An Interview with Derek Baron

Over the years, Derek Baron has pursued a unique style of field recording and sound collage utilizing mundane everyday sounds and tranquil chamber music. Their music has been released on some of the finest labels around, including Penultimate Press, Recital, and Regional Bears. On top of that, they run the label Reading Group, which has presented releases from a wide range of envelope-pushing artists from the past and present. Reading Group is about to release a new record from the groundbreaking trio of Fred Moten, Brandon López and Gerald Cleaver, as well as a record from X-Ray Hex Tet, a brand new group featuring Seymour Wright, Pat Thomas, Paul Abbott, Billy Steiger, Crystabel Riley and Edward George. Additionally, Baron has a new tape out on Notice with Luke Martin.

What are your earliest musical memories?

Most of my early music memories are of the cassette tapes in our family station wagon growing up (outside Chicago in the 90s). We had Meatloaf and some Sting/Police albums, and a double-cassette (or double CD maybe) of Frank Zappa's The Best Band You Never Heard in Your Life. On that album there was a song called "Heavy Duty Judy" that we always listened to on family trips. My dad, who was and is a big fan of Frank Zappa, also had an assortment of random jazz fusion, some Allan Holdsworth and a strange tape that I vaguely remember being called Breakfast for Dinosaurs. Another memory that comes to mind, not my earliest but also in the thread of family time in the car, was waiting in the car with my older siblings in a parking lot outside of a hotel in Florida while my parents were inside checking in or out. That Aerosmith song from Armageddon came on the radio and my older brother had a strong emotional reaction to it because of a girl he had met at summer camp and had just said goodbye to, or something like that. He was probably 15 which means I was about 7, and it was the first time I saw first hand the way music can articulate a yearning or a broken heart.

I read that you’re from Chicago, which is where I’m writing to you from. How long did you live here? Were you involved in the music scene here at all?

Yes! I grew up in Oak Park, a suburb on the west end of the Green Line, and lived there until I graduated high school. After that I bopped around for a while and lived in Ukrainian Village for several years before moving to New York for my third and final attempt at finishing college.  In Oak Park I had the good fortune to grow up next to my friend Gopal Balakrishnan and we played tons of music together from probably around age 10 and through high school: lots of covers of Soundgarden and Bob Marley at first and then we linked up with another great friend of mine, Dominic Frigo, and the three of us (in various combinations with other folks too) really created a highly adventurous musical early period for me. Some fun and pretentious rock stuff, but also checking out such a wide range of music together and pushing each other to learn all these different instruments and styles, Bach and Charlie Parker and Prokofiev and hardcore and all this stuff. Dom and Gopal were huge influences on me. Afterwards, when I was living in Ukrainian Village, I absolutely dove into the improvised music scene there, but mostly as a listener. I was quite obsessive, going to concerts 5 or 6 nights a week, often sneaking into places that were 21+ and just sitting in the back and listening to music. This period was extremely formative for me, and it was the first time I was experiencing music that I felt like I could come to as an artist in my own right (and not just an interested noodler learning some Bach suite.) There are many performances from that era that I will always, always remember, but a few that come to mind: a David S. Ware solo performance in one of his final tours before his passing; a life-changing set by the dearly departed Jaime Branch (with Paul Giallorenzo and Theo Katsaounis), solo sets by Moon Bros., Nicole Mitchell, Frank Rosaly, Olivia Block. A long-gone bar called Rodan on Milwaukee had a standing Tuesday evening with Jeff Parker, Joshua Abrams, John Herndon, and others. I would go every week. I was lucky to see Fred Anderson once as well. I started going to these shows only a couple of years after Malachi Ritscher self-immolated in protest of US imperial warfare that continues to this day. I never met Malachi but his presence, and his work in archiving that community, was felt in these spaces. 

What made you decide to work as an academic? 

I was touring a lot in 2015-2017 and having a good time doing it but I was beginning to understand what kind of work it would take to try to stick the landing to make touring a sustaining thing. I didn't think that I wanted to do that. My day job when I wasn't on tour was bartending which was fine but not particularly stimulating. When I graduated from college I had no intentions or plans to do grad school or whatever but I applied to a bunch of programs in historical musicology on a whim at this moment in 2016/17. That discipline was the one that made sense for the stupid reason that I liked music and I was interested in history. 

You have a very singular approach to field recording and collage, in utilizing these recordings of somewhat mundane, everyday sounds and sequencing them alongside chamber music. There’s a sense of surrealism to it. How would you describe your approach to this music?

I've never thought about it as surrealist per se but that is an interesting interpretation. I think my work (typically older work of mine, but I'm still exploring it in specific avenues) that combines mundane recordings and chamber music has to do with the experience of kind of "descending" into a kind of ecstatic vitalism of everyday life in late capitalism — the sound of the refrigerator as the voice of God-type listening — and then coming back up to ask the question, "what happens to Music on this ecstatic plane?" "Music" (as in like, instruments playing harmonies together) seemed so gratuitous when you're tuned in to the sound of the refrigerator. I was interested in that gratuity, the crisis of scale and reference that it seemed to entail. Also I just have a precious and private relationship with like "classical" music and I liked exploring those references in a seemingly very different aesthetic context. 

Do you ever intentionally seek out sounds for field recordings or is it all spur-of-the-moment?

As I mentioned earlier, I don't really do field recording anymore. The activity of being out in the world and capturing whatever sounds with my cell phone doesn't really provide a spark in the way that it used to. My problems are — at least on the surface, or at least apparently to me — entirely different now, and they have more to do with, for one, my relationship to the piano. But separately from the piano, if I am using any kind of "found" material now it is almost always sourced from YouTube, in a process that I started calling "YouTube Kabbalah" that I have discussed elsewhere. When I'm looking for stuff on YouTube (or other internet sound libraries, like ubuweb or the Library of Congress or whatever) it's mostly targeted searching, but with a high premium on allowing myself to be surprised by what I find. That process—which can be understood as a kind of field recording, but mediated through the internet and without the myth of the "listening tourist" — really began in my piece for Issue Project Room in 2020 and the series that grew out of it for Montez Press Radio. I continue that way of working in my collaborations with the brilliant choreographer Jade Manns, for whom I have scored a couple pieces (and am working on a third now).  

Which composers have had the greatest influence on you?

I've mentioned a few of the musicians who had major influences on me, but another one that was a huge early influence was Erik Satie. I found a CD of his at a record shop in my home town in high school, and luckily for me it didn't have any of his more well-known saccharine pieces like the Gnossiennes and the Gymnopedies. It contained the earliest compositions (the Sarabandes) and the very strange middle period gothic / Christian mysticism stuff, the "Prelude to the Heroic Gate of Heaven" and "Gothic Dances" and stuff. I think the fact that I discovered his music both alone and by accident was part of what made it such a direct hit. That wandering gothic piano music still gives me the creeps, it's so cold and beautiful. A bit later I was interested in all of the New York School people, and spent lots of time attempting to learn Morton Feldman's "Triadic Memories" on piano, which was a hilariously overambitious project for me at the time. Christian Wolff and Thelonious Monk too. For the past few years I've been playing a lot of Brahms intermezzi, and pieces that are too difficult for me but that are recommended to me by friends: Dom who I mentioned earlier is always good for this kind of thing, getting me to try to play music that I can only fumble my way through, like Prokofiev or Schubert. Right now I'm playing a piece by Poulenc that was suggested to my by my friend Ed Atkins, and a Scriabin piano sonata on the recommendation of the brilliant Lucy Liyou.

I’ve read a lot of reactionary takes about how classical music is dead because of wokeism or whatever. I think of your music as proof that people are still finding interesting new ways to engage with older western classical music. How do you think about incorporating this music in a more radical context?

I've never really understood what people mean by "classical music" when they say "classical music is dead" — less so when they're spittling about "wokeism" or whatever other reactionary bullshit. The "Classical" generation of western art music has been dead for 200 years, but there are of course other kinds of — more and less cryopreserved — practices of Eurogenic elite music that continue in a huge range of different contexts and protocols, from the Marvel Comics Universe to Lincoln Center to Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure to a ten-year-old playing a Bartok etude on piano on their practice keyboard at home. Western art music's association with conservative social positions or regressive politics is neither permanent nor inevitable. Culture continues to produce itself in part by feeding on what we have, so both the embracing and the avoidance of certain kinds of influences are either given conditions or conscious choices. I work with the music that interests me, but that cuts unevenly across traditions. There's some "experimental,” let's say field recording-based, music that I am really moved by, and some that leaves me extremely cold, same with European art music whether it's from the 1820s or the 2020s. The challenge and the joy, for me, is to try to articulate what it is that moves about something I'm hearing, or if it doesn't, why it doesn't. 

What motivated you to start Reading Group?

I'm not sure! I was becoming interested in the blooming of a thousand micro-labels as I was touring a lot and releasing early records of mine on labels like Freedom Garden and Kev Cahill's great Power Moves Label. I wanted to develop a label as a way of paying forward some of the generosity I had received (and continue to receive), but I definitely did not imagine the label expanding to the kind of scale it's at now. (Which for the record is still extremely small, all things considered, it's just slightly more involved than burning 20 CD-rs in my bedroom and giving them to my friends, which is what the label was when it started in 2016.)

What would you say Reading Group’s unifying aesthetic is, if there is any?

I don't think I would have had an answer to this a week ago, but I just did another interview about the label where the interviewer pointed out that I used the word "research" in almost every answer. So maybe that's it!  

The upcoming releases on Reading Group are both groups containing very prominent improvisers. Improvised music was basically my gateway into experimental music as a whole, so I was wondering, what’s your history with improvised music? 

Yes! The inclusion of these improvisors feels both slightly out of character for the label but also a return to a deeper influence of my own, as I detailed in response to your question about the influence of the Chicago music scene on me. I will say that Brandon, Gerald, and all the folks in X-Ray seem to me to be working in a very different idiom from the kind of instrumental improvisation that I associated with Chicago in 2008-2012, but I think the spirit is ultimately coming from the same place.  

Are there any books you feel people should read in conjunction with what you’ve released on Reading Group?

This is a really interesting question. There are some obvious connections: people interested in the David Wojnarowicz cassette journals should read his breathtaking book Close to the Knives, as well as The Weight of the Earth, which is a book-length transcription of the same audio of the RG release (and then some). For looking into Ishmael Reed more, his novel Mumbo Jumbo is a wonderful place to start. That book is at the top of the list of the micro-genre of media that's "secretly about the Knights Templar," a list that also includes the Dan Brown novel The Lost Symbol as well as a great TV show called The Curse of Oak Island that my partner Emily Martin and I watch with her Dad. And of course all of the magisterial work by Fred Moten speaks to his music on RG as well. It's not the most well-known but the book of his that I have the deepest relationship to is Stolen Life. But everything is great — I would call special attention to his follow-up to the famous Undercommons book, also co-authored with Stefano Harney, called All Incomplete.

But your question is making me think of if there's any book or text that I would recommend that points to the existence of Reading Group as a whole, or as a project. I want to think about this more, but the first thing that comes to mind is Marxism and Literature by Raymond Williams, which, despite the somewhat misleading title, is the best description I can think of about the function of collective creative practice (and all creative practice is collective) under the pressure of history. 

How did the group Cop Tears come together? Where did the name come from?

I met Cameron Kapoor, John Andrew Wilhite, and John Welsh in college. I played with each of them in different contexts (including doing a duo tour with John Welsh in Europe, our group was called Speaker World), but we continued to all play together in various formations. In 2014--maybe--we played at some tripped out festival at Reed College, and there were big letters on the lawn, "HOLLYWOOD" sign-style, that spelled out OUTER SPACE. After a night of these Reed College people doing what they do best, we were wandering around the next morning and some of the letters in the sign had been knocked over and the remaining ones had been rearranged to say COP TEARS.  We were very moved by this.

For the Thirteen Harmonies release, was the lo-fi recording quality just a practical choice or an intentional aesthetic decision? I think the quality and the audible commentary throughout is an interesting extension of Cage’s philosophy.

The cassette tape recording was just based on what we had available to us in Cameron's apartment when we decided to hang out for three days and record that music. You can actually hear, at certain parts, that the tape we recorded onto has bled through—it had been used to record a demo by our friend Kiril's amazing band BEARS, and there are certain moments on the album where you can vaguely hear Mack Williamson's incredibly loud drumming enter in under these late 18th century chorales that we were playing. Recording the Thirteen Harmonies album was one of my favorite musical experiences ever, as was the tour that Cop Tears did a year or so after we released it.

How did your collaborations with Carman Moore come about?

I went to see Personal Problems at a movie theater in New York and was completely blown away by it and by the music especially. I looked into Carman, listened to a ton of his other music, read his memoir, and finally decided I would just write to him and see if he was, by any chance, interested in doing a re-release of this music. He was incredibly warm and receptive to the idea. It's an absolute pleasure to collaborate with him, and he has sent me hours of unreleased material that he continues to put together. He's a huge inspiration of what a long and rich life full of music can look like.