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ELUCID is the moniker of Chaz Hall, a rapper and producer from New York City. As a teenager, ELUCID became enamored with music, holing up in his room to loop beats and write in his journal. His earliest music was recorded with his uncle, DJ Stitches, and he eventually released his debut album, The Bible and the Gun (2002), at 20 years old. In the decades since, ELUCID has risen as one of the most crucial rappers of the present day, releasing a string of solo projects including Save Yourself (2016), Shit Don’t Rhyme No More (2018), I Told Bessie (2022), and REVELATOR (2024). His newest project is I Guess U Had To Be There (2026). ELUCID is also part of Armand Hammer, his duo project with billy woods. The two have released numerous albums together, most recent of which is Mercy (2025). Armand Hammer are touring this year throughout the US and Europe; dates can be found here. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with ELUCID on March 12th, 2026 via Zoom to discuss Napster, living a life of honesty and integrity, and working with Sebb Bash on their new album.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: How was the show in Glasgow last night? What was the crowd like, how was the energy?

ELUCID: I felt strong about the show. It’s nice to get out in the world and play these new songs from Mercy (2025). We wanted to make a point to bring back some older songs—we’re doing things from the first album, integrating them into the set to refresh things. It was the second show [of our European tour] last night, and there were 250-300 people. It was good, a lot of energy, and it was young kids really feeling it. That’s also an interesting thing—Armand Hammer was definitely for the old guys scratching their beards (laughter). That was the general population for our shows, and it’s just not like that anymore. That’s been cool to see—there’s some progress on that front, and new worlds are opening.

When did you start seeing younger audiences?

As soon as we did the song with Earl Sweatshirt (laughter). So once Haram (2021) dropped, there were 16-year-olds at the show with their nannies. That’s when I immediately saw the change.

You said you were playing stuff from the first album. Are we talking about Race Music (2013) or Half Measures (2013)? And how do you and billy woods decide what early songs to include in the set?

When I said “first album,” I was thinking of the new fans, so I was talking about Rome (2017). When people get hip to Armand Hammer, that’s really the entry point, and a lot of people don’t go back to Half Measures. We did “Pakistani Brain.” It has a really great energy live—the beat, there’s gunshots. It’s just one of those songs that always felt good, and we have so many songs now that we were like, we can just dig back and do older cuts. We’re at a point where people may have seen us four or five times; what a shame if they were like, “Yeah, I saw Armand Hammer five times and they played the same songs every time.” How shitty would that be? So we were keeping it fresh for ourselves and fresh for our fans. Immediately after the show, I saw people online saying, “They did my favorite old songs!” and things like that. That’s cool.

You start “Pakistani Brain” by saying, “I wanted to be a hacker when I grew up.” Did you mean a computer hacker?

Yeah, I used to think that shit was cool—I’m 45! I’m from the ’80s! The world of home computers was so prevalent in entertainment. I remember WarGames (1983) with the kid almost starting the Cold War. There were movies like Clock & Dagger (1984), and a bunch of stuff with kids and computers and this idea of disrupting things via technology. I always saw that shit as powerful, and this was before I had a word for “hacker,” which didn’t really come into play until the ’90s. There was the movie Hackers (1995), and I was a teenager at that point. It was this idea of the people versus corporations, it was about this power struggle. The cover of Rome shows a burnt-out landscape, which is also like the end of a power struggle, and this idea of a hacker felt like a really strong image. But yeah, I thought that could’ve been a future for myself.

Did you always spend a lot of time on the internet?

Because of access, no. But when I did get access, yes. I was 16 years old when I first got onto the internet. The community center was getting brand new computers, so they started donating the old ones—my family was lucky enough to get one. This was when America Online was giving away CDs that said like, “50 Hours Free!”, and that would come in the mail every single week. This was the early internet, so I was on chatrooms, and I remember one of the very first things I went on was this Boot Camp Clik message board. They were one of the first rap groups on the internet, and this was a bunch of people coming together and talking crazy about a bunch of topics. It was still limited because my family didn’t have the fast internet connection and it’d eat up the phone lines—my mom needed to be on the phone to take care of stuff—so I couldn’t just be on the internet all the time.

This changed when I went to college. My first year, I had fast internet and I could go on whenever I wanted. Napster just came out—we’re talking about 1999, 2000. Like, oh snap, I can get any piece of music ever recorded very quickly. I was obsessed. It’s funny, I did not have that access when I was a teenager in high school, but my friend Brandon had this crazy hustle downloading music. He was the first person I ever knew who was downloading music—this was ’96—and he would have albums that’d coming out months later and sell them joints to kids at school. This was a mixtape hustle! He was super brainy and getting into places where he should not have access. I always thought that was really cool. He might’ve been one of the first hackers like that.

Were you participating in the Boot Camp Clik message board? Like, were you talking about how much you loved For the People (1996), or were you more of a lurker?

I was a lurker because I was scared, I was bashful. This was a time when you could still be anonymous on the internet, but I think I was just soaking it all up. I was reading and seeing the lay of the land, and then I went to other places—instead of the East Coast, I was looking into the West Coast. The Bomb Hip-Hop Magazine was based out of San Francisco, and this was an underground, West Coast zine. This was the first time I put my address on the internet, and someone was mailing me something. When it came, it was like… holy shit. I sent a five dollar bill in an envelope to this address and then they sent this zine back—it blew my mind! It was a black-and-white, stapled issue of The Bomb magazine. It was next level.

Do you remember what albums you were downloading on Napster? I know you were already playing shows at 20 years old, and you had your first album, The Bible and the Gun (2002), but what were you able to hear through Napster? And maybe these records didn’t exactly impact your rapping, but I’m curious to know what was important.

It was all about building a crazy library, just downloading literally everything. I’d burn them to a CD, and then I’d just have it. It was initially all rap, and then it was like, I can listen to more things than rap. That was such a moment of exploration, like okay, here’s Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain (1960). I remember that one because it took four days to download (laughter). I was listening to Mr. Oizo and thought it was crazy, and Radiohead’s Kid A (2000) came out around this time—that was my entry point, and I think that’s one of their greater albums. I was learning about a lot of different kinds of music.

Also on “Pakistani Brain,” you say you were “a dyke in a past life.” Do you feel a kinship with lesbians? What’s the story there?

You know… yeah, I do. I found myself in relationships with women who were queer, who were lesbian either previously or after me. It’s happened a number of times. That was one of those lines where I was like, do I even have the right to say that word? I remember feeling that when I wrote it. I just went with it, and actual lesbians have found it pretty funny, so it’s cool I guess (laughter). I expected the worst.

What were these relationships like? It feels significant that you were dating queer women as a young person in the ’90s and 2000s. I’m assuming you also consider yourself heterosexual.

From my teens to my mid-20s, I wasn’t really aware of someone being queer intentionally. I grew up with this mainstream mindset where it was like… okay, girls just kiss girls. And then when I was in my mid-20s and definitely in my 30s, it was like, oh, this is who they are, on purpose, and they’re living in the world in this way and are strictly dating people of the same sex. And then here I am, this guy who broke the pattern for whatever reason (laughs). They saw something in me and wanted to be queer in this particular way.

The relationships were a challenge of personal growth. They were confirming things I thought were true but maybe not bold enough to embody. I was seeing that sort of strength, and recognizing it as such and not as a weakness, as a man. My ways of being with women, and my ways of being with myself, really, all coalesced into something that was less of a sexually queer thing for me—I identify as a straight man—but queer in a political sense. I came to understand it that way for myself. Through that, there came a love for myself, and I began to appreciate brothers as brothers. I was able to tell my friends “I love you” and feel no kind of way. I was shifting away from this dominant, male, ego-and-bravado rah-rah culture. That was never really me, but being with women who were queer definitely gave me the confidence to be secure in that fact. Like, it’s okay to not be a fucking cave man (laughter).

Before this, I was joining in with these guys because I was uncertain about being in this group. I was young at the time, finding my own way. There’s the trial run—I was fucking around with the group and others were getting hurt. I realized that this was not cool, and I didn’t like how it felt. So what am I gonna do? And I’d hear these words from my dad: “Be your own man. You’re gonna have to be your own man at some point.” I realized that this wasn’t how I wanted to live my life; I needed to stand on my own.

This is something your dad said regularly?

Yeah. As a younger kid, I would follow behind people, just trying to be down, trying to be cool. I’d get caught stealing bikes. I was running around and being a bully to people. That sort of stupid stuff. This was pre-teen Chaz. My dad was like, “When you gon’ stop this shit? You’re young, so it’s of little consequence at this point, but you’re about to enter your teen years and they send kids to juvenile hall for this shit, and it’s right down the road. It’s right there.” He obviously didn’t want me on that path, and he told me that I needed to think for myself. “There’s only so much I can tell you, but one day it’ll click.”

Were there things he did that made you wanna go down that path? Did you see him live a life of integrity?

Yes, my dad set a strong example for me in his own way. And with those ways, I grew to adopt some of them, but I also saw how I could improve upon the model—I was the next version of him. He was a super strong model of integrity and consistency. I was raised with my dad, and he was there every day. I lived with him, he went to work, and he had different types of jobs, and even when he didn’t… I was raised in a two-parent home, and I remember seeing them hold each other down at different points in their life. If he was out of work, my mom would pick stuff up and he’d be at the house doing things my mom did. I remember that my mom wanted to go to nursing school at one point, and my dad was a construction worker then. He would work crazy-long hours so my mom could study, and this was for a couple years. And then she did it and her career really took off. He was just there as a consistent model of like, this is a dad. He wasn’t just working, either. I was an athlete and he was at all the games, he was taking me and my friends to the games—it was about presence.

What sports were you doing?

Football. When football season ended, it was either basketball or wrestling. And then in the spring it was baseball. I really loved sports until music came into the picture around 16 years old. For me, sports really cemented myself in the opposite of “be your own man.” Like, I was part of a team, and I actually drowned my individual voice, which I grew to not like. When I found music, it was like, whoa, it’s just me—it’s just what I think.

I loved that independent-mindedness of music. I was just making music by myself in my room, with instrumentals from 12-inches that my uncle [DJ Stitches] would let me hold. I borrowed equipment, a microphone, and I created this whole thing from start to finish, and I fell in love with that process. I fell out of love with sports—I still played through my senior year, but my interest started to wane in favor of this music thing. But sports was great. There was team building, and understanding how to work in a team, and how to compromise, and how to strategize a few steps ahead. Sports really put all that in my head for sure.

I love the idea of “learning to compromise.” People generally hear that word and automatically assume it’s negative, but there’s always a way to go about it in a way that’s more successful than not.

Yeah, it’s really important. That’s one of those lifelong things that sports can teach you if you want to know it. You do things for the sake of the team, for the greater good. We talk about that in society with certain acts like voting, but in a team it plays out in a very practical way. Like, just do this for that person and something might happen. To see that play out is a powerful thing, and I think that carries into today. Working so closely with woods, it’s such an integral part of the process, to compromise, to see things from their perspective and just trust in them.

How has compromise come into play in your work together?

The first thing that comes to mind is trust. There’s a song off the Mercy album, Longjohns, where I was like, “I’m just not into this beat, man. I just don’t know.” “Trust me, trust me, it’s gonna be the one. It’s not just gonna be you.” I eventually pushed through and did two drafts, and then I really dug it. Oftentimes, it’s things like that. It works both ways with productions and songs and concepts—we’re pushing each other through. The song “Instant Transfer” also comes to mind, from REVELATOR (2024). I love the beat, but for whatever reason I couldn’t find my way into it with my lyrics. woods took it, dropped the verse, and it became one of those things where I was like, “Oh, I didn’t see it that way.” And when it was done, it was all understood.

“Longjohns” is one of my favorites off Mercy. You have the line that goes, “You talk to me in other people’s words/You don’t believe enough to burn.” It’s similar to “The Lorax,” off I Guess U Had To Be There (2026). On that track you say, “You may know the language but not enough to live.” This relates to what your dad was saying about being your own man. What’s a recent example where you had to really check yourself, to make sure you were living out your words?

All the lyrics come from real life, though sometimes spun in a really hyperbolic way. Talking about, “You talk to me in other people’s words/You don’t believe enough to burn,” that came out of an argument with my wife—these are real things that happen! (laughter). And as I speak to others, I speak to myself. You know that saying where it’s like, when you point the finger you have three pointing back at you? It’s like that. I might see you do this thing, but I do this thing too. We’re both cowards in this way, so let’s not be cowards, right? Let’s say something, let’s have integrity, and let’s do it. It’s like a taunt and challenge to myself. There’s a throughline through all the work, and they’re coming out of relationships and conflicts I have with people.

Do you have an example of when you recently had to be courageous, where you had to step out of your comfort zone and really be bold?

It’s a more personal thing that I wouldn’t wanna put in the interview. But… I did it (laughter). And I lived through the consequences. It wasn’t a pretty story at all.

There’s an interesting thing that happens where you’ll recognize the courage needed to do something, and you’ll have to psych yourself up to have the courage to do it. Is there an example of this from when you were younger?

If we’re going back to those days, it was really the struggle. Like, participating in the fuckshit with friends, and doing all sorts of things. At a certain point I was like, maybe I shouldn’t do this, and a certain guilt would come. There’s this in-between space where it’s like, we’re doing the wrong thing again, but I’m not fully committed and in this gray area. Later on it’ll come and I won’t do it, and I’ll tell my friends like, “Hey, I’m not gonna beat this kid up. I’m not gonna let you do that and go in his pockets.” These are teen-year thoughts. I was growing out of a particular scene.

I wanted to ask about your relationship to religion. You’ve referenced it throughout your life, and I’m curious about how your upbringing has led to certain facets of religion lingering around, and these could be positive or negative things. I was revisiting The Bible and the Gun, and there’s this song “Determined” on there where you’re like, “God knows the heart, everyone sees the truth when the judgment starts.” If you take out the religious flavor, it’s not too dissimilar to the sort of things we’re talking about. Who was Chaz then and who is Chaz now?

I was 20 years old then, and I wasn’t spiritual in that Christian way—I was already not going to church. It was one of those things where my parents were like, alright, we’re gonna go to church. As a child, you don’t really have a choice. I was reading, I was learning, and I really loved the music—we had amazing musicians there—but I couldn’t get down with the doctrine. So I was already living by myself when The Bible and the Gun came out, but something I’ve learned is that you can’t really run away from how you were raised. It prints on you, and it pops out in ways when you’re not paying attention or conscious of it. It informs so much of who I am, even as I try to rewrite my cultural operating system, so to speak, with new experiences and inspirations. Take what you will about The Bible, but there are amazing stories in there. I’m amazed by the parables, and I’m a fan of myths and legends from around the world. So the way that The Bible framed things is really cool to me. The Bible as pure literature—it still pops through in the way I describe things. But yeah, I can never really get away from that.

Can you give me an example of how you can’t get away from those things because of how you were raised?

What do you mean?

I also grew up in the church and I definitely notice that the language I use is part of it. Like, “Oh, I’m wrestling with this struggle.”

(laughs). That’s right!

I also think for me, there’s this feeling I have where I need to sacrifice so much—in terms of my time and energy and money—and it’s to a degree where I’m neglecting my own well-being. And maybe that’s something with my family in general, but I feel like it was ingrained in me.

I definitely relate to that. It’s kind of a Christian thing to wear yourself out in service of others. These days, it takes on different contexts as a dad and as a partner. Like, it’s a dead end. You can’t actually show up to serve people you love every day if you don’t get a chance to refill yourself somehow, to get rest. That’s something I had to learn as an adult, and it’s a very recent thing, to be honest. Having one kid was easy, but when the second one came around—he’s 3 years old now—things got super hectic.

It was this idea that “being selfish” was bad, and maybe “selfish” isn’t the right word, but I needed to be number one in my life so I could be number one in theirs. Right now, I’m juggling many different things for us, but to be in service of y’all, I need to do these things. Me being on tour is a version of that. Being blessed enough to make music and tour and get paid for it, it’s one of those things where it’s like, I’m not gonna be home for three and a half weeks—it’s the longest I’ve been away from my family—but if I were to not do this… we would be doing without (laughs). This is just a shallow financial way of looking at things, but I’m indulging myself in this career, and in the long run this increases an enjoyment of life for all of us.

So this is a financial thing you’re talking about, but do you feel like making music throughout the past few years has helped you become a better father or partner? Are there things you’ve been learning about yourself?

Making music and being creative is about working through things I may not understand. I’m gleaning knowledge and new ways of seeing that can be implemented in my everyday life. With a record like I Told Bessie (2022), there were things I wrote and liked, but it took on a different meaning two years later. I was speaking to my future self, and these were words that were edifying—see, this Christian language programming is still there, I’m using a word like “edify” (laughter). But yeah, working through things creatively forces myself to be honest. It challenges me. Now that I know better, what am I gonna do? If you know better you should do better.

I’m thinking of a song like “Impasse” here. “Just a little bit of grace in the moment she could flip/I can feel the certainty slip around my neck.”

That’s exactly it! That’s the song where I first realized like, this is the real thing, there’s something here spiritually that’s connecting into the physical. I may not understand it in the moment, but it’s something for my future self. That song was about a relationship that crashed and burned in a really spectacular way, and it drastically affected other relationships in my life. It’s like… I saw it coming, huh (laughter). When I was trying to write it, I was reaching for striking imagery, but that’s exactly how it went down in real life, man. It was a big, big thing, and I lost a lot in this relationship here. Things turned out okay, but when you betray people’s trust, there’s a period of repair. And hopefully you can get through that period.

I wanted to ask about “First Light” on the new album. You say you’re “on farmer time”—what do you mean by that?

(laughs). You’re on farmer time today! You’re up before the sun and talking to me. I’m not on farmer time at this point, but yeah, I thought “farmer time” was a funny thing for me. It’s the dad line. I’m up first in the house, I’m making oatmeal, I’m waking up the kids, let’s come down, let’s eat, let’s wash our face, let’s get dressed. I have to wake up and immediately be of service to my children—I’m on farmer time (laughter). With kids, and I knew this in the very first year of having my first child, I learned that I am so much more than what I imagined myself to be. When the first kid came, I found myself with so much energy and desire and ambition. Like, I look in this kid’s eyes and it’s like, “Yo, I gotta do this! I’m responsible for you!” Everything else came second, and everything else was done in service of this child and my relationship with his mom. We’re gonna be okay.

When he first came into the world, that’s when money came into the picture with art. It was a thing of, I wanted to be paid but I was scared to ask for money. I didn’t understand the value of my time, especially in collaboration with other people. And I may not have even understood the value of my work. When he came into the picture, a lot of things were crystalized because my time was the most important thing. If I couldn’t be around my kid and raise him, then what’s really important? So this was 2017, and we’re all in on this Armand Hammer thing. We were in the full swing of things, and it put us on a path to now. That’s him and his mom on the cover of Paraffin (2018).

You have the song “Make Me Wise” where you say, “I write songs, forgetting why I did in the first place.” What’s your motivation for writing songs?

Bro, that’s the ultimate question. It always comes back. For that song, I was playing with the whole “I guess you had to be there” and the fuzziness around memory, where you’re trying to explain the significance of a person, place, thing, or event to people who weren’t there with you. If I go back to earlier songs I’ve written, I’ll sometimes wonder, why did I write that line? And I’ll have to take a moment and think about what I was doing, who I was hanging around with, and maybe the song will jog a memory and I’ll understand why I did these things. I’ve been in such a state of produce, produce, produce. I sometimes don’t take the time to think about why I did certain things, and I’ll just think about the whole instead of the particulars. So I feel like I’ve been in a place of making things and not stepping back and looking at the intricacies.

I was talking about this with somebody yesterday, but back in the day, I was just writing songs because it was cool (laughter). It was cool to just, at the end of the day, be in my room. I would be on some meditation shit. I didn’t understand what meditation was outside of some pop culture, vague Asian thing back then—I’d never been to a yoga class—but there was this idea of being very still.

Going back to the church thing—there were states that people would put themselves in. There’d be all-night prayers, people praying for hours and being worshipful in particular ways, bringing themselves into emotional states through chanting. Writing songs became my way to access or mirror that, but in my way. Back in the day, I’d turn the lights down low and loop up a beat for hours. I’d just be in my journal, writing for hours and hours. I was really taking joy in the discipline of it. I would make time to just be by myself so I could write, and I wasn’t even good yet! (laughter).

Do you remember the first time you wrote a song that you were really proud of, that felt distinctly you?

I do. It was titled “Ice Age,” and it was the first thing I recorded. My uncle was a DJ, and I knew that I wanted him to get on a beat, I wanted to get on a mic, and record it. So that was the very first thing.

Can you tell me about your uncle? I know he’s how you ended up getting weekend shows when you were 20. You had these other figures in your life at church, but then here’s your uncle showing you a different path.

He was a wild guy (laughter). Within my family, he’s the wildest one. Through him was an access point to the technology. He was a DJ, he was collecting vinyl, he had turntables. And he was interviewed by Marcus Moore when he was doing the De La Soul book [High and Rising: A Book About De La Soul (2024)]. My grandmother moved from the Bronx to Queens to Long Island, and he ran with an early [iteration of] De La Soul. I remember being down in that basement, breaking needles. And as I got older, he was always there. He had beats from record pools, so the very first time I heard J Dilla was at his house—the Players 12-inch (2000). I remember him not liking it and I said, “No, no, this is it. I’ve never heard anything like this before.” I really remember that, it was crazy—and then Jay Dee became what he became. So my uncle became this point of access to create all the music I heard in my head. I would go out there on weekends and hang out. His friends would come and play things, he’d DJ things, and he’d be like, “You wanna rap today?” I’d tape it, and I’d have something to listen to for the next couple weeks until I had something else to go in and record.

I know he was in Class A Felony and knew Rakim. Was he telling you stories all the time?

He had stories about music shit, street shit, and he was just a funny, jokey guy. I didn’t know of any other kids who could be like, “Yeah, my uncle has a record deal” and be telling the truth. He was with Mercury Records, and he’d be in the studio, come back home and be like, “Black Sheep left these lyrics, look at them—ha ha ha.” He didn’t really like Black Sheep (laughter). He was just a hater—they had the big hit while Class A Felony didn’t.

What was it like working with him again, as I know he’s on REVELATOR on “The World is Dog” and “CCTV,” as well as on We Buy Diabetic Test Strips (2023).

It felt important, and it still feels important—I have future plans to work with him. To this day, I think he’s one of the best DJ scratchers I know. He has really great timing and rhythm and I understand how he moves in this thing, so it’s a blessing to have him on those joints.

Earlier you were saying that you were too caught up in producing to reflect. You have projects, though, that are single-track collages, like BRB GOTTA GO CHARGE MY TOOTHBRUSH (2022) and INTERFERENCE PATTERN (2024). What’s your headspace like when focusing more on production than rapping? And has producing informed how you rap at all?

I start to pick up production when I’ve exhausted words and am not sure what to say anymore. I’ll go back to the music, the textures, the pitches, the frequencies. Oftentimes, this will trigger emotions, which will then trigger words. That’s how it usually works for me. With those records in particular, I was being indulgent in my interests in sound exploration. I love traditional rap and traditional rap production, but I’ve always wanted there to be room for more adventurous sounds, for a larger palette. It doesn’t just have to be breaks and soul records and gospel records. I’ve got all that—they’re wonderful tools—but what if we try this other thing? Let’s get a little unfamiliar, a little uncomfortable. The sample sources get pretty out there.

Is there something that your fans would be surprised to learn you’re a fan of that makes its way into your work? And this doesn’t have to be a direct sample or anything, but something more broad.

These days, it’s become less about going far out and more about this collage of a really far-out thing with something else I was raised with. I’ll put them together in a way where it’s like, what the fuck was that? That’s what I’m trying to get at now. Just last night, someone was like, “Yo, I heard that you’re favorite rock band is Swans.” That might’ve been a tweet that I had 10 years ago. This kid is probably like 20 years old, y’know what I’m saying? So I guess that was a shock, that a rapper enjoys Swans (laughs).

I think my parents were young enough when they had me that rap was the first music I really remember as a very young kid. They went to the church later, and stopped listening to a lot of secular things, but my first memories are riding around with my dad, listening to Whodini. Or being out at the Ave, in the Colosseum [Mall], and Rakim might be there. Or Video Music Box and seeing the “Follow the Leader” video. So hip-hop for me had these collages, and the collages I make reflect what I was raised on. I love the idea of pulling from sources that seem like they do not relate but realizing that they can.

There’s this book by Adrienne Maree Brown called Emergent Strategy (2017). My wife is a very smart person, and she’s friends with other very smart people and this is how I came to know about it. I understood the book through this idea of collage because that’s how I think it was put together: she’s relating disparate points to make something new. I remember when I was talking to [my wife] about it, we felt we gained new understanding just from that lens. I think collages are just creative problem solving. You’re putting things together that might not make sense, maybe out of desperation, maybe with a strategy, or maybe it’s all that you have.

Is there a song on the new album where there was this element of problem solving? Obviously you’re working with Sebb Bash and he’s handling the production. I’m thinking of a song like “Parental Advisory,” which isn’t super collage-y, but I like how your rapping changes on that song and it feels like a result of this hazy, slurred production.

The way that Sebb makes his beats is totally insane and collage-like—this combination of live instrumentation, DJ manipulation, and sampled bits. It’s 1000% hip-hop collage that way. Interesting choice with the song, “Parental Advisory,” as that’s the one that sticks out like a sore thumb—mostly because of the subject matter, but only in a particular way, in a corporal punishment way. In light of being a dad, I feel like I’m referencing my family and home life often on this record, and I think it’s tied into the last record because of how I’m talking about how I raised myself—I’m looking at how I was raised as I’m raising my own children, and how I want to improve on the design.

This is interesting because now I’m thinking of collage in terms of subject matter. You once said that your source of hope is your family and love. There’s this quote from Horace Andy where he said, “So much people seemed to think that protest songs and love songs should be kept separate, but they’re all part of how life is.” I feel this desire to mix all these things in your own music. Like on “Hands n Feet” where you talk about “mak[ing] revolution irresistible,” and there are songs where you talk about family but also politics—you mention Home Depot in relation to ICE, for example, on “Make Me Wise.”

You mentioned that line from Toni Cade Bambara, “The job of the writer is to make revolution irresistible.” I always loved that line. What also comes to mind is the Audre Lorde quote about the personal being political. The Horace Andy quote I didn’t know, but that lines up here, this idea of being political but also being about love. And for me, the place where I’ve been for the past 10 years is that this is unavoidable. If I’m going to tell the truth about the world, I have to tell the truth about myself, and that’s why my home life pops up here. I can’t deny it. Anything else would be an imaginary, not-true thing. Maybe that could be a lane for me, but at this juncture it’s not. Love is the underpinning for all this music—it’s about reflecting on how to be a better lover, a better partner, a better dad. As I’m looking at myself, I’m looking at the world. As I’m speaking to you, I’m looking back at myself. I need to be open to that sort of discourse.

The first line on “Cantata” was a pretty direct line—it’s not hyperbolic at all. “Let that baby suck your titty and leave me the fuck alone/When you need it I go get it then I be needing my own.” We were talking about putting yourself first, and that’s that kind of thing. The second kid arrived and this mom is feeding, and he’s comfortable with her—he rocks with me but he really rocks with mom. It’s like, you’re always with her, I don’t even get any time (laughter). I’m dad, mom’s inside with baby, and dad’s gotta go out, go shopping, fix this. And it’s like damn, I can’t get no time with wife, I can’t get no time for myself. That line was born out of complete frustration, and I was figuring out how to restructure life so I could find my own fulfillment in the midst of fulfilling others. It’s a funny one because I’ll do it live and people laugh out loud; I never expected that to happen.

What’s it like working with Sebb? You’ve had tracks with him in the past, like “Switchboard” and “Impasse,” but what’s it like to do a full project?

Yeah, we’ve had those collaborations in the past but I really wanted to do a full-length project. He has a really great ear as a producer and DJ and musician—he plays a bunch of things. It started off as a free-for-all—he sent me 50 beats—and I was learning about his songcraft, how he structured and arranged them, and then I had a chance to be in Switzerland with him and make music. I was really seeing the intricacies of how things are done, and it was cool to see that this online energy was able to translate into the real world. We made good shit.

He’s been in New York a couple of times and it turned out we had mutual friends. His really good friend Wali [Bilal] was someone I’d met because his daughter is in the same class as my son. Crazy. And Wali was Alchemist’s roommate when they were at NYU. There were all these connections. And once we got to Switzerland, it was super easy. There’s bonus tracks for the deluxe edition of I Guess U Had To Be There. We made a lot of music really quickly, and that became the 48 HRS EP. We were digging in the crates and playing with all sorts of weird synthesizers in Sebb’s studio. We were getting busy.

I wanted to ask about my favorite song on Mercy, which is “Dogeared.” I’m really moved by both your and billy woods’ verses.

woods had verse of the year for me.

Same, it’s amazing. But I really love your verse too and how contemplative it is. You’re thinking about “trading it all,” and there’s a hopefulness amidst everything. “We’re not talking impossible matters/it’s all chutes and ladders/the patterns never more apparent, glaring.” And then you land on this moment of reflection where you ask, “Who I’m is? Who I’m aren’t?” I like how all this lines up and could be about one’s personal relationships, but also revolutionary matters.

It’s all these things. It’s about trying to be a particular person and seeing my shortcomings and failures, even through this desire. I need to be honest and know that I am not this thing, and it maybe doesn’t feel good, but I am this other thing, and that’s something to work with. I’m trying to look at myself as a whole and not be afraid of what’s in the mirror, even if it’s not developed or just not there at all.

So then who are you not?

(laughs). Who am I not? I am not many things! But I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me (laughter). See, that stuff pops out, but it fits.

It’s an interesting phrase because in one sense it’s this notion that you can have confidence because it’s beyond yourself, but there’s often this weird dynamic with Christianity where you have this God who can help you but you’ll also deflect blame that comes your way.

Oh yeah, it’s not my fault! (laughter). I was contending with that as a kid, and I still haven’t reckoned with it.

In talking about who you are and who you aren’t, I wanted to ask about the reception of your music from your fans. You’ve once mentioned that your fans are more drawn to the darker topics in your music. On Valley of Grace (2017), which is around the time you’re having your first kid, you have the song “Looking for All to Be Rendered” where you’re talking about slavery, among other things. “Cutting ties to trauma that ain’t mine/So I can thrive in the after,” but then you also say “Black joy matters.” I’m thinking about the way that Black artists, even really popular ones, might only have hits when there’s death and all these grim topics coming up.

The music industry exploits darker content and images, and you can get really conspiratorial about this. I’ve been in talks with people who say certain artists are out here promoting agendas that just reinforce all the worst and negative Black stereotypes—or maybe it’s just negative human stereotypes—and not things that promote harmony and balance. I knew this early on—there’s cultural and racial tourism for some fans and listeners, and that might come from a lack in their own lives. They seek art that can express things that they have not or will not experience, or things that they’re really turned on by for whatever reason. And for some fans, it’s the darker things I touch on, and I see this happening with other artists too. Like, you don’t have this in your life and it just entertains you. It feeds something in you.

All this just puts me on the path of being more transparent instead of writing for a particular effect or person. I was repulsed by it. I just wanted to do what’s real to me, and anything else is false posturing in the name of who knows what—for the enjoyment of people who don’t actually care. People really want headline news—someone dead, someone shot, they want Black death and Black trauma at all times, at any cost. When does it stop? When is the appetite ever satiated? Never. The desire to tell the truth about my surroundings and my world includes things like that, but that’s not the whole story, and that’s where shit gets twisted, when it gets presented as just that part.

Has something like this come up with reviews of your work?

With reviews, I wouldn’t say that’s really happened with me or Armand Hammer. If anything, early on there were just all these Cannibal Ox comparisons (laughter), which is weird because I wasn’t ever into them like that when they were out—I came to their thing much later on. But yeah, people seem to be careful with my work, but I’ve seen it with other people and it’s really not it.

Is there anything we didn’t talk about today that you think is important to mention?

I will say, this is the best talk I’ve had for this press run. Thank you for talking to me. You’re a really good conversationalist and a great writer. I follow you on Twitter—I have a burner account—and I see things you say and do. I was surprised when they were like, “Joshua wants to talk with you.” I was like, “Oh, I’ve read this person.” So thank you.

I have a question I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

I wasn’t always this way, but I’ve grown to be a very curious person. I have new ideas and experiences and I love that about this current version of myself.

You weren’t like that when you were younger?

I was an obedient child. I was able to rebel in my ways, but in general I was pretty contained and not very curious about other people and experiences. I grew into that and now it’s on another level because I’m older. They’ll say I shouldn’t do this because I’m in my 40s, but actually no, I don’t give a fuck about that. Curiosity is even more important as I’ve gotten older—it’s important to never lose it because it’s easier to get rigid and fearful about the world when you get older. That’s not how I want to live my life as a 45-year-old man.

When do you feel like this started to happen?

When I was 18 or 19, there was this group of friends I was with who were not from New York. And it was the very first time I’d been with friends who were honest with how I showed up. Friends and romantic relationships are the greatest mirrors for myself, to see how I be. I may think I’m this thing, but then I’m showing up in your life and I’m this other thing. I’ll realize like, oh, I was really shitty. So this group of friends were like, “Why are you talking like that? Why are you so judgmental? Why don’t you listen to what that person is saying?” So getting that sort of honest feedback, at the time I was like, “Shut the fuck up, what are you talking about.” But if that happens again and again and again, it’s like… maybe it’s something I should actually pay attention to. That was a slow process, of seeing how I am. I strive for this honesty.

ELUCID’s new album with Sebb Bash, I Guess U Had To Be There, is out now. ELUCID is currently on tour with billy woods as Armand Hammer throughout 2026. Dates can be found at their website.

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ELUCID’s Picks

The following list includes works that ELUCID read during the creation of I Guess U Had To Be There. The list is presented in the order he sent it.

• Venita Blackburn’s Black Jesus and Other Superheroes: Stories (University of Nebraska Press, 2017)

• Rivers Solomon’s Model Home (MCD, 2024)

• Amiri Baraka’s Black Music (William Morrow and Company, 1967)

• Terence McKenna’s Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge (Bantam Books, 1992)

Thank you for reading the 212th issue of Tone Glow. Talk disruptive for me.

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Gary Higgins (b.1948) is a folk singer-songwriter born in Sharon, Connecticut. Early on, Higgins played in a rock band called The Random Concept, which initially featured Simeon Coxe of Silver Apples before the group went through various lineup changes. Higgins is largely known for his 1973 private-press LP Red Hash, a lustrous psych-folk album that was largely unknown until Drag City reissued it in 2005. Higgins’ debut was the product of a pot bust—he knew he’d serve time in person, and consequently recorded songs in a quick 40 hours with an understanding that he might never have another chance. In the years following the reissue, Higgins has played various shows—both solo and with The Random Concept—and will play at the Chicago Psych Fest this weekend. Drag City has also released an album of newer material called Seconds (2009) and an EP of older, unfinished songs called A Dream A While Back (2011). Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Higgins on the phone on February 11th, 2026 to discuss his childhood, the guitarists who influenced his fingerpicking style, and the pop stars he once backed.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: Can you tell me about your childhood? What was it like?

Gary Higgins: I originally lived in Salisbury, Connecticut in a place called Mount Riga. My grandfather managed a knife-handle and axe-handle company up there. I was too young to have cared about any of that, but I went to the space often because it was an easy walking distance from our house. I remember a lot of walks and things like that, but for most of my childhood, I was in Lime Rock, and it was very rural—it couldn’t have been much rural-er (laughter). There weren’t too many families, but fortunately there were some kids my age and my siblings’ age. I don’t have any bad memories of it at all.

What’s something that city folk would not expect or know about living in a super rural area?

In the city, you get out in the street and you can go anywhere and within 20 feet you can find a couple places to eat and shop, whereas where I lived, we had a general store for a little while but it was tiny. If you wanted to do any grocery shopping, it was a half-hour ride. It was mostly trees and grass and lawns and spattered homes. If I lived in the city, I don’t think I would be as laid-back as I tend to be. Where I’m living right now is about five miles from where my parents grew up. I wouldn’t want to go anywhere else at this point, and it’s still a pain to go to places because anywhere that has any city life is at least an hour away, but I’m used to that.

Did you spend a lot of time in nature?

I don’t think I appreciated it but I was certainly involved in it constantly (laughter). I got hit by a car when I was on my bicycle in third grade—that was my stupidity. This was by my parents’ house. I can remember my next-door neighbor had a daughter and she was about the same age as me. We used to climb trees all the time, and we climbed a fairly large pine tree once in the back of her parents’ house. We decided it was a bright move to use the branches to cross from one tree to the next, but we got stuck. We couldn’t really go anywhere and we had to call for help. Her father had to climb up the tree and he managed to grab me but the branch that his daughter was on broke and—honest to God—he caught her by the hair. At the time, it felt like we were up above 50 feet, but it was probably about 20. So there were lots of crazy adventures and doing things because of the area—rock climbing, tree climbing, all this was second nature. I didn’t appreciate any of this back then, but I think that changed in my 20s when I realized how good I had it.

Given that you’re living in the same area where you grew up, what sort of things have changed? Are there certain things you miss?

The onset of supermarkets and malls really did away with a lot of the small-town businesses. This town I lived in was small but used to have two thriving grocery stores, and they went out of business 30 years ago because they couldn’t compete. These small-town stores and mom-and-pop businesses are all gone. This area is now almost entirely a suburb—people moved out of New York and bought a lot of the properties. Two of my neighbors are like that. They’re all really nice people, but it’s not exactly the same; this is a second or third home for them. That happened to this whole area because it’s not that far from New York City—about an hour and a half—and there’s trains and stuff. So it’s changed quite a bit in terms of who lives there, but not so much physically. A lot of the young people had to move out because there were no jobs for them and they couldn’t afford the properties; it’s more of an older area than what it used to be.

What was the general sentiment of those around you when these supermarkets and malls came in?

I think in general people were very happy that they had a choice; they gravitated towards those places. Instead of having only one type of bread, there were multiple (laughter). That was really exciting for people. But it escalated—it went from supermarkets to malls and that really wiped down the small-town businesses.

Was there a point at which you decided to start playing music?

I started out playing the French horn, and this was in the school orchestra. I never got very good at that, but nobody was any good (laughter). There were only about 12 to 15 students and we were awful. That instrument was not for me, and it’s really difficult to practice by yourself—I mostly enjoyed the group aspect of playing. So it wasn’t all that interesting to do and I left that fairly quickly, but I knew there was some spark inside of me for music. In the early to mid-60s, the folk music scene really jumped out at everyone. Rock and roll was what it was, but the “cooler” people gravitated towards folk music. And when that took place, it became a really big thing for me. That’s when I got a guitar. I saw, relatively quickly, that I had an affinity for it and I just wanted to have more. Early in my music career, I was in a band called The Random Concept with Simeon Coxe [of Silver Apples]. He came from New York City with his wife at the time, and we worked at a Jewish camp not too far from where I live. That’s where I met him—I worked there for a while.

Do you remember the first folk musicians who really wowed you?

Doc Watson’s guitar playing was important, Dave Van Ronk was a big influence. Those two were the biggest for me because the fingerpicking style was really interesting to me, but there was even The Kingston Trio, and Odetta, too. Doc Watson is an incredible player and I was fortunate to see him play once. He played live with his son in Great Barrington, Massachusetts at a theater like 25 or 30 years ago. My son went with me. Doc Watson could still play his ass off, it was unbelievable—he must’ve been in his early 80s.

Do you remember the first concerts you went to?

There was a place up in Massachusetts where they’d have some concerts. I saw Jim Kweskin Jug Band up there, and I saw John Hammond up there too, but I wasn’t a kid—I was in my late teens or early 20s. It was really electrifying to see these people I listened to on records in real life. I remember seeing The Band play, and I always liked them, but I was really impressed by how powerful they were. Their records didn’t come off as having much power—they came off as being well-crafted—and I was blown away by how different and great it was. It only made me like them more. With the early concerts, I don’t remember a lot about the performances per se, probably because I was so overwhelmed about being able to see these shows at all. I was younger than most people, and I think my brother took me. I have two older brothers and a younger brother and sister. My oldest brother—he’s 6 years older than me—is responsible for my exposure to just about everything. I remember when he got a stereo and it was an unbelievable piece of equipment—a stereo phonograph and stereophonic records! It was amazing.

You mentioned that cool people were into folk music, I’m assuming your brother fell into this camp?

Not that oldest brother, he was more straight. The brother in between my oldest brother and me, who’s 3 years older than me, was more on the cool side. At the time, denim jackets were unusual but the cool thing to wear if you were into the folk scene. You’d smoke a little bit of pot, too. He exposed me to a lot of music, and he worked at Camp Freedmen, where me and Simeon worked. There was a lot of folk music there—I was exposed to a lot.

Can you tell me more about this camp?

The camp was basically a getaway for the Jewish people in New York. It was a camp, so there was a place to stay for the weekend, and there were events—talent shows and whatnot. I met people, got exposed to others, people who played guitar showed me chords and how to do other things—it was great. I worked there whenever they came up, and it was a weekend thing from Friday to Sunday. I can’t say how frequent it was, but it was probably two or three times a month. I was a dishwasher, mainly. I started playing guitar in 1962 or 1963, so I was working there around then.

Do you remember the first song you played on guitar?

Probably the fingerpicking song “Freight Train.” I was really interested in fingerpicking; just strumming chords is nice and it has its place, but fingerpicking always grabbed my attention and I always wanted to learn more. That song was a fairly easy one to learn, and there was also “Cocaine” by Dave Van Ronk.

When was the first time you smoked pot?

It was definitely at that camp, and I think I was a sophomore in high school. It was definitely a no-no, but that made it even more exciting. Simeon was probably the main influence, but it was him and his wife and both my older brothers and a whole bunch of other people who were there. That was quite a popular thing to do there: smoking pot and drinking Ballantine Ale (laughter). I didn’t really care about the communal aspect of smoking, but I really liked how I felt while I played guitar, I really liked eating food—the munchies—and I liked the laughter. It was really exciting to play while high; it was like changing from one dimension to five. Like, oh, that’s what that chord sounds like. It really opened up doors for me, and that’s what mattered—it was important for me creatively.

When did you start writing your own songs?

I didn’t start until two or three years later, probably around ’64 or ’65. I might’ve dabbled before that but I don’t think anything got completed.

That’s quite some time until your debut album, Red Hash (1973). What was going on in the interim?

I was playing in a couple bands, and The Random Concept was one of them. That actually took me away from folk and into rock and roll. That took up a lot of that space and time; we moved to New York and played there and it was very exciting. And while folk music was on the back burner, it was always part of who I was. I played in that band and then around 1970, we did an offshoot—a couple us from that band and then a couple other people who ended up on Red Hash—did an acoustic band called Wooden Wheel. It was all acoustic music with a couple guitars, cello, flute, and mandolin.

It’s kind of a funny story, when we first formed The Random Concept, we were three guitar players. Nobody could play anything else. We divvied up the responsibilities and I liked the bass guitar, so I played that. Dave Beaujon ended up playing rhythm guitar, Jake Bell ended up playing lead, we had Simeon, and then we got a drummer. At that point, I didn’t totally give up acoustic music, but I hardly played any. Rock and roll was just way more exciting, and people wanted to come hear it—people got moved by it easier—so it was more fun to play.

What did The Random Concept sound like back then?

Most of it was cover music. We did The Rolling Stones, Blues Magoos, and we did some of The Lovin’ Spoonful’s songs—we ended up living in the same hotel as they did, is why. We started writing songs around then, but just as we started doing that, the whole thing fell apart; me and Jake and Dave ended up moving back here, getting a different drummer, and we started a whole different thing.

Why did it fall apart? Was it because of relationships between band members?

It actually was. We all sang and played and we had a lead singer who was Simeon. We all wanted to sing as well, and I love the guy to this day—he did a lot for us—but vocally, he wasn’t the greatest. We had great voices, and we all wanted to sing. Also, the drummer we had was absolutely talented but he was a maniac—lots of drugs, lots of drinkin’, and we got tired of him showing up drunk to gigs. We mostly got tired of that. And we loved him too, and the parting was friendly, but we wanted more. Simeon went on to form Silver Apples and Ronnie [Bailey] played with a couple successful soul bands in New York for a while, but then I don’t know what happened to him. I know he did a lot of time in prison for armed robbery or something—he was a nice guy, but he had a rough life.

So this was around ’67 or ’68, and with this new iteration of The Random Concept, the whole music scene had really blossomed and there were a lot of venues within driving distance. We would work on original stuff every weekend. We’d have these compositions, but we would have these long jams that would take off in the middle of a song, and we’d come back by the end of them. Everything we wanted to do seemed possible—whether it was good or not is a different story (laughter), but it was possible. We had a really big following, and the response to what we did was really good, which made things more fun. It went well.

The Random Concept still plays, though not as much. Terry [Fenton] lives in Boston and he comes up here, but not very often. And none of us are getting any younger—I just turned 78. Over time, we got a lot better at recording, especially at mixing down, but all of us had families and children, so we had to balance everything pretty carefully to keep food in everyone’s stomach. We all managed, though.

I wanted to talk about Red Hash (1973). I know the story behind it, where you recorded it shortly before you had to go to prison for weed. You have a song like “I Can’t Sleep At Night,” and the opening lines are pretty brutal: “I can’t sleep at all/You know why?/’Cause underneath it all/I could die.” Were you having existential crises? What was going on then?

That came out of a breakup I had with a woman. That got written the evening I was in the middle of all that. I like the song a lot, and while the words didn’t come out so positive, I was never like that—and I hope never get like that. I was just having a bad time, and I was broken.

Were a lot of the songs on the album about this breakup?

No. A lot of the songs were written before that, maybe even a couple years. The idea behind the album was that I knew that I better get these songs recorded because I didn’t know if I’d have another chance to record them again. I was getting the tunes together that were “good enough” to do, and recording them all at one time meant that they didn’t come from one particular period. Most of the songs were written between 1970 and 1972.

Can you talk about the opening track, “Thicker Than a Smokey”? You’re talking about traveling and trying to find yourself.

A lot of the songs kind of just happened. The words that fit with them, that came through… well, I don’t remember what I was thinking about at the time. It wasn’t like I was longing to take a trip to Mexico or anything; they were just words.

So these were just stories you were telling.

Yes, they were stories that self-developed.

This includes “Unable to Fly” then, where you’re talking about your brother and mother?

Yup.

And you never worked on a farm, as mentioned on “Down On the Farm”?

Well, I actually did work on a farm (laughter). One of my best friends at the time had a farm and I worked there a couple of summers. I learned how to run all the equipment—tractors, hay balers, stuff like that. This was a guy who owned the farm and he came from a New England family—this was generations of farmers. He had this one type of tractor that was really old—it had these huge wheels on the back with metal cleats on them. We had to crank the thing up to start it, and it took all your strength to do that. That was the coolest equipment I could recall; when you drove down the road, it left cleat marks in the asphalt. It’s funny—my sister and her husband ended up buying that farm, and they converted it into a nice home.

You’re talking about farming, and I wanted to ask about your relationship with the guitar. Do you view it as a tool that you have to get a better handle on, like a craftsman would?

I was always trying to find ways to make new sounds with it and not just play it. When the Red Hash reissue came out, it was so many years since I’d owned a guitar. I had to go to New York—it was exciting, the Drag City thing. Ben Chasny [of Six Organs of Admittance] had a concert somewhere in New York and they wanted me to sit in, which was really fun. I literally had to relearn how to play the songs on that album; I had no idea what the chord positions or tunings were. I know them now like the back of my hand, but it was so long since I last played them. At one point, I was very proficient at the guitar and with fingerpicking, and while I do a little bit of it now, it’s mostly chords and tuning progressions—that’s what I’m into these days; my relationship with the guitar turned more into tunings and strange chords and seeing how they interacted with one another.

What guitarists got you interested in exploring different tunings?

Joni Mitchell and Crosby, Stills & Nash. It was pretty common—these odd tunings. I have three or four now that are my go-to. Joni Mitchell is the queen—well, the queen and the king—of guitar tunings. It’s amazing. Somebody gave me a book years ago that had all her tunings in it and I was blown away that she used so many different ones. I liked a lot of her songs, but I love Blue (1971), and Court and Spark (1974) is my favorite.

Did you already know what all the arrangements were gonna be like for Red Hash when you went to record the songs?

One of the more amazing things about it is that we recorded the whole thing in 40 hours. The only regret I have is that it was only four tracks and I couldn’t easily mix them. I wanted to remix the album when Drag City reissued the album, but they didn’t want to. I wasn’t involved for the original mixing—I was off in prison when the mixing took place—and while they did a good job, there are some things I would’ve done differently.

What’s something you would change?

People don’t know this, but there’s quite a bit of my drum parts on the album. And part of that is the limitation of 4-track machinery and mixing ability. That’s not something that would take place today. John Colpitts [of Oneida] interviewed me back in 2005 and he told me he didn’t know there were any drums on those songs (laughter). So that’s one small thing. I have no regrets, but I still would like to mix them again—I still have the master tapes. After years, I thought I didn’t have them, but I eventually found out I did. With what I just described to you, they were smaller reels because it was only four channels, and then they were mixed down to two. They’re all over the place. I had to send a master of Red Hash to Chicago for the reissue and they barely survived the ordeal.

Do you mind talking with me about prison?

I was sentenced for two years and nine months, but I had a very good lawyer and I did a habeas corpus and got one of the chargers knocked back, so I got out of there in a year and nine months or something. It wasn’t fun. They had programs there where you could earn what they called “good time” per month so you could get out early. If you joined a drug program, you got seven days knocked off per month instead of five. I didn’t like a lot about the drug program, but I liked that it was isolated from the rest of the population. The first week or so there, though, was scary. They had this thing, and I don’t know if they do it anymore, but it was called “concept.” There was a hierarchy of people, and you had to listen to what they said. If you didn’t, they’d literally scream at you at the top of their lungs right at your face. We’d get woken up at 3 o’clock in the morning and move furniture around, and then mop the floor with shoelaces.

What? With shoelaces?

Correct. It never ended up that you finished the whole thing, but you would do it and they’d eventually say, “That’s enough, back to bed.” That was weird. The idea was that it was supposed to make you more self-aware. And, well, it made me more self-aware of how quickly I wanted to get out of there (laughter). The other guy I got busted with was also in the program with me, so it wasn’t all bad all the time, but there were odd things like that. You’d work your way up the hierarchy and you’d eventually get your own room, which I did. I got my guitar brought in too, and I would play it. It was a pretty organized program, so people had specific jobs and that helped make the days go by.

What was the first thing you did when you got out of prison?

I think we went to a restaurant and I had a nice meal. I wasn’t allowed to be in establishments that had liquor, so I couldn’t go to bars for a while. Things have changed so much, and that’s one of the most frustrating things about it—within a 20-mile radius of my house, there are seven or eight cannabis stores. It’s ridiculous.

Do you still smoke?

I do not. Going to prison took all the joy out of it. Instead of enjoying it, I only got paranoid and fearful. And then I got married and had a child and needed to keep a job. The biggest promise I made to myself was to never go back to an environment like that again—I never wanted to do anything that would jeopardize my freedom. I don’t have anything morally against pot, and I’m curious about the strength of the new stuff, but yeah. I’ve never been to a dispensary either, and I’d like to go in just to see what it’s like, but I’ve just never gone in. I could go in there and tell them my story, but they probably wouldn’t care (laughter).

Fifteen years ago, Drag City released Dream a While Back (2011), which had some of the other songs you wrote in the early 1970s.

Those songs never got fully developed for one reason or another, so they were kind of like outtakes. I thought “Song to Springtime” was one of the better songs I’d ever written—it’s a raw recording, and that’s the only one there is, but it just never got fully developed. All the songs were like that. My friend Bill Lockwood recorded those songs, as well as the ones on Red Hash, and most of them were done at a place called The Old Chestnut Inn. It had cabins that people rented, and the reason I was there was that my girlfriend’s mother owned it. It was like anybody’s house, really, but it had a small pond and some cabins in the back—made of chestnut!

You also had Seconds (2009), which featured newer material. What was the impetus for recording again after all these years?

I had evolved from the Red Hash days and I had new material that I considered really good. I wanted to get that out there. There are parts of me that are nothing like the music on Red Hash. Having that reissued and getting all the publicity was a wonderful thing—do not get me wrong—but that was me in 1972, and it was 2005 when it got reissued. I had done a lot, musically, in between. I listened to Seconds recently and I think we did a great job on it, and I’m a little surprised it didn’t get more love. I don’t know why—maybe because people who like Red Hash didn’t think it sounded like that—but I’m not disappointed with the album.

The “5 A.M. Trilogy” was basically three songs that ran into each other, and we probably shouldn’t have done it like that (laughter). And the reason is that people have a hard time getting past three or four minutes of anything. You have to commit yourself to 13 minutes and I think most of the listening public would prefer to listen to more than one song in that time. Maybe I’m wrong, though. I think that’s something we should’ve done, and I also think we should’ve chosen a different cover for it. I like it—it’s a picture of a photograph—but Red Hash was colorful and lively while this one was dark. Maybe if we had a more inviting cover it could’ve helped, but who knows—it is what it is, and I’m still happy with how it came out.

You mentioned that you didn’t play guitar for a couple decades when the Red Hash reissue happened. Were you playing other instruments?

I kind of skipped over this, but I was the bass player for the second coming of The Random Concept, and soon thereafter I became the drummer. The drums were my major instrument for 20+ years. I still have my Ludwigs from 1966. When you play the drums, it’s a lot more physical, and you’re not having to worry about specific notes, so playing it was freeing in some ways. When we moved back to Connecticut from New York, and this was when we were trying to get away from that drummer, the band needed to find a new one and I said I’d do it. I played my first professional gig only two months after I started, and the funny thing is that I played drums for Len Barry—he had hits in the early ’60s. He was doing tours in secondary clubs, and our band ended up backing him for one gig, and that was only after two months of playing! I can’t imagine I was very good, but he never complained. It was really fun. He was a well-known guy, the place was packed, and the hits he had I liked very much. I was very familiar with his music. Before that, I played bass for Gary U.S. Bonds. This was the same club and the same sort of situation. And Dee Dee Sharp, too. These big-time people who couldn’t play auditoriums anymore were doing what they could, and they were still bigger than local bands so they still drew a big crowd.

You have your show coming up for the Chicago Psych Fest. Do you have anything in particular planned for that?

There’ll be a lot of songs off the Red Hash album, and then there are two or three new ones that nobody has heard aside from a few people around here. We’re looking forward to it a lot. I played The Hideout years ago, and I opened for Baby Dee, who’s another Drag City artist.

I end all my interviews with the same question and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

At this point in time? I thank God I can still think, I can still walk, I can still talk, I can still play. I hope that never goes away.

Gary Higgins’ music can be found at Bandcamp and the Drag City website. He plays the Chicago Psych Fest this weekend. Details can be found here.

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