MICROWORLDS is a musical talk show hosted by Rusty Santos. Guests from the underground and the overground alike discuss music, select songs, or perform live with a focus on psychedelia, including genres like indie pop, psychedelic pop, rave music, post-punk, progressive and glam rock, underground hip hop, and experimental music.

I’m not comfortable with the term experimental music. This sounds to my ears like laboratory work. Sound is separated from what we call music and kept under observation, isolated from emotion. To navigate this, I decided to play a two-hour set of my own music that is atypical in form. It begins with my recent social media experiment, which was inspired by Alan Lucier’s performance art piece I Am Sitting In Room. I updated the concept of feedback cycles for the social media age using video. That’s the closest I’ve come to making actual experimental music, and even that is subjective. The processes I used to make these sounds were anything but clinical. My set is drawn from recordings I released between 2006 and 2008, under my own name and also as The Present. That’s what my solo project evolved into when Jesse Lee and Mina Ohashi joined me. We released two albums on Lo Recordings. These recordings are bookended by selections from my 2006 album Eternity Spans.

photo by Vince Cooler