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, being in the same room (both acoustically and socially), zoom meetings, music being the artwork...

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, The Oracle of 13 Sky, Copal, and the Jaguar Poems. Among the most novel features o...

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, and southern California, where it was hailed as a “glittering masterpiece” by critic Dan Kepl....

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-songwriter traditions. Their songs are bilingual (Spanish and English) and about mental health, qu...

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, Salon La The Beating Lola Everything's a Calculated Risk Ferrarelle e Borsec Then Ago ( ) https...