Blending avant-garde experimentation with a deeply personal compositional ethos, Jason Vitelli’s ‘2. No Wave Gaze’ embraces the anti-commercial spirit of late ’70s downtown NYC while channeling modern sound design into something immersive and unpredictably alive. We caught up with him to discuss creative freedom, sonic risk-taking, and the evolving language of his work.
2. No Wave Gaze pulls from the experimental, anti-commercial ethos of late ’70s NYC No Wave while embracing modern sound design. What aspects of that era’s creative philosophy resonated most strongly with you while making this album?
I intimately relate to the no holds barred sensibility which permeated the No Wave movement. Way too often, I see artists struggling within a mire of idioms to fit into a marketplace. Arbitrary guidelines we are urged to follow can stifle creativity and force a square peg into a round hole. Although some listeners are apt to fall by the wayside, pushing the sound envelope (pun intended) broadens the vocabulary and brings about innovation. I am an experimenter at heart and the alchemy of modern sound design techniques I learned at university and through subsequent film projects gave me the impetus to create much of this work.
The album thrives on disorienting yet immersive soundscapes, often challenging conventional ideas of melody and structure. When building a piece, do you intentionally try to subvert listener expectations, or does that happen organically?
The form for many pieces in this collection arose as a product of their conception, rather than a means to their end. Perhaps this inverted sense of logic is what thwarts expectations. I often use film cues to compose so the choices I make bridge to what is happening physically and emotionally on-screen. I’ve used dance choreography to write in this method as well.
“Standing at Your Doorstep” transforms everyday sonic details — ringing phones, breathing, environmental textures — into something increasingly tense and cinematic. What draws you to recontextualizing familiar sounds in unsettling ways?
Just like how consonance and dissonance create a sense of tension and release, sound effects can provide a similar push/pull effect in the aural timeline. There are a multitude of examples of this compositional approach, which is often referred to as Musique Concrète. You can hear elements of it in the Pink Floyd catalog, as well as in many modern classical pieces from the ’50s and ’60s. Once artists got access to a tape recorder, the creative possibilities were boundless.
You incorporate homemade instruments and unconventional sound sources throughout the record, including modified strings and toy-based percussion. How do these DIY tools influence the emotional tone or unpredictability of your compositions?
“Train Alarm,” which I originally developed for a commercial, is a prime example of how a novel idea can foster the creative spirit. The producer asked me to use the clicky sounds of the toy being advertised as the backing track’s focal point. Once I programmed the individual sounds into my sampler, its frenetic energy translated into an exceptional percussion patch.
The home-made electric cello you mentioned I had utilized in “Like Herding Cats.” Not being an experienced luthier, I did not level the fingerboard correctly, however I could still bow the notes as touch harmonics. These created a ghostly timbre which inspired the improvised melody and the subsequent canon section of that piece.
Mathematical and chance-based approaches — like Fibonacci-driven sequencing and aleatoric processes — play a role in the album’s design. How do you balance structured systems with intuitive musical expression?
In “Grandfather Clock” and “Echo Chamber,” I built a signal path using an interactive, visual patching coding environment called Max. Like a domino toppling, this unique tool sets in motion a chain reaction, bringing about a multitude of possible outcomes from an initial input. Editing the earworms generated by this software, I weaved together a beginning, middle, and end. It is the balancing act you describe, but it’s ultimately governed by intuition.
Tracks such as “Like Herding Cats,” “Asimov’s Robots,” and “The Black Lodge” explore fragmentation, unease, and abstract textures. Do you think of these pieces more as sonic narratives, conceptual experiments, or something else entirely?
I don’t know, but I think the album has a strong affinity to Five Pieces for Orchestra by Arnold Schoenberg. Describing them in a letter to Richard Strauss, he said, “They are short orchestra pieces (between one and three minutes long), not cyclically related . . . that is all they are about: absolutely not symphonic – precisely the opposite – no architecture, no structure. Merely a bright, uninterrupted interchange of colors, rhythms and moods.” I couldn’t have described them better myself!
“A Piece of a Sing Along” merges vocal takes recorded decades apart, creating a literal dialogue between past and present versions of yourself. What was that experience like from both a technical and emotional standpoint?
Technically, the biggest hurdle was converting the older DAW files into a newer session without losing any minute details. Once I could start working on it, the process felt like this otherworldly collaboration which came about easily. Ultimately, I’m unsure if I’m better off now or then, but I’m glad I still have the desire to make music and be connected to the moment. There is a kind of magic in the moment that transcends through time.
If you could collaborate with any artist, alive or dead, who would it be?
Ah, there are so many possibilities, but I think the artist that is always in the forefront of my mind is John Coltrane. The house he lived in during his later years was only about a mile away from where I grew up. I’d like to think his spirit still lingered around the neighborhood and helped me discover my artistic path. He never let the constraints of genre limit the music he would create and if he were still alive, I know we would have found each other.
With a live-recorded classical installment and a new singer/songwriter album reportedly in progress, what’s on the horizon next — and how do you see your sound evolving from here?
Most of the classical music is already written, so the recordings just need to be produced. I’m very excited to be bringing those pieces to life. However, the songwriting project will be the harbinger of my future self. The things I am driven to write about now will be what I represent to an audience down the line. All in all, the thing about evolution is we never know exactly where it will bring us. I can only hope it will bring me closer to who I am.
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