Outside Music Inside the Golden State

Brandon died February 21, 2024, nearly 3 years after this interview. He was a composer of experimental music, and a very good friend of mine. This interview touches on topics like: attention (inside & outside of concert settings), processing trauma through music, mental illness, drug usage, the psychology of repetition, the harmonic properties of multiphonics, spectralism, whole number ratios,...

Interview originally recorded March, 2021.  Eleven trips to the Mayan region and an investigation of some 35 years into Precolumbian thought have indelibly marked and changed the work of this U.S.-born composer. Haladyna’s Mayan Cycle now stretches to thirty-five highly distinctive pieces, including such titles as Zaquico’xol, El Llanto de Izamal, The Maya Curse Pedro de Alvarado, Pok-ta-Pok, 2012...

Interview originally aired July 5, 2021.  Joel Feigin is an internationally performed composer, whose operas, chamber, orchestra, and piano works have been widely praised for their “very strong impact, as logical in musical design as they are charged with emotion and drama.” (Opera Magazine). Feigin’s opera, Twelfth Night , based on Shakespeare’s comedy, was produced in North Carolina, Chicago, an...

Peruvian immigrant Anaís Azul (they/them) is a California based singer-songwriter, composer, and teaching artist. Described as “stunningly honest and vulnerable,” their artistry engages with music as a tool for community building, cross-genre collaboration, and collective healing. Azul writes music that is in conversation with looped vocal harmonies, classical melodies, and Latin American singer-s...

Moths, Clownfisher, Dylan Marx, The Sandman, Oracle of Light, Purveyor of Goods, Great Overtaker, Stopping by for Soup, Standing on the Corner with a Glass of Water, Dumping it out on the Sidewalk, missed the plants, missed the plant, went back, wrote a postcard, postmarked it, forgot to address it, sitting in a big mail room waiting to be sorted, sort of open to that Pieces Featured: Chan Hey, Sa...

The Los Angeles Electroacoustic Ensemble (LAEE) was founded in 2018 by its core members Zaq Kenefick, Christina Lord, Marcus Carline, and Glen Grey. In this episode, the group discusses how they first came together, their aesthetic goals for the ensemble, their process for writing and developing new compositions, and their debut album LAEE, which released January 2021. Pieces Featured: contact ast...

Daniel Newman-Lessler is a composer, conductor, pianist, singer, educator, and dabbler in watercolor and pastels.  His compositions have been performed by players and ensembles across the country, and impressively he has also found repeated success as a conductor and performer.  We met at the California Institute of the Arts, where he is currently a Lilian Disney Scholar in the MFA Performer-Compo...

Andrew Kaluzynski is a composer, improviser, and multimedia artist living in Oakland, CA. Andrew's music endeavors to explore relationships between gesture and feedback, and the effects of aleatoric input on improvisations and compositions. Andrew often employs the use of obsolete and/or idiosyncratic technology as a means of restraint, inspiration, and focus, in order to cultivate a live ele...

Alex Hawthorn is an Artist, Composer, and Technologist based in Los Angeles and Brooklyn. His work interrogates notions of archive and memory, bringing together aspects of traditional composition and experimental sound design with elements of photography, videography, and other forms of digital media.  In his solo work, he combines elements of old and new technologies: traditional orchestral scori...

Andrew Jamieson: composer, improviser, & bandleader of the Avant-Gospel Trouble Ensemble. We talk about dialogues in music and community, race relations in American music, cultural appropriation, and musical accountability. Andrew even does a live improvisation near the end of the interview! Music Featured, in order heard: Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ‘Round Deep River Daily Improvisation No...

Scott Perry earned his PhD in music composition from UCSB in 2019. He holds a BA from UCSB (CCS), an MFA from California Institute of the Arts, and a MA from UC Davis. His teachers include Beverly Grigsby, Jeremy Haladyna, Kurt Rohde, Wolfgang von Schweinitz, Ulrich Krieger, Pablo Ortiz, Mika Pelo, David Rosenboom, Curtis Roads and Clarence Barlow. Pieces featured, in order heard: Continuum Music...

Jeremy Rosenstock is a composer, pianist, and installation artist in California. In this episode, originally aired 11/30/2020 on KCIA, we talk about his compositional outlook, Simone Weil, socialism, listening to sound on its own terms, a piano department, and many other things. You can also hear some selections of his great music! Pieces featured, in order heard: Renunciation of Time (unreleased)...

Today's episode features Alison Niedbalski and the band she leads "qualia." Alison's music is tagged on bandcamp as: experimental, jazz, progressive death soul, torch gospel, great American songbook, and new wave old fashioned. Some of the things we talked about: covering Captain Beefheart songs, the legacy of Carla Bley & Annette Peacock, the effect of trauma on the creati...

Tim Rowe is a drummer, painter, video maker. His video series "How to Play the Drums by Tim Rowe"  uses all those mediums and others to touch upon subjects from the silly to the historical to the philosophical to the purely musical. We talk about his careers as a drummer & painter, how he makes his videos, why he makes the artistic decisions he makes, his personal connection to &...

Cheryl E. Leonard is a San Francisco-based composer, performer, field recordist, and instrument builder whose works investigate sounds, structures, and objects from the natural world. Her projects cultivate stones, wood, water, ice, sand, shells, feathers, and bones as musical instruments, and often feature one-of-a-kind sculptural instruments and field recordings from remote locales. We talk abou...

Nathan Corder is an Oakland-based composer of works for electronics, objects, and arrays of people.  Our chat covered topics like performer agency & control in composition, fixed media composition vs. composing for people and/or objects, and nontraditional ways of conceiving rhythm and musical time. Pieces featured, in order heard: Untitled (for string trio and electronics) Appetite Push Locks...

Christoffer Schunk is an artist based in Los Angeles. His portfolio vacillates between audio and theater, resulting in intricately staged productions, films, and sound art.  His audio compositions incorporate almost everything: theatricality, humor, strange instrumentation (farts, hunting calls, dolls, to name a few), noise, and many other things. We talk a bit about content production on the inte...

Pander Sera is a noise-pop artist from the LA area. Our conversation touches on topics like practical uses of magic, equipment which grants a view on infinity, gender transition, pop punk as a modern folk music, and many other interesting things. https://pandersera.bandcamp.com/ https://pandersera.com/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd8uxKf6JYUIR5tUjKm-v_g https://soundcloud.com/pander-sera http...

Memory Leaks Onto The Rug is secretive and anonymous artist who has been recording tapes onto tapes since 2014, these days out of Santa Cruz, California.  In this interview, originally aired 10/5/2020, we talk about some of their recent and older music releases, how they make music, names, and about birds and plants and places. Check out their bandcamp: https://memoryleaksontotherug.bandcamp.com/...

Composer/sound artist Dr. Ron K. Sedgwick received his PhD in music from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His acoustic and electro-acoustic works have received numerous awards and have been performed and broadcast throughout the world. He has studied composition with Professors Joel Feigin, Karen Tanaka, Kurt Rohde, Samuel Adler, and electronic music with Professors Curtis Roads and Cl...

Patrick Talesfore, Jr. is a drum set artist from Sunnyvale, CA. His playing has been described by master drummer Kenwood Dennard as '...cognizant, deliberate, musical...like facing a life or death moment. Passion personified.' Since 2011, Patrick has performed solo and with Cerce, Space Devil Rest in Peace, infant, Nishad George, Dylan Ewen, Sam Morrison, Piotr Lato, Matt Hull, David Lec...