INTERVIEW // Emily Beisel

INTERVIEW // Emily Beisel

Comfort Music’s Ian Mahanpour sat down with Emily Beisel to talk about their upcoming Quiet Comfort show on 3/28/24.

CM: Your last solo project, A Particle of Organs, used a lot of distortion—how does that play into your practice?

Emily: My background in new music was actually my channel into exploring heavier music. I came to really appreciate experimental metal and am always looking for more of it, but it's hard to find. Which is a little of what A Particle of Organs is—it’s what I'm looking for but can't find, so I'm trying to make it.

Experimental metal groups like Sunn O))) or Car Bomb felt to me like some of the things in new music that I was really attracted to, but at volumes that brought in much more physicality. Working with your mind forces you to also work with your body. That mind-body connection is particularly important as an instrumentalist and is such a big part of my practice. That really is the medium that I’m working with—and I love that.

CM: Where does your interest in noise and timbre come from?

Emily: I think a big part of what draws me to noise and complex sounds is the fact that it’s oftentimes easier to get into acousmatic listening with them because their source is not immediately obvious—especially with extended techniques that are really either in the body of the instrument or a combination of your own body and the instrument itself.

Perception and focus is something that I think a lot about. I studied both music and psychology in undergrad, and my mom's a psychiatrist. And I also have ADD—I was diagnosed as a young kid—and so part of that as an adult is thinking about focus and how minds interact with and stay engaged with things. As a listener, I find that when there's some perceptual ambiguity, or when there's not an overt meaning to a sound, it really keeps your engagement. I was most attracted to sound when it allowed you to exercise your own interpretation—it really opens a sort of freedom.

I also think that we are so inundated with noise, especially in a city. There's a lot of noise pollution and I think that we actually spend a lot of time having to block out sound. We exert a lot of energy trying not to let things in. And so I think spaces where that noise can be explored more intentionally can feel really good. Amplification and electronics really broadens what you can do with that—it increases the number of parameters that you have to work with.

CM: So how will your Quiet comfort show embody “quietness?”

Emily: I've been thinking a lot about this because a lot of the solo work I've been doing has been moving much more towards higher volumes, which is something that I really enjoy. But the thing that got me started with amplification, like amplifying the acoustic instrument, was wanting to be able to use those really small sounds that you otherwise can't use in a group setting because they're inaudible unless you're close to the instrument. Amplification let me use those sounds. 

I've played a few acoustic solo sets in the past year, and when you work with a lot of electronics, sometimes it's very freeing to abandon that for a bit and just hang those wires. So I'm excited to go back and use those sounds, but in their acoustic setting without the amplification. Some of them are just extremely beautiful and delicate, particularly with the way that air interacts with the instrument when the full instrumental tone is not there. There's a lot of really delicate overtones that almost sound choral. Things like that have to be solo and they need a space like Comfort Station to be audible. Any sound is so amplified in that space.

CM: How did you start your practice of free improvisation?

Emily: I started in my freshman year of undergrad. I was in the contemporary ensemble and the leader was Stuart Saunders Smith—he was a phenomenal teacher. He would have us start every rehearsal with a free improvisation set with the whole group, which I was so grateful for because it introduced that way of performing  really early on. And especially when you're a very green player and don’t have any preconception of what things should or shouldn't be, even doing things like walking around on the stage and trying to play the grain of the wood on the stage feels radical.

CM: Do you prefer improvising in group settings or solo?

Emily: They feel very different to me. I love playing with others—in a lot of ways, it's easier, but it can also be frustrating. If people aren't listening, that's where the frustration tends to come in. But having things in someone else's language provoke something in yourself is also really special. I actually really love that, for example when you're working on a score, you're working with the composer's language and it’s very interesting to feel the ways that working intently with a different composer's language influences the things that you pull into your own and then use.

In a lot of ways, my free improvisation language is deeply informed by all of the scores I've ever played. For example, it's fun to improvise with the members of Fonema Consort for that reason. We've all played together so much, and so when we improvise together, you can almost hear the things that we've done together  but in this totally live setting. It's no longer predetermined in any way. 

CM: So would you say your solo work, such as A Particle of Organs, is informed by your participation in groups like Fonema?

Emily: I think it's very much its own thing, but I don't think it would exist if I didn't have that experience. There's one composer in particular that we play a lot, Julio Estrada. His work, “yuunohui'ehecatl” are pieces for wind instruments where you basically “build them” as the performer. The score has different lines and each line is a different parameter. You choose which of the parameters you want to incorporate in each page of the score—you could think of them as movements or fragments—and as the performer you build it and then combine them. You have to, somehow, perform all of them simultaneously. There's a level of impossibility there that forces you out of your patterns of what feels good to you.

Playing his music really impacted all of us. I especially felt that when we found things that broke us out of our standard approach to performance it was really fertile ground. Even just how your body wants to move, those habits that are sort of built into you when you approach your instrument. That experience of breaking them down and trying to put them back together in a different configuration was really impactful—and there's definitely a lot of that in Particle of Organs. 

CM: How did you develop your solo practice?

Emily: I would say that is something I have worked up over time. I have intermittently worked up material, but was never convinced by it. So it took me a long time to really develop, which was a frustration for sure. That analytical part of yourself can really interfere with writing, and that was what I was struggling with for a long time. There is fruit from that process, but it takes a while.

With the intention of creating a solo album, I started playing solo a lot more. To work on this, I would improvise every time I sat down with my instrument for at least 15 minutes and see what was generated. Sometimes it was nothing, but sometimes something was interesting and then I would make a little recording and keep working with it. Eventually I came up with a body of work that I liked. 

CM: You also do a lot of freelance theater work—does that affect your improvisational  work at all?

Emily: They do exist in their own spheres to a large extent. Freelancing work is oftentimes a lot more about being really consistent in your performance. That consistency is essential—it's being able to come in and lay it down every night. And so I think that those two, the free improvisation and freelancing work, balance each other very nicely. I really enjoy being able to use that high level craftsmanship as an instrumentalist, but then balancing that with something that is not about consistency in the same way. I don't think I could do all of one or all of the other. 

CM: Any upcoming projects you’d like to highlight?

Emily: I'm in the process of developing what will eventually be a new album. I'm actually working with an artist to build a piece of wearable visual art. I won't say too much because it's not announced yet, but I want to further obscure myself as a person and performer—pushing things in the direction of the sounds being able to exist as they are. Sounds often have the ego of the performer layered into them; you're still hearing the performer as a source. So I’m incorporating some visual things that will help further obscure that.