Julia Holter x gorilla vs. bear takeover: TASHI WADA

Tashi and I met about ten years ago when we were both part of a “harmonium ensemble” (collection of musicians playing small Indian-style harmoniums), and ever since we have shared an interest in the reed-ier timbral realms, and also played shows together with other family/friends like his father Yoshi Wada, Dicky Bahto, Corey Fogel, and Mark So or with the Dogstar Orchestra. Tashi’s longtime interest as a composer in the harmonic continuum (like sliding through tones rather than playing with just fixed pitches, I would say coming out of certain explorations of composers like James Tenney, who Tashi studied with, and Alvin Lucier) inspired me harmonically a lot early on, and we both like to grapple with that in our music, which is funny as we are both keyboard players with fixed pitch limitations. Recently he has worked a lot with tuning his Prophet synth in different ways that bring out new harmonic worlds, and he’s also started playing bagpipes which his dad also plays, so I think that has opened up a new realm that is maybe a bit more outwardly complex than his more minimal music in the past haha, as seen on his new work Nue (see a track from that record below). On Aviary, his glorious soaring bagpipes are obviously very present (I love this sound lol!), but also his work on his Prophet synth and the patches he’s made on it subtly bring a mystery to the mood of the record. In tracks like “Colligere” and “Les Jeux to You”, his melodic lines played on his multi-layered synth sounds creep in and swirl around, buzzing and binding the other sounds together. -- Julia Holter

Here is a track called “Double Body”. (Inspired by Gagaku music) from Tashi’s new record Nue.