Tone Glow 224: Stephen Vitiello
An interview with the American musician about the late Steve Roden, soundtracking video art, and his collaborative LP with Brendan Canty & Hahn Rowe, 'Second' (2025)
Stephen Vitiello
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.
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.
Thank you for reading the 224th issue of Tone Glow. Mind it and enjoy.
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.