Other Minds Podcast

Pianist Stephen Siek served as a professor of music at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, where he taught piano, music history, American music, the aesthetics of music, and film music. He is currently Director of the Emeritus College Academy for Continued Learning at Arizona State University. He has performed and lectured at piano conferences for organizations such as the Historical Keybo...

Composers Inside Electronics is a group of composer/performers dedicated to the composition and live collaborative performance of electronic and electro-acoustic music. The group was formed in 1973 with David Tudor and is known for its pioneering use of original live electronics, including custom-built software instruments, resonant sculptural instruments, rotating and focused loudspeaker systems,...

David Rothenberg is a composer, clarinetist, philosopher, and author of several books on animal songs, including Why Birds Sing , which was turned into a documentary by the BBC in 2006. He has more than forty albums under his own name, and has worked with scientists to decode the mockingbird’s song and written stories on cicada music for the New York Times and whale music for National Geographic ....

The “fresh, daring and incisive” ( Fanfare ) compositions of Amy Williams have been presented by leading international performers, including the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, JACK Quartet, Bent Frequency, Ensemble Musikfabrik, Wet Ink, International Contemporary Ensemble, Junction Trio, Orpheus, pianist Ursula Oppens, soprano Tony Arnold, and bassist Robert Black....

Pamela Z is a composer/performer and media artist working with voice, live electronic processing, sampled sound, and video. A pioneer of live digital looping techniques, she processes her voice in real time to create dense, complex sonic layers. Her works combine experimental extended vocal techniques, operatic bel canto, found objects, text, sampled sounds, and custom MIDI controllers that allow...

Choreographer Nancy Karp grew up in Los Angeles, where she was an early student at CalArts. She embraces elaborate structures working with units of pure movement, investigating their potential through combination and variation. From these “structural investigations” emerge patterns and phrases that become her dances. In 1980, she founded her dance company, Nancy Karp + Dancers. On Night 3 of this...

Other Minds’s own Devin King joins us to read an excerpt from our first ever OM book, Peter Garland’s Ingram Marshall: A Personal and Musical Appreciation . Born in 1952 in Portland, Maine, Peter Garland was one of the original students at CalArts in 1970, where his principal teachers were Harold Budd and James Tenney. From 1971 to 1991 he edited and published Soundings magazine and press, where h...

Electroacoustic composer, improviser, and harpist Zeena Parkins is a pioneer of contemporary harp practices, making use of extended techniques, object preparations, and electronic processing. In her compositions, Parkins utilizes collections, recombination, historic proximities, geography, and movement. On Night 3 of this year’s Other Minds Festival, Parkins will perform her new work Modesty of th...

Putu Septa is a composer and musician from the village of Padangtegal, Ubud, Bali. To contribute to new music on Balinese gamelan, Septa initiated a new gamelan ensemble–Nata Swara–which performs with, among others, Gamelan Sada Sancaya, an orchestra of extended range bronze instruments designed by Septa, and Kendang Briuk, an instrument set consisting of a varied collection of Balinese kendang dr...

Kristine Tjøgersen’s compositional practice is characterized by curiosity, imagination, humor, and precision. She has a special interest in the interplay between the visual and the auditory as well as the natural world. Her collaboration with researchers and biologists is a source of new sound and scenic ideas, incorporating organic forms into the music. On Night 3 of this year’s Other Minds Festi...

Samuel Adams (b. 1985) is an American composer. Gramophone Magazine praised Adams as “among the most interesting composers of the millennial generation in his negotiation of the tensions that shape and define his musical narratives: between directness and implication, silence and resonance, emotion and its aftermath.” His work resists the traditional tensions of classical music, blending acoustic...

SPECIAL BONUS EPISODE: On Sunday, September 7, 2025, Other Minds will present a two piano recital of the music of “Blue” Gene Tyranny and Robert Ashley with pianists Sarah Cahill and Joseph Kubera at Mills College at Northeastern University in Oakland.  Robert Ashley and “Blue” Gene Tyranny were both iconic and beloved teachers at the Mills College Music Department. They were opposites in many way...

We have another special episode for our subscribers, a recording of the pre-concert talk by musicologist Simon Morrison at our concert of the complete piano sonatas of 20th century Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya, performed by Conor Hanick. Born in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) in 1919, Galina Ustvolskaya’s expressive and vigorous music was deemed problematic in the USSR early in her career a...

A Year of Deep Listening was a 365-day online celebration of Pauline Oliveros’ legacy, coinciding with what would have been her 90th birthday. The Center for Deep Listening, established at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2014, posted one text score per day, totaling 365 pieces, which will be published in book form on January 28, 2025, as A Year of Deep Listening: 365 Text Scores for Pauline Ol...

Thea Farhadian is a composer and violinist who creates multi-textured sound worlds which employ an array of elements drawn from her engagement with Western classical music, performance art, Arabic classical music, and live electronic processing. She collaborates with a network of Bay Area, East Coast, and international colleagues and her work has been seen and heard at Galerie Mario Mazzoli in Ber...

Trimpin is a sound sculptor, composer, engineer, and inventor. A specialist in interfacing computers with traditional instruments, he has developed ways of playing instruments ranging from giant marimbas to stacks of electric guitars via computer. His work integrates sculpture, sound, and live performance. Born in Germany, Trimpin spent several years living and studying in Berlin, working as a set...

IMA is the electro-percussion project of electronic sound artist Amma Ateria and percussionist Nava Dunkelman. The duo has been presented in residency at The Stone, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, San Francisco Art Institute, and Stanford University and collaborated with Ikue Mori, Fred Frith, John Zorn, Matmos, and many others. IMA will perform The Flowers Die in Burning Fire on the fina...

Jan Martin Smørdal is a Norwegian composer and performer of contemporary music. With a background in experimental bands and improvisation, he writes music often inspired by social phenomena: imitation and mimicry; swarms, flocks, and other collective behaviors; memory; and the unevenness inherent to being human. His music has been performed at festivals such as Ultima, ISCM, MATA, and Borealis and...

Marshall Trammell is an experimental archivist, percussionist, conductor, and composer. His aesthetics and activism are centered in social change interventions using political aesthetic theory, data creation, mapping, and collective music-and-artmaking in order to relocate the act of co-production from traditional cultural institutions into communities. Hafez Modirzadeh is a saxophonist, composer,...

Brian Baumbusch is a composer, instrument designer, and musicologist whose works engage the use of new technologies while also drawing on deep cross-cultural histories. His Polytempo Music, performed by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, is being issued in three different formats simultaneously: as a compact disc on Other Minds Records, as a virtual reality application for the Meta Ques...

Annea Lockwood’s compositions range from sound art and environmental sound installations to concert music. Water has been a recurring focus of her work and her three installation sound maps of rivers: the Hudson River, the Danube, and the Housatonic River have been widely presented. She is a recipient of the SEAMUS Lifetime Achievement Award 2020 and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts...

Karen Power is a composer from Cork, Ireland whose work spans orchestral music, sound installation, music for dance and experimental film, and free improvisation. Since 2012, much of her work has been concerned with the use of field recordings and ambient sounds. Power has a new album with Quiet Music Ensemble out now on Other Minds Records, …we return to ground…, which surveys her field recording...

Adam Tendler is a New York-based pianist and author. A pioneer of DIY culture in concert music, in his early twenties Adam performed in all fifty states as part of a grassroots recital tour he called America 88x50, which became the subject of his memoir, 88x50. After his father’s unexpected death in 2019, he used his inheritance to commission a group of composers including Laurie Anderson, Timo An...

Giacomo Fiore is a guitarist and musicologist and has premiered more than two dozen works for justly-tuned, electric, and classical guitars. As a scholar, his research focuses on American experimental music, intonation, and performance, and he teaches historical and practical music courses at the University of San Francisco and UC Santa Cruz. In the interview, we discuss Fiore’s new album Lost Hor...

Soosan Lolavar is a British-Iranian composer, researcher, and lecturer living in London. Having studied Iranian classical music, her music draws on ideas from both Western and Iranian traditions with a focus on the diaspora experience. Her album Girl with the London chamber orchestra Ruthless Jabiru was released in March 2024, and her book Embodied Research Through Music Composition and Evocative...