Ezra Feinberg (Interview)

Good morning.

Today we’re listening to Ezra Feinberg, an American guitarist and composer based in upstate New York. We previously recommended Feinberg back in 2020. We’re playing his new album Soft Power, which came out a couple weeks ago and features guests such as Mary Lattimore, David Moore, and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. It’s a collection of mellow acoustic instrumentals, reminiscent of Sven Wunder or John Carroll Kirby, recorded from the summer of 2020 through early 2021. We’re also re-upping Feinberg’s 2020 solo record, Recumbent Speech, which features more drums. A conversation with him follows the streaming links.

Soft Power - Ezra Feinberg (40m, no vocals)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Bandcamp / Tidal

Recumbent Speech - Ezra Feinberg (40m, no vocals)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Bandcamp / Tidal

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What are your earliest memories of music?

I remember the covers of some of my parents’ LPs. The Fifth Dimension comes to mind, and Free To Be You And Me, that might be one of the very earliest. I remember the song “Free To Be You And Me” and the skit where Mel Brooks is a newborn baby who keeps talking about how he’s “bald as a ping pong ball.” I guess that isn’t music exactly, but it’s an early memory of a record. That was maybe age four, but a little later, in kindergarten and first grade, my memories of music become more vivid. In kindergarten I was obsessed with Rick James’ “Superfreak.” In first grade I was very into Michael Jackson’s Thriller of course, but also early hip-hop. My friends and I did a whole breakdancing routine to Run DMC “It’s Tricky” in the school talent show.

We've read that you've been influenced by Hiroshi Yoshimura, Cluster & Eno, and Terry Riley. What are the tracks and records that you come back to the most for inspiration?

Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Soundscape 1: Surround was reissued recently by Temporal Drift as just Surround after being out of “print” for years, and then only on YouTube for years after that. It’s a record that holds magic inside it. I listen to it and wonder how the hell he did that. There’s very little there, but it conjures a whole world. It feels trite to call it tranquil or relaxing, it might be those things, but to me it’s music that slows me down and brings me back to myself. It’s an inspiring record but I can’t say I’ve attempted to borrow or steal anything from it, at least not consciously, because I wouldn’t know how. It would sound ridiculous if I tried.

The classic Cluster & Eno record feels to me like the opposite – it’s a template that I can use, it has ingredients I can spice my own dishes with. Finding compositional dynamics through the sounds and rhythmic patterns of analog synthesis is a bottomless well of possibility for me. I freely steal ideas from Cluster & Eno, and Cluster, and Eno.

As for Terry Riley, performing “In C” back in 2018 as part of the Darmstadt collective’s annual event at Le Poisson Rouge brought me closer to the piece and its meaning. It’s a radical interior dialectic at work: 52 musical figures to be played in sequence for any duration at any rhythm and with any grouping of instruments. It’s a performance of both rigid structures and boundless freedoms, a composed piece that is entirely unpredictable, a truly experimental composition. Riley wasn’t the first to invent an idiosyncratic compositional schema like that of course, but, with the pulse holding it all together it’s a piece that always feels as contemporary as it does historical. Doesn’t matter how many times you’ve heard it, you know it’ll start with that pulse, pretty soon you’re in the muddle, and from there who the fuck knows!

You're a practicing psychoanalyst. Tell us how your expertise in psychology interacts with your musical life, if at all.

They’re very separate endeavors with very different processes and very different communities, but, at the same time, they have crucial overlaps, at least for me. Making music and being a psychoanalyst are both about putting yourself in a deliberately unpredictable situation. You can’t say how a given session of psychoanalysis will go, or what might come up. Free association is unpredictable by definition. I’d say the same goes for music, whether I’m composing on my own or working with other people or improvising – you start playing and you see what happens. You have an intention at the start but it’s never fulfilled, it never sounds just the way you imagine or even hope it will. And that’s the point.

On Soft Power you collaborate with some of our favorite contemporary artists: Mary Lattimore, David Moore, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma… Tell us how that collaboration worked – what were the highs like and what challenges did you overcome, if any?

Each collaboration was different, and this being an album recorded during the pandemic these were all parts recorded remotely. Jefre is an old friend from my time in San Francisco who I see all the time. We’ve collaborated in various formations, and I love how he thinks about music – his mentality could not be more different than mine. He thinks about music like a painter – it’s all about which shapes and colors should have clarity and which should be abstracted or obscured. I think of music in more narrative terms, more like a novel or a film. Where does this piece begin, where’s it going, where should it end up? I sent Jefre “Pose Beams” but without the end part, which I was confused about, and he sent me a bunch of ideas, including one where he took the piano part and ran it through I think a micro synth or maybe a granular synth, not sure, but he sort of smeared the piano across the canvas, and the whole “free” second half of that piece started with that. I got David’s info from Jefre when I needed some piano and additional synthesizer and he was into it right away, and Mary I met almost 20 years ago in San Francisco and when I had the idea for a harp on “Get Some Rest” I reached out to her. I wrote a couple of the lines she plays but the open stuff at the end is all her, it’s so beautiful and worked so well for the tune.

Do you listen to music while doing busywork, like answering emails, etc.? If so, what are your go-to artists or albums?

Yeah, I listen to music all the time. Seems like every week is something different. This week I’ve been obsessed with this composer, Catherine Lamb. She works a lot with just intonation, and her piece “Pulse/Shade” with Erika Bell has been on repeat for days. It’s been that and the entire Basic Channel catalog.

Name an underrated musician from the past 50 years.

Wow, that’s a hard question. Most of the music I love isn’t actually that popular, which is to say most of it is underrated (though not all of course). I can think of a dozen truly brilliant songwriters who are almost entirely unknown, same with “experimental” musicians, jazz musicians, genre-less genre-tourist musicians. Answering this question feels a bit funny because whomever I choose necessarily excludes so many others who are equally deserving. I’m probably overthinking it. How’s this: if you ever come see me perform chances are the musicians I’ll be sharing the stage with or the bill with will be vastly underrated.

What are you working on next?

Quite a bit – I have some shows coming up and a new trio performing pieces from Soft Power, so we’ve been rehearsing as often as schedules allow. I also have different collaborators these days, mostly in improv-settings, mostly ongoing projects with good friends and no hard deadlines. I also just got asked to record two interpretations/covers of whatever music I want for a really cool music website/subscription, so I’m planning some studio dates and what to do (and what to cover) once I have those dates. Eventually I’ll get to working on the next proper solo record, probably by the end of the year, but my records take a long time, years really, and it can be a very arduous and disorienting process. For the moment I’m enjoying doing other things musically before I dive back in.