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What Is Not Strange? is the first full-length album by Los Angeles-based composer Tashi Wada in over five years, comprising his most far-reaching and impassioned music to date, performed live with Julia Holter, Ezra Buchla, and Corey Fogel. Written and recorded over a period that encompassed the death of his father and the birth of his daughter, the album sees Wada reflecting inward to explore broad narratives—being alive, mortality, finding one’s place in the world—through new modes of ecstatic, song-based expression. While the denser forms, stark contrasts, and overt surreality may carry a different weight than Wada’s earlier work, which elicited perceptual effects with minimal means, the heart of What Is Not Strange? is still in experimentation and unforeseen outcomes.
Wada refers to What Is Not Strange? as dream music, inhabiting “emotional states that are difficult to pinpoint” and “shapeshifting from moment to moment.” The search for innate truths by way of experiential knowledge of the self was influenced by Wada’s immersion in the writings of the American Surrealist poet Philip Lamantia. In addition to titling the album after a poem by Lamantia, Wada was inspired by the visionary poet’s belief that the secrets of the world lie within us, as we are a reflection of that very same world. And yet a basic premise of the album is the underlying feeling that there is no “there” there. Even the ground under our feet is uncertain.
Matt Robidoux is a San Francisco based composer, improviser, and educator interested in the convergence of movement and sound as it relates to free improvisation and accessibility. Their primary instrument is the “corn synth” — (Kinetically Operated Randomness Network) a modular system that interprets physical input from two “ears of corn” sculptures cast in aluminum.
Why corn? I like to focus on the modularity/ubiquity of corn and this kind of illogical sculptural sound causality as a starting point for free improvisation. The instrument was invented during my residency at ACRE in Wisconsin, where I cast two corn cob moldings in aluminum at a metal pouring workshop in a cornfield. Movement and touch determine the parameters of pitch, velocity, and duration. This makes for an accessible instrument, at once charming and absurd, while also a merging of my practice creating space for unrestricted musical improvisation.
The modular environment, configured around two touch controlled aluminum cast ears of corn, is informed by my ongoing work with Pauline Oliveros' final project AUMI (Adaptive Use Musical Instrument) in direct collaboration with the disability community and multidisciplinary arts organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area. The powerful echo and artistic legacy of Mills College CCM (1967-2022) resonates in my design of the corn synth, modeling it after the Buchla 158, the original synthesizer used at the San Francisco Tape Music Center beginning in 1963.