Throughout history, figures like Jane Goodall, Benjamin Franklin, and Leonardo da Vinci have stood out as polymaths—individuals driven by an insatiable thirst for knowledge and expertise across a multitude of fields. This week, we welcome Hans Fjellestad, a member of their esteemed ranks. A true Renaissance man, Hans's talents span music, film, and education.

In our conversation, Hans walks us through his artistic evolution, starting with his classical piano background and progressing into the realm of experimental electronic compositions. Along the way, he shares stories from his experiences in documentary filmmaking, including insights from acclaimed projects such as Moog and a recent work centered on the sculptor Luis Bermudez.

As Hans and Scott delve deeper into the conversation, they explore the roots of creativity, the fascinating interplay between music and language, and the chaotic beauty of performing live in front of an audience.

For more information, please visit https://notrealart.com/hans-fjellestad

The Not Real Art Podcast is intended.

For creative audiences only.

The Not Real Art Podcast celebrates creativity.

And creative culture worldwide.

It contains material that is fresh, fun and inspiring and is not suitable for.

Boring old art snobs.

Now let's get started and enjoy the show.

Greetings and salutations my creative brothers and sisters.

Welcome to Not Real Art, the podcast where we talk to the world's most creative people.

I am your host.

Fit, faithful, trusty, loyal, tireless, relentless host.

Sourdough coming at you from Crew West Studio in Los Angeles.

How are you people?

Thanks for showing up.

We do this for you.

It's all about you.

We so appreciate you.

Thanks so much man.

Do we have a VIP in the house today?

Hans Willistad is here to talk about his new album, so stay tuned for that.

But as I was saying, I am so appreciative of you guys showing up.

We do this for you.

It's all about you.

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Like I said, today Hans Philostad is in the house and I'll tell you what, I am thrilled.

I am honored, dear friend, dear colleague and I'm just so thrilled that he's on the show today to talk about his new album.

This guy's a real polymath.

Los Angeles filmmaker, musician, educator, Hans Willstad has produced and shot on location throughout the us, Canada, Mexico, uk, Europe, Australia, Japan, Turkey, Afghanistan and Haiti, filming hundreds of interviews and numerous concerts, live events and documentary film projects.

His award winning work has screened in theaters and festivals worldwide and on top broadcast networks and streamers, Netflix, Showtime, ABC Prime Video, Sony, Japan, Adult Swim, Documentary Channel, BBC, mtv, bet, pbs.

Hans directed and produced the feature length documentary film Sunset Strip, Moog Radio, Caroline, Sounding the Space when the World Breaks, Frontier Life and was writer and producer for the Heart as a Drum Machine and On and On.

He's the cinematographer for American Clown, a new documentary that's dropping this this year.

His video production work also includes projects for Mode Records, Steinway, Titmouse, Glad Had, Health Core, Haiti, Community Corporation of Santa Monica, Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp Not Relart in California Roots Festival.

He is a lead producer at arts oriented media production house Crew West Studio.

A classically trained pianist and electronic music composer performer, Han studied music improvisation, composition and technology at University of California in San Diego and has composed original scores for theater, dance and film.

He has recorded and performed extensively, appearing on over 50 albums and touring in over a dozen countries.

Han's newest work is available on Bandcamp and his recent retrospective compilation, let's Pretend this Happened, New High Recordings is available on all platforms.

He has also lectured at Columbia University, Amherst College, San Francisco Art Institute, McGill, University Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, I could go on center for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, National Taiwan, all over the world, Mexico, Taiwan, Tokyo.

He well, what else?

I mean Hans, what haven't you done, man?

Hans worked as a curator producer for International Arts Initiative inside 05 and has served as an organizational Grant program panelist for the Los Angeles County Arts Commission.

He also serves on the advisory board for the West Hollywood History Center.

Man, oh man, Hans, you are too busy, my friend.

And I'm so grateful that you you took time out of your busy schedule to come on the show and chop it up with me today to talk about your new record.

And guys, you're going to love this conversation.

Hans is one of the best, lovely, lovely humans and I'm grateful to have him.

So without further ado, let's get into this conversation with Hans Felistad Brother Hans, welcome to the show.

Hey dude.

Oh my God.

So you.

I mean, I hope you know this.

You know I love you.

You're like, you're like family to me after all these years.

And yet it turns out I've been mispronouncing your Last name all these fucking years.

It's a massive club that you're a member of.

So.

So for our listeners, make sure that we all know exactly how to say it.

So please, you know, please school us.

Yeah, well, it's an old word.

It's an old, like little village name of a village in Norway.

So it's like old Norwegian, but you do just pronounce every letter.

So it's F, J, E, L, L, E, S, T, A D. And so the FJ is like a fjord, you know, so it's like a Y sound and it's just Fjalla stad.

And it means something like village in the mountains.

Fiela stad.

Okay, I'm gonna practice that.

I'm gonna get better, I promise.

Yeah.

By the way, you know, I've had a very similar problem over the years because so many people have mispronounced my last name.

Well, this is true.

They tend to say hours when it's power and, and I, you know, I just have.

Have to correct them, you know, I mean, I have to get it right.

God forbid.

It's the burden we bear.

That's the first we spare.

Well, brother, I'm so glad that you took time out of your busy schedule to come on and talk about all the stuff you're doing.

You're such a prolific artist, prolific creative, you know, truly a multidisciplinary artist in so many ways.

But your roots truly are in music.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

I think that's the frame of reference for everything I do.

There's no time of my life that I ever remember not being involved in music making on some level.

Started piano when I was five.

So it's been.

And that's where I went to music school, University for music.

And so, yeah, it's just sort of not the background, but actually kind of been a general framework to kind of think about any kind of creative pursuit, including film and even teaching and, and whatever else.

And it is a little bit specific in a certain way because I do tend to come at things that are more temporal, those sort of time based creative processes.

I'm doing a documentary film for the last year or two, it's almost finished, about a really wonderful sculptor named Luis Bermudez.

And it took me some fun months, you know, just really kind of getting my head around how do I think about and approach sculpture, which is not particularly time based.

And so I kind of came up with this idea of, well, different kinds of artistic results.

Creative results have different metabolisms.

Music is very ineffable it's ineffable, it's very temporal and ephemeral in a way.

It just kind of disappears.

You know, recorded music is relatively a new thing, but music in general as a human practice is always time based and experiential in the moment.

And, but then a sculpture, that's what ends up being, you know, archeological digs for finding more about, you know, cultures that lived thousands of years ago.

So the metabolism is much slower, but it still has entropy and it still has, it still does have a temporal quality, even if it's kind of a poetic one.

So anyway, all that just to say that, yeah, I dabble in all kinds of creative stuff, mostly time based.

What do you think came first, do you think the rhythm, the beat of a percussion kind of, you know, player or vocal sound, you know, singing?

I mean, did early man beat on the rock first or did early man sing, you know, down the trail?

You know, it's hard to know, but, but it's, it's something I thought about for sure, but because, I mean, I grew up mostly with a really kind of inadequate and inaccurate kind of concept of Neanderthals, for example.

You know, just bring in like another human species, which turns out through lots of research over, you know, the past decades, one of the oldest instruments that we know of as a little bone flute that a Neanderthal made.

So they had music, they had language, they had rituals, they had all kinds of different, you know, very dimensionalized and complex kind of culture.

So it's hard to know.

But there, there have been some studies that suggest like that it's likely that singing musical expression predated language.

So it was sort of a first language potentially, possibly so because at the bottom of it, it's, it's just communication, you know, so well, not to get like too into it, but, but like there's a, A, a form of vocalization, rhythmic based vocalization called kanakal, which is part of the, the South Indian Carnatic tradition, like one of their classical music traditions, where the, the person doing the vocalizing is actually just kind of expressing syllables that represent perc.

So it sounds like, I mean, I can't do it, but, but it's very specific ways to strike like the surface of a, of a, of a, of tabla and whether it's preceded or, or, or succeeded by shorter notes, longer notes, faster, slower notes, and all of those are just different syllables that represent all of those parts of percussive expression.

And I've always been drawn to it because you're actually Kind of speaking music at a fundamental level, at like, a mathematical level, and you're speaking it into being the human voice.

I mean, in jazz, you have a little bit with scat and vocalise, where you're kind of mimicking instruments with your voice to do a solo.

But that conical always, like, just kind of really gets right into something deep inside of me or something.

It just turns me on a lot.

And so, anyway, I feel like music and language are inextricably linked and potentially music came first and rhythm and.

And melody and inflection are all sort of bundled in there somewhere.

You know, there was.

There's actually a number of kind of neurological studies on music that popped into my head just now that, like, there's the one where depending on what language you speak, you will hear rhythm differently.

Fascinating.

Yeah, it's really.

It's really kind of interesting.

So if you can imagine, like, two short notes together, like, da, da.

But they're exactly the same.

Coming from a computer, they're exactly the same.

Neither of the notes is accented or.

Or longer in duration or anything else.

It's just flat, straight, identical, two notes together.

But somebody that speaks Japanese or somebody that speaks English might imply in their own mind, the accent.

So they'll hear it as tata or tata, even though that accent doesn't exist.

And that's based on kind of what their ears are tuned into in terms of language.

So it's a really interesting kind of world of things that you're bringing it up in terms of the relationship of music and language.

Well, it would seem reasonable to imagine that, you know, early Neanderthals, early man, what have you, would probably first mimic the sounds they heard from animals.

Right.

Like if birds are singing or the dinosaurs are roaring, whatever, like, you can imagine that maybe, just maybe, you know, we were.

We were somehow using our.

Our voices in a similar way, perhaps, you know.

Yeah, well, to communicate with animals in some kind of way.

Or with kids.

With our kids or.

You know.

Right.

I mean, so we're also just making our own sounds, but just like a lot of birds, there's also mimicking, you know, just expanding your vocabulary by what other animals are saying.

Other sounds are around you.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's.

And.

And animals make music also.

Yeah, so.

Indeed.

Indeed.

So.

I mean, there's just so much.

There's just so much to talk about.

I'm so glad you're here.

I mean, so you're always making.

You're always creating, whether it's music or film.

And, you know, so this.

This Week.

For example, just to be really specific, what have you been working on this week?

Let's see.

I edited a small project for this Rodeo Drive series that I work on sometimes with Lynn Winter and Francis Anderton.

That's always kind of fun.

What's that?

I said shout out, Francis.

Hey, Francis.

Yeah, absolutely.

So that's always fun to do.

And I did shoot a little bit.

Mostly it's been music.

I started doing a new production by Amit Elman, the director and playwright, and he's got another production called Strings, and we're just standing that play up at the moment.

So we've done two performances, and so we're kind of sculpting it as we learn things, but it's going really well.

And so I made the score, and I'm performing part of the score live for each show.

And so I spent a lot of time on that.

I don't know if you remember that movie, Shakespeare in Love.

Yeah.

And there was young Shakespeare and they were getting a play off the ground and the investors were getting worried and whatever it was.

And there was this kind of just recurring gag that it would just say, well, you're never going to have this ready and I'm never going to make my money back or whatever.

And, oh, no, no.

It'll come together.

It'll be wonderful.

It's like.

But how do you know?

It's a mystery.

There's nothing more than stage productions, plays, and that kind of work that really feel so chaotic until the very last minute.

And the way that it all comes together is just really kind of magical and really kind of satisfying to witness and experience and kind of be part of.

So that energy, it can also be exhausting.

But that energy is.

I'm kind of full of that energy this past week.

When did you start harnessing the chaos.

Start arranging and composing for live theater, so to speak?

We did.

What was the first production?

I went to a school of Creative and performing Arts in San Diego as a kid, so I was in, you know, the pit for some of the productions.

I was on stage, not with any major roles or anything, but, you know, you sort of would experiment and kind of dabble in all kinds of different things at certain points in the way that that education was sort of arranged.

And so I feel like I've always been around it to some degree.

Actually, enough was about Trans Border Kind of issues immigration and things like that.

And, and I remember sitting in one of the little rehearsal rooms at the theater and rehearsing with some cast members.

The, you know, the, the, the, the song, the structure, just kind of the, you know, how maybe this line could be performed, you know, better, whatever it was, just rehearsing and just, just getting, I remember getting just kind of a overwhelming feeling of satisfaction.

I just kind of love it.

And then at some point getting deeper into, into my filmmaking stuff and my solo music stuff.

I don't know, maybe I just kind of forgot it for a while and then, and then after years, started getting back into it maybe five years ago.

So I did another play called Bride of Blood that had an eight month run where I played the live score and it went to Japan.

So we did it in Tokyo a handful of nights.

And so anyway, I've, I've kind of reignited that same kind of feeling I had in that rehearsal room.

I think it's just, there's something about it.

I mean, on a practical level, I mean it's not even worth saying almost.

But on a practical level, I never really thought of it as a way to support myself.

I mean, music and filmmaking and everything else is hard enough.

Live, you know, productions, stage productions, plays I feel like are even more intense in that kind of way.

So I guess I just take advantage of whatever opportunities come across my desk.

But, but anyway, but it, it would be hard to try to support my family with, with more of it or exclusively that.

But I do love it.

I do love it.

So.

But you mentioned your, your solo work as a musician.

How many, you know, full LPs do you have out?

I don't know.

I mean, especially lately it seems much more normal than it did maybe 20 years ago to me to do epsilon and singles.

And for, for me that might mean like I have a couple solo albums from recent years.

One of the most recent ones is Istanbul, which is sort of one conceptual thing.

And so it's like one 30 minute piece.

So it's not quite an LP, it's not quite a full album.

Depending on the streaming service, they'll call it an EP or a single, whatever.

But in terms of other conceptual albums that have multiple tracks and go for, you know, close to an hour or something, I mean there's definitely a couple dozen.

And then I've collaborated with a bunch of musicians as well.

So there's something, something in the 50s, I think in terms of album releases over the years.

And solo is maybe a third to a half of that?

Yeah.

Well, how would you.

How would you characterize the music you make?

I mean, neophyte like me might characterize it as electronic music.

Sometimes it feels really experimental, very avant garde, you know.

And what I've heard of your music over the years, you're just, you know, I love it because it's like you're.

You're creating vibes.

Like.

It's like sonic vibes, like sonic landscape.

You know, you're setting a mood.

You're.

You're taking us on a journey.

It's very intellectual.

It's very, you know, lovely.

Of course.

But I mean, how do you think.

Help me understand how you think about your music and the music you make, what genre you tend to favor?

Yeah, I mean, if I'm doing.

I mean, the stuff I'm doing for this play is actually very kind of cinematic score type.

I mean, the arrangements that I'm not playing live, for example, or orchestral.

I think what your ear would.

Would think of as something conventional for a film soundtrack in a lot of ways, you know, melodic themes.

There's the same kinds of motifs and light motifs that are kind of repeated and evolve and variations on themes and things.

But in terms of just my personal.

When I sit down to do stuff, a lot of it comes from a conceptual place, a storytelling place.

It's like.

It's very idiosyncratic.

It's not conventional storytelling.

But I feel like I have some sense of a character or set of themes or set of something within a concept, and eventually that'll kind of gel into something that has a certain kind of artwork and a certain kind of collection of music.

But, I mean.

But I've done solo piano tours as well.

And I do treat the piano in a less conventional way than some people might be used to, even though it has a long history being treated that way.

So, anyway, I would just say that there's some sort of sense of storytelling and communication, some sort of expression that I do want people to kind of feel a certain way.

Not necessarily a specific way, but feel a certain way and get a certain.

You know, sometimes I'll have bits of poetry that inspire just kind of my headspace while I'm.

While I'm composing.

But also a lot of what I do.

One of my thing that I've studied and done most of my life now is improvisation.

And that, to me, is a very pure form of musical expression that takes a lot of practice.

But in that sense, there's sort of practical kind of aspects to coming out on a stage with no Plan.

No actual music, nothing.

You're just sensing the vibe of the room.

There's the physical space.

There's acoustics in the space that your instrument might sound different coming back at you than in another space.

There's an audience, and their vibe might be a little different.

You know, is it part of a festival and they've been kind of immersed in music for three days?

Or.

Or is it, you know, a small gathering that's more like a salon type thing.

So there's a different kind of attitude and kind of emotional quality of.

Of different audiences.

And then the instruments that I play are almost exclusively analog, so that means that the sound is being generated by vibrations in a physical circuit.

Not a microchip, not a.

Not a computer.

So that kind of means for a lot of my instruments, you know, what, humidity matters, the temperature in the room.

I'll have instruments that might not be getting enough.

Like, maybe they need a little extra power than that theater has to offer, and they need a little more current, electrical current, or maybe it's just super hot in there or.

Or super cold, whatever.

And.

And so now the conversation I'm having with my instrument while we improvise is different.

It has different things to say, you know, So I. I feel like sometimes it sounds like an approach or a practice that might, like, be anything goes, but it's definitely not that.

It's just the contours of what you're trying to do and the technique and the structural things.

Like, I'll be always thinking if I do this for another couple minutes, then what would be nice is maybe transition into this kind of a thing.

So you're also structurally composing in real time, and it's satisfying.

It's.

It's a.

It's.

It's.

It's a lot to think about all at once, but there's something very liberating about it.

And you can really create an experience that only could have happened at that moment in that space, at that time.

Maybe in another season with the climate different or something.

It would have been a different experience, you know, whatever it is.

Sort of like one of those Tibetan Buddhist, like, mandalas or something.

Yeah, right.

Well.

And that gets to the ephemeral nature of it.

All.

Right.

Yeah.

And this sort of underscores that ephemeral nature by, like, deliberately.

There were a number of years where I didn't release any albums because I was only interested in live and.

And recording.

The instance of one live performance didn't, you know, didn't attract me so much for a short period of years.

So during the pandemic lockdown, that definitely switched.

Now it was all about composing and recording and, and, and, and thinking about musical expression in a slightly different ways.

Yeah.

So I don't know if that, if that helps, but there is a long history of composers and performers from jazz and classical and all kinds of world musics where improvised music is kind of a primary engine for musical expression.

So I kind of am part of that.

And again, I'm a neophyte, and that's one of the reasons I was looking forward to our conversation, so you could school me and help me understand.

Because, you know, when I think of improvisation, I think of jazz, you know, and when I listen to your music, you know, it doesn't sound like the jazz that, that I listen to.

Right.

So I don't necessarily think, you know, the improvisation wasn't necessarily the word that came to mind when I listened to your music.

Right.

And I have, I'm, I'm not, you know, I'm not going to lie.

I haven't heard all of the, you know, your whole, you know, catalog.

But, but the, but, but the, but one of the words that, that I would use to describe what I'm listening to when I listen to your music is that it all feels incredibly intentional.

Like very intentional, which, you know, on some level, you know, maybe some people say that sort of is opposite of improvisation, I guess.

I don't know.

I guess you could be very intentional about your improvisation, but it just, you know, it just, I don't know, like, like, like they're, like your music is not.

It doesn't come across to me as any sort of, like, happy accident or whatever.

Right.

Like, it just incredibly thoughtful, incredibly considered, incredibly intentional.

Yeah.

Well, thanks.

Yeah.

I mean, I, I feel like that's true, but I feel like that's true in more conventional jazz, improvised jazz music forms as well.

There are, there is such a thing as a happy accident, of course, but I don't know if it's as foundational to improvisation as, you know, much different than in which order I brush my teeth or put my shoes on.

You know, like, we're improvising in daily life constantly.

Yeah, right.

And, and, and, and when you do things in a sort of different way or on a specific day and time, there could be a happy accident in whatever you're doing, especially with group improv, you know, like sometimes when I was, I was playing in Tokyo last, last or Yokohama last year.

And one of the things about being an improviser is that's interesting is your.

Your.

Well, your ability, but also your opportunity to communicate with other artists that you don't know at all.

At least the saxophone player and these two Japanese women, young Japanese women, one on trombone, one on saxophone, and then my old friend Marcos on percussion.

They actually didn't speak so much English, so we couldn't even communicate much outside of a translator, but outside of music.

And there was some time, you know, and I'd never heard their playing.

They never, you know, they're not familiar with mine.

And so we just start for the first set and sometimes there's these moments where there's these very kind of like, beautiful, like haunting, like melodies are coming out of this interplay between my synth and the trombone player, for example.

And so I don't know if it's exactly an accident because we both intended to be there.

It's more training yourself to listen very deeply.

If you're very much tuned in to listening to what you're doing and what the person you're playing with is doing, you can start to anticipate things and you can start to feel outside of yourself.

You know, it's a little bit of a spiritual experience in a lot of ways sometimes, whatever that means, you know, but, but, but where, where I'll be playing with somebody, I'm not really sure exactly what they're doing and exactly what I'm doing.

I can only really hear what we're doing together and.

And then I kind of instinctively somehow know.

You know what?

I bet we're gonna go there.

I bet they're gonna go there.

And I think I want to go there.

And I. I bet she's gonna keep right up and follow, you know, and.

And then we'll find this other new place to explore.

And that is, that is.

That's where it's at, you know, because it's very, very deep communication.

I mean, I've played with so many musicians over the years that, that I don't know, that we'd never met, that we don't speak the same language, come from the same culture, but we can sit down and play an hour set together in front of some, you know, a small audience of happy people, you know.

So, yeah, I think, ah, the, you.

Know, universal language of music, right?

Like, I guess, yeah, there's.

There's a lot of universal languages, I suppose, but music is definitely one of them.

And so, yeah, there's just something just tremendously, just kind of beautiful about that.

There's a communion, a communion of some kind.

So, yeah, it's a way of feeling close to someone that I'm not sure I've felt in a different context.

Yeah, well, what is your, what, what is your connection to Japan?

I mean, how did you, what was your first, you know, contact, so to speak, with Japan?

I mean, it seems like over the years as I've gotten to know you, you know, Japan comes up for you always.

You know, you've traveled the world, you've been all over the place.

We, you and I have been to Haiti together.

Oh yeah, but tons, tons of great music there.

Yeah, but I, but I, but I don't know the origin story or the original connection necessarily with you in Japan.

I think it, it, it's definitely influenced, if not, you know, sort of catalyzed by my good friend Marcos Fernandez.

So he was born in Yokohama and when he was 18 he went to university in San Diego and, and then stayed there.

He owned a cafe and a music performance space.

Jewel got her start at that space and he founded a record label called Accretions.

And him and I started, you know, working together on different things and performing.

And so this is going to be back in the mid late 90s and, and then at some point he decided that after 20 years or 25, whatever it was in the US he wanted to, you know, kind of reconnect with, with Japan and he wanted to move back there as part of the, of that kind of year or two or three long transition.

He started connecting with the music community there and then, and then became the hub for a lot of the musicians and friends that he was working with in San Diego.

He invited me and two other musicians from San Diego to join him for a performance at the Yokohama Jazz Promenade, this big jazz festival.

I mean the audiences are different, they're receptive to music in a different way that I really like, especially on the experimental side.

They have a really thriving noise scene and really adventurous music making kinds of projects there that I just kind of really connected with.

And so then I went back once or twice a year ever since with maybe a couple years in between due to whatever.

But yeah, I've been there a bunch of times and last time was last year, so I think I did three solo tours, then I did a couple duo tours and, and some some group stuff.

I've also shot scenes for I think two, two or three of of my films there as well.

I just Love, love being there and working there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I, I have to ask though, because I've never heard the phrase noise scene.

I didn't know there was such a thing called a noise scene.

Tell me, tell me about a, about the noise scene.

Noise music.

There's, there's a really great book by somebody I know actually, but I feel bad that his name is escaping me at the moment.

But anyway, there's a book called Japan Noise that kind of outlines a lot of the history and traces a lot of the genealogical roots of the scene there.

But essentially it's, it's harsh noise comes out of a little bit of a kind of a punk related attitude.

It's in Japan, it's very kind of specific feel like particularly out of Tokyo.

There's a certain kind of cultural milieu that, that generates that kind of harsh, intense expression as a release.

So you could be doing it with no input mixers with electronic instruments, with things that aren't actually usually musical instruments, but things that just generate giant walls of sound.

I saw one guy had.

What do they call, fluorescent bulbs around his.

That he was wearing like a guitar, little sort of little guitar strap on either side of the.

And.

And he could play them using his body to manipulate the current and then eventually kind of crushing them and destroying them over time to also get different kind of sounds.

Amazing.

That sounds so cool.

Yeah.

And, and, and it is, I mean just like maybe death metal and a bunch of other kind of, you know, even some forms of like kind of, you know, drama bass and IDM and things jungle.

There's a real release sometimes.

You know, with so many billions of people on the planet, sometimes we need to just get a big cathartic release.

And one of the ways that can come about is just screaming somehow with an instrument or your voice just screaming, you know, and, and it does something kind of nice for the brain.

And so there's this openness on the part of the audience to whatever comes to whatever happens, you know.

And, and, and so that just creates a really welcoming environment for whatever you want to.

Like you said though, with an, with intention, it's like I'm not trying to torture people with my actual experiments.

I'm hopefully presenting some.

The results of cool experiments, you know, rather than just randomly experimenting with sound in front of people.

But, but anyway.

Yeah, so it's, it's, it's actually kind of a really complex, complex and sophisticated genre of, of music.

Noise.

There's noise festivals also in the US Man.

I'd like to check that out.

Let me know if there's ever one in Southern California that'd be really interesting.

Yeah, it's sort of like a sound bath, but a lot noisier.

No, no, but the understanding, the logic behind it.

Right.

Like, that's, you know, I love that.

And I totally get it.

I totally get it.

That's super cool.

Well, tell me about your latest record.

Well, Istanbul, I kind of mentioned, but.

But the one that was released just previous, like, by a couple weeks, I think is called Specular.

Like, I was sort of hinting at.

And when I.

When I'm conceptualizing an album, I'll use Specular as a better example because Istanbul was one of those albums that just appeared out of nowhere.

So that one was a little bit mysterious to me.

I was cleaning off out my phone and it was just a bunch of audio notes that I'd been walking around apparently, and.

And just kind of recorded minutes here and there and I'm like, oh, my God.

Like, I totally had forgotten, but I could remember exactly where I was at each one.

So it was just this flood of memories.

So I just started playing around with those phonographies, those sound.

The field recordings, and that became Istanbul.

So that was sort of this crazy.

Kind of had this other kind of momentum that came out of nowhere.

Whereas Specular, I wanted to focus on a specific set of instruments.

There's an analog instrument called the Lyra 8 by Soma Labs in Moscow by this inventor, Vlad Kremer, who's a wonderful musician as well as just a really inspired and unique musical instrument maker.

So I'm basically using that instrument in a different way with different live processing, effects, pedals, Moog, Spectrovox, like, all kinds of different analog instruments that give me different ways to kind of express stuff through the Lyra.

And so I just kind of sculpted spaces that in a different way that weren't as improvised in terms of just like recording an improvised kind of 10 minutes and then kind of fashioning that into a piece.

This one, I was actually layering things and tracking, and I definitely had dynamic and textural kind of goals, but tying in, I guess, a little bit with.

With noise and just the nature of experiencing experimental music, especially early on in your listening.

You know, one thing in music school that I kind of really internalized was these ideas that pitch, you know, melody, you know, the whatever scale or tonality or.

Or note you're using.

And timbre, the actual sound, color, is it a trombone, a piano or something on a synth and rhythm are just three of many kinds of organizing principles and aspects of musical expression.

So you can actually do an entire catalog of work that doesn't really pay much attention to pitch sets.

Like, I don't care.

What about keys or tonality?

I mean, I like micro tonality, I like atonality.

I don't care.

It doesn't need to be a traditional melody in that sense.

For me, timbre and rhythm are much more primarily important.

And, and one thing I did with Specular is slow down the metabolism of the rhythmic side.

So it's a lot of slower moving drones.

And this, I think, is also what gives a kind of meditative quality.

It can really kind of transport your mind to different places as you kind of tune into it and patiently kind of sit with something for like 10 minutes that's moving very slowly.

And I wanted to give that kind of, I don't know, kind of transcendental or meditative experience.

And I have gotten a lot of feedback on Specular that there are some, like, friends of mine in, in, well, here in la, but also in, like in Mexico and all over the place who told me that, like, they use it to kind of orient themselves in the morning or just to kind of get their brain right or feeling right to them.

Mm.

It's kind of an orient.

Orienting kind of experience for them.

And that's not nothing, anything I necessarily thought I could control in the listener, listener's mind.

But hearing that it happened is, Is pretty cool.

Like, I like, I like that.

I like being part of someone's day in that way.

Right.

Isn't that, I mean, that's lovely.

Right?

It's like, how does your art move people?

How do people engage with your art?

Could be completely different than what you ever intended.

But if it's giving them joy, if it's them value, whatever that means, you know, like, that's, that's, that's a, you.

Know, I don't know.

It must be very rewarding as an artist to hear delighted and surprised with unexpected applications, right?

Absolutely.

Well, and, and you and I, you know, are friends with and work with like, countless artists, visual artists, painters, graffiti artists, street art, whatever.

And I don't know, like, they don't always have that experience.

When they do, I think it's generally positive, but they don't necessarily have a way to experience what their work actually did to somebody's home or how it, how it kind of changed in some small or big way.

You know, the dynamic in the home and, and the flow and the feel and in music.

You definitely get to do that when you're playing in front of an audience, which is why live is so important to me, because you're, you're getting immediate feedback in terms of what the vibe is and, and that's like a, like a stand up comic or, you know, it's like that immediacy is really good.

You know, that immediacy is really useful for film and for our friends who are painters.

It's not baked in.

It's not baked into the trajectory necessarily.

But when you get to present a film live and do a Q and A or something, that's great.

And I know artists that have really seen how their art has changed somebody's life.

I mean, that's huge.

But it's not quite as baked in to the experience as music is.

How many instruments do you play?

My, the first instrument was piano.

I started playing electric guitar when I was around 12 and that's also when I got my first synth.

I was a church organist, so I could do proper, proper pipe organ.

So anything, you know.

I love that.

Yeah, I love that.

I know that.

That's awesome.

Yeah, I, I started probably around 15 or 16 and I actually studied with a specific teacher for, for organ, for church organ, in addition to, you know, studying classical guitar, classical piano and everything else.

But, but yeah, and, and so I just kind of learned how to do it.

It came kind of naturally.

A little extra practice with the pedal board and I, I loved it.

It was also similar to kind of everything else I'm talking about in terms of music too, because, you know, a pipe organ is putting that, that musical material into the air without any kind of digital or, or computer otherwise compute, you know, it's just pumping air and, and there's reeds in some of the, you know, it's, it's so, it's very, a very acoustic experience.

So being in a space and then playing church organ, not just solo for like, you know, prelude and kind of other kinds of transitional elements in the service, but also along with the congregation as they're singing hymns.

I'm the opposite of a religious person in any kind of that kind of sense or whatever, but the feeling of, you know, a couple hundred people singing along with your pipe organ while they're singing a nice hymn, you know, or like, who was it?

The comedian?

Australian comedian Tim mentioned.

It's like, you know, he loves the hymns.

You know, he's like, the songs have nice chords, but the words are kind of dodgy.

And so I kind of felt like that also.

Right.

But.

But I was more focused on just that visceral kind of that sense of community and, you know.

Yes.

And.

And so.

So it also plays into all the other experiences, I guess, now that I think about it.

I loved.

I love playing church organ Point where I just.

I couldn't.

I couldn't manage to.

To actually stay for the whole service.

Because it was just.

Because the words were dodgy.

Yeah, the words were.

There's a limit to my dodginess.

You try to limit my toleration of dodginess became thin.

But.

But I remember the experience.

I did it for good into my 20s.

So, yeah, I did it for years.

So anyway, guitar and pipe organ and piano and synths of all kinds and.

And also drums and percussion.

I studied that in school a little bit, but nothing.

Like, never anything with reeds.

I don't think I've really done a lot of wind.

I mean, I'm melodica.

That doesn't really count.

But anyway, not a lot of wind instruments, though.

But anything with strings or electronics I can play.

I've become more and more interested in getting back to electroacoustic things.

Things that are actually vibrating in the air and things that are actually taking human gestures and converting them to electrical circuit in.

In an electric circuit.

And so the newer instruments that I've been acquiring, like the Somalira 8 or the landscape stereo field or a number of other instruments, are like this one.

I'm actually kind of the cable.

So I can connect faceplates to electricity generated by a plant or by another human or by my cat or just by a piece of metal on some other thing or whatever.

And you can hear how your body can conduct the electricity to change the character of the sound.

Yes.

And that is another form of immediacy that is just intoxicating to me.

Yeah.

So electroacoustics kind of where it's at.

Any percussion in there?

Yeah, I mean, there's stuff I play in a percussive way, things that are triggered, things that I hit with sticks.

I played marimba.

I remember I was a teacher's assistant to a younger class coming up behind me in.

In percussion class.

So I'd teach them how to do paradiddles and.

And, you know, how to kind of manage kind of, you know, xylophone and vibraphone and marimba playing and.

Yeah.

And piano is.

Is essentially a percussion instrument also.

So there's all kinds of stuff you can do with the hammers and.

And.

Right, right.

You know, so.

And I think.

I think I got into percussion because, you know, at like, whatever age I was 12 or 13, like, you know, I needed to be in the orchestra.

And.

And there's no piano players in the orchestra, so the piano players generally became percussionists.

So I played timpani.

And that was a little stressful for me because I didn't practice enough because I don't own a timpani, you know, how to tune it, you know, for the next stuff coming up in the score.

And I've got two, and maybe I need three notes.

And so I've got to quietly put my ear down on the.

On the surface and use the pedal to tune it to the right note.

So that was a little stressful to make sure I was in tune.

But.

But yeah, I've.

I've dabbled all over the percussion kind of thing, for sure.

Talk a little bit about how, or talk a lot about how your music making and your filmmaking come together and intersect or have come together and intersected over the years.

Your journey.

Well, the.

The.

There was a time in the early 90s where I was trying to.

While I was going to university there was trying to make my make a living supplementing with engineering, with audio engineering, doing sound design, doing mixing, doing mastering of other people's albums, things like that.

And at some point, the technology I was using became so cheap over the years and the hourly rate suddenly dove that I needed to find something else.

So on a practical level, somebody asked me if I could edit video, like in 91 or something or two.

And I just said yes.

And then.

And then I figured it out.

So on a technical level, I kind of was primed to think, well, you know, video production, film production, actually, there's aspects of that that I can make maybe a little bit of a better living.

So there was that.

Involved in the electronic music scene down there.

These are some friends I've had for years.

And we would get together and we would listen to new tracks and hang out.

At some point, the shows that they were doing went from a handful of people, dozens of people, hundreds of people, to like 5,000 people in a big Highline arena.

And I looked around, okay, this is different now.

I see architects, I see graphic artists, I see video live VJs, video artists, fashion designers.

I see everybody kind of collecting around this aesthetic.

At the time, in Tijuana.

And this is clearly an explosion.

So that was my first idea to actually pick up my camera, which I had been using in production work, pick up my camera to document something.

And that became my first feature called Frontier Life.

And, and then I followed that up with Moog.

So the inspiration to actually start making music and art oriented documentaries just came organically out of what I was doing with my friends, my music, my musician friends in Tijuana.

And then on a, on a more conceptual level there's a huge.

I think most editors, film editors are.

A lot of them are drummers or in some way musical rhythm is so important.

So I also use music to inform my editing and my camera work and everything.

Like I said at the, at the top, it's always and still is my frame of reference for just creative pursuit.

It's just my core vocabulary is music.

And if you imagine a frame in a film, you know, you have the movement of whatever's happening in the environment or the cast or whatever.

There's the blocking, there's the movement within the frame of people that's rhythmic.

There's the movement of the camera that's obviously very, very rhythmic and can have different emotional meanings.

And then there's the movement of the rhythm of the edit.

So there's these three kind of dimensions that are primarily rhythmic that form the basis of making a visual story.

There's.

Yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of connections.

It seems, it does seem seamless to me in a lot of ways, especially after all these years, to go between all of those things.

You know, playing a score that I wrote for somebody, playing in somebody else's band, doing some session work, performing my own stuff, suiting something, doing something with, with Crew west or, or Arterial Portrait of an Artist.

It's all in a complicated way, very, very interconnected.

What of all the films that you've made over the years, is Moog the one film that you're probably most known for or associated with?

I think probably that it depends on what, what audience.

But, but because Sunset Strip was also pretty big.

They were coming out and they would, they would be shown in theaters.

I remember as a kid, even in the late 90s, like I remember going to the theater and seeing in, you know, indie docs, like, every other week.

You know, it had a lot of.

It had a lot of ways to be seen, and it seemed a little bit.

It was definitely a little bit smaller, a little bit more indie.

And I guess a lot of my sensibility on a personal level was infused in it differently.

And so I'm.

I'm definitely proud of that one.

And it definitely kind of made, like, set the stage, I guess, for.

For.

For the rest of my career, such as it as it is in filmmaking.

Well, would you have made.

I mean, would Sunset Strip have come to you if.

If you hadn't made Moog?

I mean, every way.

Because.

Because it came first.

No.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

By.

By almost a decade.

And.

Yes.

I'm just.

And then the difference between, like, a $300,000 budget, like, for Moog, you know, 1.3, 1.2, 1.3 million for Sunset Strip, that's a whole different.

I would.

I definitely prefer making Mogs to Sunset Strips.

Yeah.

After going on.

Going through it, the pressures are not a satisfying part of the creative pursuit when the budget is at a certain level.

Yeah.

The pressure is coming in different ways that are very kind of practical and incongruous to what you're trying to do.

Mm.

Mm.

So, yeah.

Yeah, no, Moog definitely put me on the map as a filmmaker and also tied into my music story because Bob Moog was a hero of mine Since I was 12 and started subscribing to Keyboard Magazine.

So he was.

He's, like, in the godhead of electronic music.

And Wendy Carlos, who came out was switched on Bach, I guess around the time I was born, actually.

But I really started listening to it when I was 11 and 12, and that bridged my classical piano experience with music to that point, with going into electronics and synthesizers beautifully.

So she.

She did a bunch of Bach, actually.

Wendy Carlos switched on Bach where she used Moog synthesizers to create.

Recreate a lot of Bach's music.

So Moog himself and his instruments were very form, like, performative for me as well, coming up as a musician.

So that was a very uniquely wonderful kind of intersection of music and filmmaking for me.

And how did that project come?

I mean, what was the origin story?

How did that come to you?

I was still shooting Frontier Life and I had an idea for a scene with Pepe Mok and Ramon and Masque, Fusible and Bostic from Nortek Collective, great musicians had a scene where they would meet Bob Moog and talk.

And Bob Moog happened to be coming to a museum for a talk in San Diego.

So we did arrange it and I shot it, got all the permissions and it turned out that my mentor from university and still friend, George Lewis, shout out George Lewis.

He just got a Pulitzer for his opera called the Comet.

Amazing.

He was there and him and Bob had worked together and so it was the best introduction I could have had, George Lewis introducing me to Bob Moog.

And anyway, so it all kind of came out of there.

So it came out organically from the other film and then also from music and from George and from, you know, all of it was.

Yeah, it had to happen, you know, it just had to happen.

Just with the way that it came together.

Yeah, I think we were, you know, and Bob told me, he's like, yeah, you know, I've had dozens and dozens of people want to do this and none of them ever figure it out and make it happen.

And I was the first one and my producer, Ryan, Ryan Page, we were the first ones to able, able to actually make it happen and get it done and get it out.

It's tough to make documentaries, indie documentaries.

So.

Yeah.

And as it happened, for people that aren't aware of, I mean, he's also a wonder, a wonderful human being as well as musician and designer.

So it was a wonderful time to, to talk to him because he could reflect on this 50 year career with.

But in a very poetic kind of way.

It was very, it was very cool.

And then he had.

What is it?

Glioblastoma, one of those very aggressive brain tumor cancers which was diagnosed and then he passed away, like just several months later.

It goes fast when you discover it.

So by the time the film was released he had seen it, but he hadn't actually been out there at screenings and all of that kind of thing, so that was kind of a shame.

But on the other hand, to have been able to have that experience with him and to Put his story out at that time in his life was a blessing in the sense that, you know, it was just before his exit, essentially.

So the timing was also important in that way.

In hindsight.

Yeah.

Serendipitous, right?

Yeah.

And his daughter had several years after he passed, wrote me a note, just said, oh, thank you so much.

Like, I have this thing that you made that I can show my new family, you know, now that she's married and having kids, like, I can show them, hey, this is my dad, this is grandpa.

Right.

And they, and, and they can really get a sense of him as a human being.

Yes.

You know, because we, we kind of had that approach in the film.

So that, I mean, that's awesome to hear that.

That's as good as it gets right there, for sure.

Especially for a storyteller, an artist, a filmmaker.

Yeah.

Like you.

Well, what's next, brother?

And as you look out over the balance of this year and onto the next, what, what are you feeling?

What are you thinking?

What are you aiming for?

Well, I don't know.

I, I would probably prefer not to get into politics right at the end, but there's a lot going on that makes things a little haphazard and a little unpredictable.

Yeah.

And a little stressful, as we all.

Know what's going on.

I didn't read the news today.

I don't know.

Yeah.

So.

So asking about the future is difficult of a question in a lot of ways, but just in terms of career wise.

In terms of.

And I don't really think about career actually, but just in terms of projects I'm excited about.

Yes.

That are, that are happening and in some degree of their evolution.

I'm excited about getting this, this Luis Bermudez doc out.

Yes, yes.

Hopefully before the end of the year.

So that, that I'm, I'm very much looking forward to.

I'm always interested in looking forward to as you are Classic Black, the project that, that you and I are.

Ricky Pageau on that.

That, that is going to turn into something I feel like that we wouldn't be able to define yet because I just think it's so multifaceted and, and, and he's such an interesting artist and accomplished artist anyway.

I can see that going into some really unexpected and awesome ways.

Yes, yes.

But even as a just a straight up kind of documentary, visual type thing, that, that I'm always excited about, and.

And I'm excited with the work that.

That we continue to do with all of our artist friends and just being involved in different ways with, you know, like, I have the opportunity to teach at UCLA a couple quarters a year.

Anything that.

And I know you feel the same, like, anything that we can do to kind of get in there, even with a little bit of a political motivation, even.

But get in there and stoke the fires of creative expression and emerging artists and young artists and try to do whatever we can to inspire them and help them and facilitate.

Facilitate their creative growth, which I think is also resistance in a certain way to the things that are inhumane, that are happening.

So I look forward to that.

I look forward to getting back into my teaching quarter in the fall, and I always find that pretty grounding.

I teach music for visual media, so that kind of slides right in between everything we've been talking about and everything I do.

So, yeah, I think that's.

That's what I'm interested in.

And.

And family, man.

Trying to figure out how to.

How to.

Yeah.

How to boost my son into his own.

Yes.

Life in the next several years.

He's 16.

You know how fast it goes, right?

Oh, my God.

So.

It's such a cliche, but it's so true.

It's like an eye blink.

It's an eye blink.

Yeah.

I had to look, you know, my.

My wife Channing, look her in the eye the other day, and I just said, you know, honey, we need to, like, look each other in the eye and recognize very overtly that our daughter.

In front of.

In five years.

Our daughter is graduating high school and likely going to college in five years.

And that'll.

That's going to be five minutes.

It's going to go so fast.

So what do we want to do in these five years?

How are we going to, you know, maximize our time?

And there was a statistic I heard Recently, I guess 95% of the time we will spend with our children happens within the first 18 years.

After 18, it just falls off.

You just never see them again, basically.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, there's the pressure because I want to do good by them, you know, and I'll always be there, you know, but also, it's just heartbreaking.

Like, I'm gonna.

I'm gonna miss you, man.

But, like, it can't go any other way.

So Godspeed and go.

You know?

Yeah.

Go for it.

But anyway, it's really heartbreaking to think about it, you know?

Well, we.

We started this wonderful, wonderful conversation, talking about your music.

And as you think about music making over the next, you know, few weeks and months and, you know, what.

What do you.

What are you.

What are you working on?

What are you.

What are you feeling in terms of original music?

Well, I have.

I have one.

One project that's been sitting on the back burner that I just.

It just hasn't quite clicked in the way it needs to click.

So I'm excited for.

To witness the clicking of that and then bring that.

You know, it's a stubborn one, I guess, but I think it's also a little bit personal.

It's like, you know, dedicated to Kate Olivia Sessions, who's a hero of mine and a hero of many in Southern California, and it's called Jacaranda, which is.

She's responsible for the jacarandas that we see all over.

So, anyway, so I want to have something that is appropriate for this amazing woman and her effect on my life.

You know, what, 50s?

60.

No, maybe more than 60 years ago, she passed.

And connecting with how important she is to me is, I guess, a very personal kind of thing.

So I'm not forcing it.

I'm not forcing it.

So that'll click when it clicks.

And then apart from that, I've just.

Yeah.

I've recently got a growing stack of new instruments that I haven't had time yet to really explore.

You know, they've been arriving over the last, like, month or two, so I'm gonna.

I'm gonna see what kind of inspiration, New inspiration, new vocabulary is hiding inside of some of those instruments.

And those releases will probably be more forthcoming than Jacaranda, maybe.

Anyway, we'll get at least.

At least one or two more albums before the end of the year.

Right on, Right on.

Well, come back, please, and.

And share.

The door is always open to you.

My brother and I just.

Thanks, man.

I've just so cherished our time together today, and, I mean, I just.

I care for you deeply, and I'm just so grateful to call you my friend and my colleague.

Thanks for coming on.

Back at you, man.

Love you.

All right.

Love you back.

Love you more.

All right, man, talk soon.

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