Intro

- Why did you get started releasing music on bandcamp?

It just felt like the thing to do. Music was the center of my life and I wanted to be closer to it in any way I could. I suppose I also felt spurred by my personal philosophy that I used to sum up as "all art is good", a hopelessly imprecise and pretty much useless statement that nonetheless I fought tooth and nail to defend against percieved attacks. I felt like since all art is good, since art only adds something to this world, it was my responsibility to create it.

- I think I know what you mean.

I bet you do!...I guess if I'm really digging deep here, it might've also been a twisted method of identity formation. I had just been (all but) kicked out of the fancy college I went to and because school was all there was to me, this was crushing. I was depressed. I lost my passion for mathematics, my passion for fandom, my passion for playing the piano. Not too long before I recorded Concrete, I went through a difficult breakup with my partner, who I'd lost the ability to communicate with after acknowledging my deep discomfort with the physicality of our relationship...

- That's awful. How long were you together?

Maybe 8 months?

- That's not short! Have you talked to them at all since then?

No. They lived in Buffalo, and even before we broke up the last 5 months of our relationship were long-distance, after the whole kicking-out thing. A couple times in 2019 they reached out over facebook messenger, but neither time could I bring myself to open the message request. As time goes on I feel more and more like I should find a way to apologize, because I have a horrible suspicion that they never really understood what the issue I was having was, and I want them to know it wasn't anything they did. Even though I guess, in a way, it was. [laughter]

- Good luck with that.

Thanks. But anyway, the point I wanted to make was that when I listened to jazz music, something else happened. I felt the most incredible sensations of beauty and admiration and gratitude wash over me, toward the world and towards the artists. I felt and named love, real love, for the first time in this music. So from that perspective it makes sense I would try to make myself a part of it.

I had been in jazz band--"advanced combo"--in high school as a saxophonist so for a while I stayed with that. I had my pretty tenor sax that I loved so much, and I just started playing it. In particular I focused on extended techniques like overblowing, vocalisations, multiphonics, and so forth. Things I had never paid attention to before. But the thing is, and I'm not sure how many people know this about the saxophone, but it's a full-body workout to play one, and they're somewhat complex to take apart, put together, and maintain. And I was depressed. So eventually I stopped playing so often.

- What kind of saxophone did you have?

You know, I can't actually remember. It was scratched and dulled on the exterior though, which I loved. And when I had a saxophone instructor for a brief period¹, he was impressed by it.

- You ever hear what Sunny Murray said bout cats with shiny horns?

Yeah, man. What was it? Something about Albert Ayler?

- Yeah, Sunny's telling a story about how he and Jimmy Lyons played a prank on Cecil Taylor by inviting Albert Ayler to their gig without asking him, and he says that when Albert got up on stage he had a brand-new, shiny-ass Selmer. And he says "I like guys with shiny horns! These young cats who don't shine the horns because they say it 'sounds better'... why the hell should it sound better?"

[laughter] Yeah, man. I love that interview. Isn't that the one where he insinuates free jazz fell out of popularity due to a government conspiracy?

- Something like that...

See, that's another thing that drew me making this music. I didn't just admire the music, I admired the people, they way they talked, the way they dressed. They felt outside of anything I'd seen before. They seemed unafraid. And their individuality, their expression, didn't disconnect them, it didn't contradict their community. If anything, it amplified it. In jazz music and in jazz musicians I saw that individual expression doesn't have to isolate; in fact, the most truthful expressions of one's individuality can only arise in community, in connection with others. When you're alone, most of you is closed. Other people open you.

- That's a very beautiful way to put it. I'm also thinking though, isn't that kind of a funny way to look at the free jazz movement in particular? People have criticized that movement as kind of going against that idea, as promoting the individual expression of musicians as consititutive of their community, instead of vice-versa...

I see what you mean, and it's a difficult point...it requires a lot of nuance.

- I just think about things like John Tchicai's story of Charles Gayle refusing to put on headphones while recording..."I don't want to hear anything, I just want to play..."

[pause] I don't know. I think it would be a mistake to say that Gayle isn't still drawing his individual expression from his connection to his fellow musicians. I think the connection just starts to be deeper than direct reaction, or mutual adherence to a common harmonic-rhythmic structure, or whatever. And this is why free jazz requires the precondition of bop and all of its predecessor styles--free jazz, to me, takes those connections and probes to their root, searches for the flow that operates beneath things like harmony and rhythm. I think you could say this is also sort of what people express when they reflexively say that one must study how to play "in" before starting to play "out". I'm not sure I totally agree with that statement but I understand the impetus in a jazz context.

- I think I see what you mean.

I'm glad. [pause] Thanks for saying it was beautiful.

- You're welcome.



Concrete

- Tell me about the piano. Why did you start playing it?

My parents put me up to it when I was 8, I think not unlike a lot of other children of the petit bourgeois. I started with a lady who was primarily a violinist but knew enough rudimentary piano to teach it for the first few years. A point came where she recommended I switch to a different teacher named Joan Nagano, who's a professional pianist and piano teacher. (She's also the sister of the famous conductor Kent Nagano, funnily enough.) I stayed with her for the rest of my classical training, up until I was 17. I really loved working with her. Her house is high up on the side of a steep hill, and has an unbelievable view of the pacific ocean. She's a cat lady, and had two cats when I started with her, one that was maybe 8 years old, and one that was 22 years old. Can you imagine?? It moved so slowly. It had big mats of fur all over it, and I asked her about them once and she explained that the vet said she shouldn't cut them, because they cushion her joints. She died a few years after I started with Joan. Shortly afterward she got a kitten, since she didn't want her other cat to be alone.

She owns her house, and she spends all her time either teaching or performing. She had, or maybe still has, a boyfriend named John who would from time to time arrive unobtrusively during a lesson of mine. She drove a funny old electric car where the rear wheels were sort of half contained entirely within the car, instead of having a wheel well all the way around, if that makes sense.

- I think I can kind of picture what you're saying. I've seen cars like that.

They're funny. Anyway, I loved taking lessons with her, even though I didn't always love practicing unless I really loved the piece I was playing. So that's my piano background. I stopped playing regularly for a couple years after high school, though.

- What ultimately brought you back to it?

I had an important encounter with Cecil Taylor's music, particularly the album Indent, which I had heard bits of once and put aside in my mind, partly because I just wasn't paying very much attention, and partly because the album was heavily proselytized by someone I found insufferable in the Jazz-music-themed facebook group I was in.

- Who?

Man, I probably shouldn't say...

- Initials M.M.?

[laughter] No comment.

- Alright anyway, the piano....

Right, so I heard Indent again a bit later on and this time I came at it with a genuinely open heart, since this time someone I really admired had been proselytizing it. What I found was one of the most incredible sonic worlds ever. I really mean that term--it's a whole world of sound, with its own laws of motion and change and dependence and necessity. Nothing made sense until you could really enter the world yourself and descend below its dense atmosphere, and see it populated by its tones, antlike, and loving...

- Sounds intense. Anyone ever tell you you have a flowery way of talking?

Shush. To be honest, that's not even the way that I talk. I just felt like I needed to say something special for Cecil...

- I'm sure he'd be grateful.

Perhaps...but anyways, I was also thinking that something else I got from Indent was, in a broad sense, permission. I could just go and sit down at the piano and play whatever notes I wanted however I wanted. I could bang, I could roll my forearm up and down, I could play huge chords and tiny trills and never worry even for a second about the form with which I pushed my wrist forward, or whether that hit had been forte or mezzo forte, or whether I was falling behind the tempo.

- Why do you think you needed permission?

That's a good question. I'm really not sure. If I were being shallow I would say something like "I'm just not a particularly visionary person", which is untrue and unproductive. I do think I have a bit of a pattern of needing permission to do things that were always possible for me. It could be a flinch away from responsbility or the possbility or judgement.

- It's definitely hard to do something truly for yourself. As much as I always wanted to do this interview, I still needed to wait for the right conditions and feelings...

One might even say it's impossible.

- One might.

Anyway, that's really it. Put together my desire to participate in the tradition and my sudden sense of freedom, and you have 18 year old me buying the cheapest condenser mic she can find on sweetwater and learning to take the front board off the big upright piano her recently deceased great-grandmother Lois had bought for her as a graduation gift.

- That was sweet of her. Is it a nice piano?

It is! She loved to hear me play the few times I got the chance. In fact, my mother explained to me years later that among my entire extended family, I was the first one who had showed any real interest in music. According to her, they're all very taken with this, although considering I never hear about it from them, I imagine this was more true when I was in the "cute piano recital with kids in fancy clothes and hey she's not half bad!" stage. Nowadays, a bunch of my much younger cousins on my dad's side are starting to take music lessons. Kai and Lilly are learning piano, and Caden's been playing alto sax for years now.

- Tell me about this album [ed.: Concrete]'s title and cover art. The cover reminds me a little of that album "captagon" by Rod Modell...

Yeah, I can see that! In my case, the title and cover are actually related in a funny way. Less than a week after I started freely improvising on the piano, I decided to record and release a session. I had never really released anything I'd recorded before, besides some midi piano exports of strange, simplistic piano pieces I had composed back when I was just entering my musescore obsession era.² I bought a $30 behringer audio interface with one XLR/quarter-inch and one pure quarter-inch input and plugged in two sm58s my father had from his old days recording jam sessions with his friends. They played a lot of Tom Petty covers. I played four pieces, each one stopping once I got tired, hence they get progressively shorter. I had over half an hour of music. I listened back to it and I actually thought it sounded kind of good. It didn't give me the same sort of embarassed feeling that listening to my own music usually did. I was so proud of myself. And so excited, man...Seriously! I released it on bandcamp the same day on a new account. Posted it on facebook for my friends from music discussion groups, hence lovely Hope's review, since we were pretty good friends back then.

- So...the title, though? The cover?

Yes, right. Sorry, I just go on sometimes...

- I'm well aware. To be honest, you come across as a bit self-absorbed.

Oh, I'm--

- And by a bit, I mean extremely.

--sorry. Ok, Jesus Christ, man thats a little much for me. Seems a little frank for an interview. People are reading this interview to hear about me, not about your opinion of me.

- It's nothing personal, I just believe in my journalistic responsibility to our readership. And I believe I have nothing to hide from you in that regard.

Jeez, if that's how you feel...I'll tone down the personal anecdotes. I'm sorry, I really didn't mean to offend you.

- You didn't offend me, and don't tone down anything! I'm just being honest with you.

Um...ok then. Thank you.

- Alright, the album's title and cover.

...Yeah. Basically, the point all of what I said before was leading up to, before you cut me off, was that I was extremely excited, and I wanted to release the recordings right away. The issue was that it needed a cool, eye-grabbing combination of cover art and title to convince people it was worth their time to click on it. I had no ideas. I took random photos of things around our house. One photo I took was a whorl in the concrete driveway outside. I put it into paint.net and started filtering it. Eventually, I settled on pixelating it, since I thought that in such coarse detail, the shortcomings of my phone's camera, my photographic ability, the environment I was photographing, and so on, would be obscured.

- Seems like a pretty nervous approach to making art.

That seems a bit hasty and judgemental. But I'm not letting you sidetrack me again. I chose the name concrete because I liked that it had this kind of obscured connection to the cover. Whenver in the past I'd made music or especially when I'd written things, I always liked to include these strange subterranean connections between elements of them, obscure symbolism that only really existed in my mind, or at best was still almost completely indescipherable from the work itself. It made stories I'd written feel more alive and more complete. So I applied that here. There is no way anyone could've ever known that that art came from a photo of concrete, and thus that it's connected to the title, but I wanted it there anyway...

- Do you still take that approach? What about in your latest projects?

Well, I don't really have any "projects" nowadays. But the answer is yes, absolutely. I still take this approach in nearly everything I do.



Teeth

- After Concrete, was Teeth your next release?

It was! Released like, a week later. I must've released 7 or 8 different pure solo piano improvisation albums in 2018 & 2019 together, and to be honest with you, they all sound the same. And before you ask, the process of creating the album art for this one was the same as Concrete, which was the same as all the other ones, save one: I took a random photo or found a random piece of clip art, and picked a single word which was some how interlinked with that image. Here, the connection seems obvious to me: the hammers of my piano kinda look like weird teeth. That's really the whole story for my solo piano recordings, they aren't worth your time.

- What's the one?

It was a single 33-minute recording I did, the last one I uploaded to bandcamp. I'm pretty sure that's the longest I ever played without a break for at least a few minutes, too. All that eschewing of proper technique really does a number on your forearms.

- Maybe so, but to be honest, it really doesn't seem that long.

In all honesty that thought's occurred to me a few times as well. Maybe it's a sign that piano was never really my true calling.

- Is that recording on this list?

No, people weren't keen to add my piano recordings to rym. Funny, because of all the piano recordings I made, the one 33-minute one is probably my favorite, and I think is really the best possible manifestation I could manage of the sorts of things I was trying to do. I actually like it so much, it's the only music of mind you can still find on Bandcamp.

- First of all, that's not true, because there's the old t35t bandcamp account.

Oh, fuck. I forgot about that.

- I bet you did! But anyway, second of all, what was the deal with that recording's art? You said it wasn't like the others.

Yeah, I didn't take a photo or anything. In fact, I did nothing -- the art is just a white square.

- Then what's the title? What is there to connect to?

I mean, let's not get carried away and pretend theres no subterranean connections to be made to a pure white field. But in this case I went with my own word "Ssenghlasel".

- What does it mean?

Nothing in particular. I guess maybe I always kind of halfway felt that it was a place. But it's not all the way anything, you know what I mean? [laughter]

- I do. Maybe I'll add it to rym later myself.

I'd really prefer you didn't.

- Well, we'll see. rym is a database first and foremost, you know. It has a solemn responsbility in this regard, a duty to history and its study--

Ok, yeah, I get it. God, I am NEVER saying that about rym again, I think I just actually realized how obnoxious that is.

- Glad I could illuminate that for you.

[laughter] You are so annoying.

- Hey, you agreed to this interview...

Fair enough!

- Why did you say that your piano recordings aren't worth anyone's time? What changed about the way you view them from when you recorded them? Old you would probably be pretty heated to hear you say that...

[laughter] Even old me reserved a special shit-talking exception for her own music. But still, that's a good question. I think it was to some degree just acknowledging that my techniques and methods for making music of that kind just didn't have very much to them. Even though I was playing far outside my classical training, as time went on I started only being able to hear my limitations and my unwillingness to overcome them. I would listen back, and notice times where I had a specific musical idea I wanted to play with, but because I had a weak left hand, or a lack of understanding of jazz harmony, I settled for a desaturated version of it, or just moved on. And then I started to feel these things while playing, too, noticing them in real time. I noticed that a lot of my improvisations fell into tropes; they often alternated between overbearingly loud and dramatic sections and meek, quiet sections, without much logic. I often was simply imprecise in my playing and hit multiple notes at once with a finger, but would try to disguise the error by playing a sequence of major/minor seconds in that range.

- That's a pretty specific thing to pick up on. How much were you listening to these recordings

Yeah, you got me. Literally all the time. I still do this, actually. I'm not sure why, but I can't help but just loop pieces of music I've made. Go over every piece with a fine tooth comb. If I were rationalizing I would say that it helps me be intentional when making music, but I know for a fact that my actual motivation is something deeper than that.

- What music of yours are you listening to nowadays?

Hmm. I'll tell you when we get to Oz, I think it makes more sense there.

- It's a deal.



The Unexplained Sounds of Amateur Internet Radio Broadcasts

- So this release is kind of out-of-place with the rest of your work, wouldn't you say?

Yeah, to be honest, I can't even really remember what motivated me to make this one.

- I personally find this one a bit funny, because it kind of seems like the title leads one to believe that the recordings are unedited, or at least minimally edited, but from what I can hear it seems like you did some heavy cutting/splicing and even recorded some original material for tracks 2 and 4.

I definitely did. I think the title is probably because I was particularly excited about the found sound aspect of the pieces, particularly pround of the specific sound crumbs I'd found. I mean c'mon, the samples in tracks 2 and 4 particular are pretty intense, are they not?

- They are. I can't argue with that.

It's honestly kind of strange the way that the sample still hit me with a similar degree of emotional weight as they did when I found them. I think that the specific weight they carry has shifted over time but it's still there. To be honest, listening back to this for this interview made me appreciate it more than I had. Almost enough to make it public...but to honest, still nowhere near enough for that.

- I don't have any more questions about this album, somehow. It inspired me a bit less than the others, maybe because its contents seem less at odds with the person you are now. Do you have anything you want to add about it?

Not particularly. Although I will say, I think it's bold of you to imply you know the person I am now!

- Maybe, maybe...



Wavs

- Tell me about the name Sam Watson.

It's my deadname. It's funny, because whenever I have to explain this to someone, I say "old name" instead of deadname, and I've never really interrogated that fact before now.

- What do you think prevents you from using "deadname"?

I really couldn't say. It seems a bit hardline, I guess. My immediate family still calls me Sam and I have no strong motivation to change my name legally. My voicemail is still my one from when I was a kid with a very high pitched voice, and it says "Sam Watson", but I've never really felt like changing it. To be honest, whenever I think about these things, I wonder why I as a trans person have such a weaker reaction to my given name than so many others I've known. Than all of them, to be honest. I mean, here I am broadcasting my deadname to all of my friends on rateyourmusic. What's wrong with me in that regard?

- I'm not sure, I don't think there's anything "wrong" with that per se. I definitely don't feel that way myself, though.

Yeah, and on my end I definitely get the feeling of wanting nothing at all to do with your deadname. I would definitely feel uncomfortable if my friends were calling me that, too. It's funny, I can remember that I went through a phase where whenever someone without any control over me (IE not an adult, and especially younger kids) asked me if Sam was short for Samuel, I would say no, it's short for Samantha. And I would claim it said that on my birth certificate. What I loved most of all was the moment where I've refused to back down after they go "NO it's not! You're silly!" and stuff, and they pause and start to believe it. The pause followed by the "...really?" That's what I lived for.

- That seems pretty transgender to me.

It really does, doesn't it!

- Was your childhood like that? Did you always have that sort of sense of your gender?

Not really, no. When I got to high school and started trying to represent myself more on social media (as opposed to the presumption that everyone already knows "who I am" so to speak, which makes communication a lot less risky), I had a little bit of a sense. I can remember specifically that I would from time to time, just offhand, imagine myself as a woman, and lament how it would definitely be way cooler to be a girl who played the saxophone (or whatever) instead of a boy. The girl I imagined always was a lot darker than me and had short hair, but I made an effort to imagine us with similar facial structures and blemishes and stuff like that. But before that, gender wasn't really a part of my thought process. I went to a small public K-8 school right down the street from my home, and because of that I didn't have the experience of switching schools at age 10 and having to figure out social dynamics anew while simultaneously just starting to access one's sexuality and realize the significance of gender in social life.

- Is that a universal experience, do you think?

Definitely not, now that you say that. In fact, I have no specific evidence of this experience happening to anyone.

- I mean, I can see the logic of it, though.

Even so...

- I mean like, I've always felt like one way or another, people have to be made aware that changing your gender or just changing any particularly fundamental aspect of oneself is even possible in the first place. Maybe that's just me projecting as well.

Maybe. We're pretty alike, you and me!

- I think you're right. Anyway, what about this album [ed.: Wavs]? How did it come about?

This album is a collection of aged wavs from my old laptop, half-finished projects or projects that I posted to bandcamp but privated a few days later. I think more than anything it illustrates the way that my musical creation was moving away from the piano and the saxophone, even though there are several piano and/or sax improvsations on here.

- So what pulled you away from the piano this time?

I think it was a combination of that sort of disillusionment with my playing and my abilities I was talking about before, together with my growing interest in electronic music, particularly jungle.

- Why electronic music? And why jungle in particular?

I think in both cases it was the combination of a strong rhythmic basis with dramatic and emotional melodies and harmonies. This isn't a combination that's unique to dance music, but in dance music the affective power of those elements is brought to the front and focused on and amplified to insane degrees. I also really loved the way I felt the music in my body, the way it moved me to dance, which I had always been very shy about. I loved that the music was in my body at all, to be honest--dance music was a point where I really started to comprehend on a personal level the philosophical points I'd been making before about the infinite range of possible musical experience, or about how all senses are really the same sense... And I loved that the vibe always came first; or to put that a more convoluted way, the actual way the music affected actual people and space was the most important thing in making it (instead of representation, theorizing, and so forth).

- I understand what you're getting at, I feel the same sorts of things when I listen to jungle. Do you go to raves and stuff like that?

I don't. On one level this really does make me feel a bit ashamed, since I'm so heavily invested in styles of music that live and die by actual physical gatherings of people dancing to them. I regularly come across old rave footage from the 90s for one reason or another, and universally those clips give me a horrible longing feeling to have been there in that moment, even though I know if I were there now, I would be terribly uncomfortable. There's not any special underlying motivation behind my discomfort by the way, in case you were about to ask...

- I was.

Yeah, I really think it's just a lack of experience. I think if I actually got myself up and out and to a rave and maybe I was with a good friend or two just for a tether, for safety, raves and related events could be a very special and powerful and useful part of my life. I think, and I'm being honest here, that if I were regularly raving, I would not have any need to do things like write this list.

- Maybe you're right. But then I'd be out of a job!

[laughter] With your skills? You'd be snapped up by someone else in a heartbeat.



Notes:

¹None other than David Boyce from the Broun Fellinis, an SF jazz legend that my mother happened to know because a) the broun fellinis were her favorite band in the 90s, and b) for a moment David's son went to the school she works at.

²If you're interested, search musescore.com for users panopticon, panopticon1, panopticon2, etc. through panopticon8, which were my various accounts to get around upload limits. This was a particularly funny era because I can remember a long period in 2017 where I hadn't realized what a breakbeat was, and I was listening super closely to like. the hot pants break. and trying to figure out how to replicate it with like random 808 and 909 samples and the "retro house" sample pack from musicradar in a sequencer lol. also, to be clear, the pieces on those accoutns are my late musescore obsession era. the early pieces were released on bandcamp, where I reasoned that probably at least one or two people would buy them, theyre only $5 and SOMEONE out there probably likes stuff like this, and then i could buy a book i wanted or junk food or something. this never happened.