TAK Editions Podcast

On this episode we’re celebrating Star Maker Fragment’s birthday with vocalist and composer Jeffrey Gavett! A founding member of Loadbang and Ekmeles, and longtime collaborator of Taylor Brook, Jeff joins Taylor and Charlotte to talk about microtonal music, collaboration and digital nonsense. Star Maker Fragments: https://takensemble.bandcamp.com/album/star-maker-fragments Jeffrey Gavett: https://...

On this episode we celebrate the release of ‘field anatomies,’ a collection of blisteringly physical works for flutes and electronics, featuring flutist and fearless leader of TAK, Laura Cocks. Laura and Charlotte Mundy speak with the composers featured on the album– David Bird, Bethany Younge, Jessie Cox, DMR and Joan Arnau Pamies–about space, time, embodiment, and magic. field anatomies comes ou...

We're rebroadcasting this episode in preparation for the TAK ensemble music video drop of "8 minutes after boiling" by Julien Malaussena. Check it out on Sunday, October 31st at 4pm (or any time thereafter) at the following link: https://youtu.be/OO6qJKWsckY *** Julien Malaussena considers his compositional prism to be sound energy–not timbre nor time; not dynamics, pitch, nor the sound space, but...

This week, we’re hearing from Diana Marcela Rodriguez, aka DM R, and James Diaz. They’ll give us a preview of a roundtable discussion they had with Jose Martinez from their group C3, the Columbian Composers Collective, alongside violinist Natalie Calma. This summer, we’ll air their full conversation as an audio episode in Spanish, alongside a video with English subtitles. For more information abou...

Today's episode is a playlist of music we love. 0:48 CIHUANAHUALLI: Tlacualo (devorado / devoured) by Carmina Escobar 7:05 Delirious Delicacies by Nick Dunston 12:03 Pequeño tótem by Wilfrido Terrazas 18:20 and Dorothy never looked back by Patrick Shiroishi and Dylan Fujioka 25:41 7 fish in a desert byElena Rykova and Etienne Nillesen 32:21 for trumpet by Weston Olencki 37:44 Variation X by DM R -...

Julien Malaussena considers his compositional prism to be sound energy–not timbre nor time; not dynamics, pitch, nor the sound space, but rather this element straddling all of these, one less palpable, less quantifiable. He has been particularly influenced by the teaching of Chaya Czernowin and Pierluigi Billone. He also had master classes with Brian Ferneyhough, Raphaël Cendo, Alberto Posadas, A...

Charlotte Mundy is a vocalist who specializes in music that is new, daring and sublime. She has been called a "daredevil with an unbreakable spine" (SF Classical Voice). Recent performances include George Benjamin’s one-act opera Into the Little Hill at the 92nd Street Y and a set of music for voice and electronics presented by New York Festival of Song, described as "an oasis of radiant beauty" b...

This week, Isaac Jean-François interviews Jessie Cox about his TV series, "Space Travel from Home." About Jessie: “...some of the most experimental music of not just the day but the season... held a listener’s attention with surprises and delights aplenty.“ — LA Times Jessie Cox is a composer, drummer, and scholar, currently in pursuit of his Doctorate Degree at Columbia University. Growing up in...

In this week's episode, Brad Garton interviews composer Taylor Brook and multi-media artist Lara Lewison about Star Maker Fragments, the new album from TAK Ensemble, out 3/3/2021. Lara Lewison creates audiovisual art for the web and for live performance, with a focus in networking, language, and creating live works that are dependent on exchanges between “performer" and “audience." She works with...

Brandon Lopez is a bassist/improviser/composer who works at the intersection of jazz, free improvisation, noise and new music. He has been an artist-in-residence at Roulette and Issue Project Room, performed as a soloist with the NYPhilharmonic and in ensembles with Fred Moten, Okkyung Lee, Ingrid Laubrock, Tyshawn Sorey and Gerald Cleaver, who is his guest for this episode. TAK commissioned and p...

Bethany Younge’s acoustic and electronic music explores the manifold kinesthetic properties of musical performance. For her, the act of music-making cannot be divorced from the physical presence of the human instigator. Her works often incorporate instrumental deconstruction, exaggerated movement, motion tracking, sounding costumes, and/or other aesthetic devices to sonically heighten corporeal ex...

This week on the podcast, Ashkan Behzadi and Saharnaz Samaeinejad interview Marxist political theorist Alan Woods about art and socialism. Alan Woods was born in 1944 in Swansea, South Wales, into a working-class family with strong Communist traditions. At the age of 16 he joined the Labour Party Young Socialists and became a Marxist. He studied Philosophy and Russian at Sussex University, and lat...

Shaped by sonic sensitivity from a young age, Pittsburgh based composer/performer/artist Devon Osamu Tipp creates unorthodox musical environments from ostensibly incompatible realms. Tipp’s music draws influence from his Japanese and Eastern European roots, his experiences as a jeweler and painter, improvisations with plants, and his studies of gagaku and hogaku in Japan and the US. TAK had the pl...

Hannah Kendall is a composer whose work has been described as ‘…intricately and skillfully wrought’ by The Sunday Times. Her music has attracted the attentions of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, BBC Singers, Seattle Symphony Orchestra and Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, with performances at the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, The Royal Opera House's Linbury Studio Theatre, Westminster, C...

This is a friendly lil teaser for some upcoming episodes of the TAK Editions Podcast! Every Tuesday for the next five weeks will feature conversations between a recent TAK collaborator and a guest of their choosing. We are so grateful to all of our guests for contributing their time and thoughts to the podcast, and super excited to share their brilliant convos with you. The music at the beginning...

Marina Kifferstein is a violinist, composer, and a founding member of TAK ensemble and The Rhythm Method string quartet. She also performs regularly Talea, Wet Ink, and the International Contemporary Ensemble, and is a co-administrator of the Open Improvisations concert series. As a composer her work has been performed across the U.S. and Europe. Marina is currently a DMA candidate at the CUNY Gra...

Madison Greenstone is a clarinetist currently based between San Diego and New York City. Her creative practice encompasses contemporary & experimental music, improvisation, noise & acoustic feedback, and band-like collaborations with other creative performers. She has performed as a featured artist of the Darmstadt Ferienkurse für Neue Musik and the Lucerne Festival Academy. Notable performances h...

Tyshawn Sorey is a multi-instrumentalist and composer born in Newark, New Jersey, known for his mastery and memorization of incredibly complex scores. He has performed nationally and internationally with his own ensembles, as well as artists such as Roscoe Mitchell, George Lewis, John Zorn, Claire Chase, Evan Parker, and Anthony Braxton, among many others. He has been commissioned by The Spektral...

Natacha Diels is a composer and performer whose work combines choreographed movement, improvisation, video, instrumental practice, and cynical play to create worlds of curiosity and unease. With a focus on collage, collaboration, and the ritual of life as art, her compositions have been described as “a fairy tale for a fractured world” (Music We Care About). She is a member of the composer/perform...

Erin Gee is a composer and vocalist who has created, in her Mouthpiece series, an ephemeral world that expands the possibilities of the voice, leaving behind the constrictive structure of language, and replacing histrionic female vocals with a virtuosic mouth and a tabula rasa for an emotional palate. Begun as one piece for solo voice in 2000, the list of Mouthpieces has grown to over 30 works for...

Ashkan Behzadi’s music combines a miniaturist lyrical craft with an aim to invoke the collective-memory of folklore music through the use of allusion and pastiche. The question of genre-identity and genre-blurring and, in particular, the relationship between modern lyric and contemporary music is at the core of his aesthetic and artistic research. In this episode, Marina Kifferstein and Charlotte...

Ann Cleare is a composer whose work explores the static and sculptural nature of sound, probing the extremities of timbre, texture, colour, and form. She creates highly psychological and corporeal sonic spaces that encourage a listener to contemplate the complexity of the lives we exist within, exploring poetries of communication, transformation, and perception. On this episode, Laura Cocks and Ch...

David Bird is a composer and multi-media artist based in New York City. His work explores the dramatic potential of electroacoustic and mixed media environments, often highlighting the relationships between technology and the individual, and has been performed internationally by some of the best performers working in the field of contemporary music. He also happens to be director of Creative Resea...

Brandon Lopez is a New York-based composer and bassist working at the fringes of jazz, free improvisation, noise and new music. His music has been praised as “brutal” (Chicago Reader) and “relentless” (The New York Times). On this episode, Ellery and Madison of TAK talk to Brandon about his new piece, "Empty and/or Church of Plenty," which TAK will premiere on December 14th at St. Mary's Harlem. B...

Bethany Younge is a composer and performer whose work plays with anti-irony, nonsense as spiritual awakening, and the place between situations and theater. She builds incredibly individualized works, often simultaneously centered in the physiological dramaturgy of performance. On this episode, Laura and Charlotte of TAK talk to Bethany about her new piece “at midnight i walked into the middle of t...