Local composer Ryan Francis is one of four Oregonians on the upcoming FearNoMusic concert Sounds Like Home on November 15 in the Eliot Hall chapel at Reed College (the others are Caroline Shaw, Kenji Bunch, and Andy Akiho), where James Shields and the FNM string quartet will perform Francis’ Voynich Transcriptions. The piece–”28 fragments essentially,” the composer says–was premiered in Albuquerque back in 2023 by Chatter, which has since established their own branch up here in Portland.

Francis took inspiration from the Voynich manuscript, a mysterious document. It’s hard to place specifics on the Voynich manuscript: we don’t quite know for sure who wrote it, why they wrote it, what it means, and how it ultimately ended up in the hands of the Polish book collector Wilfrid Voynich. It appears to be some kind of 15th-century codex, featuring illustrations of nonexistent plants and animals, astrological symbols and the like. The entire thing is written in a mysterious script that has yet to be cracked by even the best cryptographers.

One thing that strikes me when I talk with Francis is how sophisticated his musical thoughts are. He thinks a lot about aesthetics, and thinks critically about what he composes, why he composes, and where his music fits into the broader landscape of contemporary music. 

Back when I was the editor of the PSU student-run music journal Subito, I wrote an analysis of one of Francis’ other pieces, Nightwalk. Voynich Transcriptions is similar in style, with focus on carefully-voiced chords and musical fragments. While he was working on the Voynich Transcriptions a few years ago, he told me, “do you know how terrifying it is to get a commission and to hand them pages upon pages of whole notes?” His music is comfortable with letting a single texture or musical idea just sit there for a bit too long, forcing the audience to really consider what is before them. Much like the manuscript from which it takes its title, Voynich Transcriptions is enigmatic and fascinating. 

Before the interview proper started we were already off to the races with musical discussion over some well-brewed Arabic Coffee. We talked about his young experiences as a piano player, his thoughts on aesthetics and the culture surrounding contemporary classical music, what composers have to say about their own music, the problems with influence and innovation, and the willingness to make your audience uncomfortable. 

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and flow.

Oregon ArtsWatch: What was your “aha” moment? What was the thing that made you want to pursue music as a career? 

Ryan Francis: It’s hard to say I had a single moment like that. I was a musician from when I was five, and I started writing music when I was in my early teens. Then I went to college for it because that was what I was interested in and then I just kind of stayed in it. So it’s been a very steady progression. It’s more of the opposite: have I had moments where I ask, is this progression the one I want to be having? I always had to check in with myself when I was younger about if I ever felt like I was done writing music, that I’d written what I wanted to write, and then give myself permission to do something else. I feel like that’s something you have as a luxury when you’re younger. Everything about life when you’re a little bit older feels more fixed. I still ask myself occasionally: if you weren’t doing this, what would you be doing? And I don’t really have any clear answers to that for myself still, which means that I’m probably where I need to be. For better or for worse. 

I really enjoyed playing piano when I was younger. It just felt very natural. Like something that I felt like I was good at and both was good at and enjoyed. I probably wasn’t that great–I was probably an average pianist. But I really enjoyed it. It was fun performing for people. Ultimately, I’m not a pianist, I’m not a performer. I wasn’t a great sight reader, and great pianists have to be good sight readers. I didn’t really find a lot of opportunities to be a pianist then. The piano was more my gateway into composing.

I had this weird relationship with the piano as a performer. I competed in my university concerto competition a couple of times when I was an undergrad. I made it to the finals once, which I was pretty proud of because I wasn’t a piano performance major. Maybe I had a little bit of insecurity about that. And so I worked even harder at performing when I was in college and really wanted to kind of show people, “I may not be a performance major, but I’m still a concerto competition finalist.” From a certain perspective, I think I really understand the instrument really well. I feel like my compositions are akin to hearing my idealized version of myself playing the piano. That’s my imagination of the pianist, you know? Even though I need people that are much better pianists than me to actually execute it. 

The main classical composer that I really gravitated towards was Ravel. And I read all these books about Ravel and they made a point of saying he wasn’t a great performer. And I think on a certain level that gave me permission to say, “Other people can play my music and that’s okay.” Maybe if I had a different model, I would have maybe pushed myself harder. I was at my natural limit of what I could do, so maybe that attitude let me continue. If I had to be a really great performer and a really great composer simultaneously, that would have been a higher bar than I could have cleared. 

OAW: Ravel’s piano music is really, really hard too. 

RF: I was drawn to him pushing those limits, and a lot of the music I wrote when I was younger was like intentionally trying to push those limits. Not necessarily in terms of being explicitly just difficult to play, but for instance in my Etudes, I was trying to really push forward the pianistic texture. It’s a very, very narrow artistic goal as a composer, but those sorts of things are liberating and it really allowed me to write a good body of piano music that is still being played today.

I had an explicit goal of writing a body of piano music. I wanted it recorded. I wanted it to be released on a label that releases this kind of music. Tzadik was the label that seemed most appropriate for my music. And like, “gosh, I hope they notice me.” And they did, and offered me exactly what I wanted them to offer me. That happens very rarely in life, but that was one of those times where it did happen. Vicky Chow, who was the main exponent of my music in the 2000s and still is, recorded it. It’s really great to have the acknowledgement of a label like that. I always have that now, which is great. 

OAW: That’s not an opportunity a lot of composers get, to have one whole complete document of your music. I know it feels weird to talk about things like your earlier pieces versus your later pieces.

RF: I mean, I’m old enough now. Music for my twenties versus music for my late thirties and early forties, those are very different times in my life. 

AW: What do you think those differences are between the music you’re writing that and writing now? 

RF: My thinking is much less ensconced in terms of contemporary music aesthetic gamesmanship. I still think about that sort of stuff, but it feels less like there’s a lot fewer “inside baseball” kinds of aesthetic decisions. I’m doing something this way, which is in reference to or even slightly satirizing, the way that other composers have done these things. There’s a dialectic that’s at play in terms of the way I’m thinking, but it’s a fairly narrow dialectic. As you get older and you get more outside of academic environments, you’re just less exposed to that. So your music becomes less insular in some ways, more insular in other ways. 

OAW: You broaden your perspectives of what music is, but it’s more insular in terms of focusing your own vision of what you want your music to be. 

RF: I think that I managed to do younger than some people by really doubling down and focusing on solo piano repertoire in my 20s. That was a very insular, narrow focus that I didn’t really observe a lot of people around me had, of one very specific thing that they were working on. They spread their chips more widely, and they all worked very successfully too. This is a little bit of a narrow thing, but it’s also probably why I got that album. 

The funny thing about my decade of writing piano music that was kind of percolating under the surface was like working with technology. A lot of the textures and compositional processes that I was pouring into my piano music were grounded in working with software in order to generate and modulate my material. That was, especially at a certain point, to escape my own physical limitations and habits.

You can hear, especially in the Etudes, that there is not an unnatural, but maybe unintuitive, way that the textures flow in some of those pieces. I’m not using my symmetrically-shaped body to invent them. Even if you kind of try to bend away from that, it’s really easier to just use some sort of technology to assist that process, that guarantees a more unintuitive outcome.

The Ligeti Etudes are obviously a huge influence. It’s kind of silly to say it’s a huge influence; it sounds a little bit conceited. But you can’t help it. The thinking behind Ligeti’s Etudes was born out of his physical limitations as a pianist. The hand patterns are all based on his own malformed pianistic technique. And therefore, very basic, blunt and intuitive. He is using that very intuitive shape to then create very unintuitive sorts of interactions. I was very taken with that kind of thinking. But what I do in my piano writing is invert that. Instead of saying, “my body’s ultimate limitation is how these pianistic shapes are going to come out,” I’m going to remove my body from the process of generating this content at all. It guarantees that I’m going to come up with an outcome that’s not like Ligeti necessarily. Even though one of my Etudes obviously is a little too indebted to him. 

I spent my 20s writing a lot of piano music, and after I finished this album project for Tzadik I thought it was time to pivot from piano for a while. I had worked on a lot of electronic and synthesizer-based compositions, probably the two biggest of which were the ballets I did with Pontus Lidberg. When you work with electronic instruments, it can sensitize you to how acoustic instruments can work. Because I focused on the piano so much, my thinking about timbre was also probably even more limited than some of my peers. The only way that you can really think about the piano texturally is in terms of what I was doing, working with sequencing. You’re really locked into harmonic and rhythmic dimensions of texture. You can’t pull the sound of the piano all the way from sul tasto to sul pont, right? 

OAW: Although composers have tried, like George Crumb. 

RF: I also set this arbitrary limitation on myself though, to focus on the keyboard. My focus on the piano was kind of misguided for reasons we can get into, but I want to really control the opportunities to have my music played. One pianist is exceedingly more easy than trying to get together like four string players. Of course, this is faulty thinking because the piano has a deeper well of repertoire than just about any other instrument. And therefore, pianists can be extremely reluctant to program a new piece on the whole, understandably, because they have so much to choose from. But that was my reasoning.

Once I started working with electronic instruments, then my thinking really started to shift in terms of what I want to focus on–I’ve really not thought as much about this as I should. Even in the orchestra music that I wrote in my twenties, I treated the orchestra kind of the same way I treated the piano a lot of the time. I would have it move in unintuitive ways a lot, if you look at my Piano Concerto. I wish I could have redone that part of my twenties, but I can’t do that. So when I started going back to writing more acoustic music in my late thirties, I really wanted to just really focus on other things. And so there’s no longer this kind of overbearing need to try to push the players, and maybe push the listener in some ways. I leaned into just focusing on timbre, but not in the Lachenmann kind of sense. I’m not organizing things on a spectral plane or anything like that. It’s oftentimes extended tonal thinking. But then I’m trying to add really thoughtful, temporal kind of applications.

OAW: I think Dutilleux was great at that. He can really create really novel timbres just by the way he stacks instrument groups together. Adés does as well. Dalbavie, Saariaho. 

RF: All those composers, I can look at them now and see more of what they’re doing. At the same time, they have a language that’s definitely ensconced in a different era. I wanted to put some distance between myself and that kind of language. That’s something else that I started to notice or feel, like it’s not the right thing to be doing right now. There’s way too much development–kind of aggressive development–in so much contemporary music still, where there’s a very complex form that’s unfolding most of the time. That still feels like we’re going all the way back to classical motivic developmental thinking. I’m oversimplifying, but there is some sort of like proximity to that still. That is maybe the more important thing that I’ve tried to leave behind. Even if you look at my Etudes, they feel very dated to me, to the 2000s. Twenty years ago, everyone was still writing very formally complex music. It feels more radical to aggressively remove that expectation from the listener. This is one of the most radical things I think that you can do. And I think that a lot of people have started to figure that out, because we don’t want to be having some sort of complex, motivically developed formal scheme unfolding. That feels very retrograde now. 

We all kind of collectively figured out that in terms of kind of formal complexity, less is more. At least right now, for whatever reason. I’m not quite sure why it feels that way. Part of it is that the way people listen to music is different now. If you’re mostly focusing on timbre, or if timbre is more in proportion to harmony and rhythm and form, then I think naturally those things may be de-emphasized then. That brings timbre more to the foreground. The thing about abandoning a more traditional formal, rhetorical developmental kind of mentality, is that you can still create something that’s gentle and listener friendly. But you can also make something that’s a little bit more challenging for the listener. Which is kind of cool. You can go in either direction there. 

OAW: Could you give a broad overview of Voynich Transcriptions?

RF: James Shields was looking for a commission for clarinet quintet, because he had a new basset clarinet in A that he was having built for himself. And he wanted specifically a piece for that instrument. It’s not a super common instrument, and it has a really interesting range. You can kind of go a little higher, but there are some surprising low notes and I exploit that a lot in the piece, actually. 

Something about the clarinet quintet feels slightly older than a classical ensemble. It’s not the most standard instrumentation, even though there are some really famous pieces for it. I mentioned to him that I was really interested in doing a piece about the Voynich manuscript and I explained my vision for doing this large scale collection of miniatures, and doing projections from the manuscript with it. And then we were also talking about the interesting sense of mystery behind the manuscript. It’s a very compelling document to draw inspiration from. Originally one of the theories was that it was designed to be sold to a rich patron.

I hold myself to a standard for what kind of non-musical material I bring into my work. What do I have to do with the Voynich manuscript? Nothing. It’s just an interesting thing, and I don’t try to borrow the credibility of some extra-musical thing for my own work. This is just an anonymous document, possible forgery. So what credibility am I borrowing? It’s the mysteries, I guess. It inspired me to write kind of imaginary old music, for this possibly fake manuscript. I like this idea of the way that we kind of idealize and imagine how all this older music was made. It’s a little bit of a fantasy. And I like the idea of making my own kind of imaginary old music. 

OAW: If you’re writing for a classical ensemble it feels appropriate.

RF: Or a misimagined past. The music maybe has an inauthentic old music quality to it; it doesn’t quite feel correct, which it shouldn’t. It’s apropos for the manuscript, to make it slightly uncanny in its character.

OAW: What motivates you as a composer? 

RF: It’s very ingrained in me, this kind of thinking. I couldn’t remove that part. Sometimes I get some sort of small, more commercial gig. And I’ll just turn that part of my brain off and just execute something that’s appropriate for whatever I’m being paid for. And sometimes the outcome of that is interesting, actually. Working with a certain set of limitations that I don’t normally, the outcome is different than it normally would be. And that’s interesting. 

Whenever I hear creative people give direct and simple motivations and explanations for their work, I can’t believe them a lot of the time. This is my problem, right. My immediate reaction to reading or hearing those kinds of explanations is that it’s a bad faith explanation. Obviously, there’s much more that’s going on there, and you’re just being coy about it. Sometimes I just feel like everyone knows how to be coy about this stuff, and not actually give away the game of how they’re thinking about their own music. And I don’t. 

Maybe a lot of people are actually being honest, but my brain immediately goes to thinking they are explaining things in bad faith. I don’t begrudge them for it. I wish I could be more coy. But on the whole, if you find a fairly sophisticated, artistic mind, but they’re giving these very kind of simplistic reasons, do you think that they try to come off more simplistic because there’s more mystique to that? I don’t know.

OAW: I think it could be any number of those things. I think it could also just be that people have this sense within themselves, this kind of musical language that has been received from the past or something they’ve developed themselves. For me personally, I have a hard time feeling like I can reach an audience unless I give some people something to latch onto.

RF: Everybody hates writing program notes because the way everyone’s thinking about what they’re doing is actually very complex, and also very personal, and it’s much easier to give a simplistic answer as to what’s happening in the piece. 

OAW: Or give the listener something to latch onto in terms of an image, a sensation, a literary reference. The pieces of mine that do have some kind of clear inspiration, I don’t try to make it a one-to-one thing. I could have a basic genesis of an idea, but then the piece itself goes off in its own direction. 

RF: One thing I do want to point out though, you studied with me. And so we’re going to have these kinds of conversations. So you may have a skewed perspective on how much more I think about this stuff than other people. If you actually read my program notes, I do stick to the facts a bit more. And rather than going really deep into this stuff, because that’s a little bit pretentious. That’s also a big part of why you’re not necessarily explaining all of your thinking about your work, because you don’t want to lead everybody by the nose about what you’re doing. You want art to a certain extent to be like a Rorschach Test for the viewer, for the listener. You want them to project their own kind of thinking on what you made. That is like the basic dialectic of artist and viewer, composer and listener. 

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is that music, they call it one of the arts. But like, I just don’t really think music is art. Broadly speaking, it’s a different phenomenon. I think it serves a different kind of social and human function. Of course it serves a different social human function across a lot of different cultures. We group a lot of different diverse kinds of performance practices as music. I think there’s a pretty noticeable divide between how musicians talk about their work and how artists do. Visual artists are very comfortable with talking explicitly about all the themes and ideology that goes into how the viewer is supposed to engage with their art. And in fact, those explanations are actually crucial to engaging with the art. 

There is often an effort to create music in that kind of context, where you do need to read the program notes to fully understand what’s happening in this piece of music. But there’s always been a countervailing force against that intellectualization of music. There’s an antibody response to this sort of hyper-explication of the meaning of music. 

Look at something by Mike Kelley, where dissecting the social and political context and intent of his work is the point. And he was very comfortable talking about it in interviews and talking about how he’s co-opting and rearranging aspects of culture. Jeff Wall does something very similar, but in photography.

OAW: Compared to other art forms, music is so ephemeral. It moves through time. You can never capture a single musical moment because it’s here and it’s gone. Having something for a listener to latch onto helps guide the listener because otherwise you start getting into deep analysis and music theory that can be really abstract and obtuse.

RF: Well, something that you have in music is genre, for that reason–because then genre is kind of a substitute for explanation. You understand the stylistic boundaries, and also the social context in which you’re supposed to listen to it. Genre governs so much about the context in which you’re going to listen to something. But then in contemporary classical music, or in visual arts, you don’t have genres. You have a medium, but you don’t have a genre. Each artist really does try to carve out their own conceptual and aesthetic space. Whereas in music, you’re much more limited in that way.

And then you always get to a certain point where people start to get fed up with having all options being negated. All of this other stuff is off limits. Then what starts to happen is that people start becoming reactionary, or engaging with older repertoire of music that I’m like, “what does this have to do with us at this point, you know?”

It’s natural to want to build upon and immerse yourself in older masters and try to understand and learn from these different eras. Looking back at what used to be done is incredibly refreshing, because it’s not what’s being done now. But there is this kind of binary thinking about this. Whereas you’re either going to reject everything that’s overly played out, or this idea of innovating gets conflated with distinguishing yourself. I think maybe when you find your footing more, you can kind of figure out the difference between those two things. 

OAW: We don’t really talk about trends in classical music, but they are there, they just take place over a longer span of time. There are multiple instances of certain things people try that just never really caught on, like the harpsichord revival or adding saxophones to the orchestra.

RF: It’s so funny, it seems like such a minor tweak to an ensemble, which kind of shows how fixed things are at this point. That adding saxophones would actually be a really big deal. The reason things get so fixed is that you have this massive mountain of repertoire behind you with this instrumentation. So how are you going to justify paying saxophones full-time? It becomes a catch-22 in terms of actually changing up the ensemble. From the practical perspective of programming and personnel, saxophones are never going to become part of the orchestra at this point. This is never going to happen. How could it? No one’s going to write for them because they’re not part of the ensemble. 

OAW: They did become part of the concert band and wind ensembles. 

RF: But they don’t have the same weight of repertoire and expectations behind them. 

OAW: What is your compositional process? Let’s say you get a commission for a piece. Where do you start? 

RF: Lately, I’m very old fashioned about it. I will mostly start at the piano and map out pitch collections. At my core, I’m still a harmonist. I love combining pitches. I still think really deeply about that when I write music. It’s a joyful part of this process for me. I think that’s why a lot of my music has moved away from pushing the envelope of challenging the performers or making something sound really virtuosic. I know what I care about and love, and that is painting these sonorities and trying to really draw the listener into hearing these things in a carefully framed manner. 

I take a lot of cues from the visual arts in my work. I’m really drawn to the artists that really dial in the viewer into a very nuanced look at something. One of my best friends is a painter, Amy Lincoln. This is someone that I’ve known since high school and I’ve been a composer since I was in high school and she’s been a painter since she was in high school. She’s represented by Sperone Westwater now, which is a really big deal gallery. It’s interesting because I feel like our work in our early 40s has settled into an eerily similar set of artistic or aesthetic conclusions. To the point where the last piece I wrote was in response to some of her work because I felt like my work does feel like it is dialogue with her work, in a weird way. She’s just been painting seascapes, cloudscapes, landscapes that are incredibly flattened into a confrontation with carefully modulated colors. This extremely narrow focus where there’s such an abundant body of work. But intentionally leaning into not being a particularly unique subject matter, but then being able to dial it in in such a personal way. I love that. 

She displays such an effortless mastery of controlling colors, combining them in a way that makes you perk up when you look at it. If you really dissect her work as a whole, it does have this feeling of seeing something in a different way now. She’s able to personalize this theory into a unique vision. Similarly, if I’m going to voice a chord, I’m going to think about acoustics and everything, but then I can still know how I want to work with harmony, work with acoustics, and dial something in a very particular way. I get a lot of joy out of that now. 

I feel similarly, if you’re working for any kind of classical ensemble, just by virtue of writing for clarinet quintet or something like that, there’s such an abundance of repertoire and expectations there. Why lean away from it? Lean into it, but in a very dialed-in sort of way. 

If you frame your work in the right way, with that careful consideration and intense focus, from moment to moment your own music will translate to the listener and their experience. When I talk about trying to put a little pressure on the listener, that’s that knife’s edge of making them really focus in on what they’re hearing; that can push their endurance a little bit. If you’re not pushing their endurance a little bit, then you’re allowing them to maybe tune out. Whereas if they felt a little bit of pressure or a lot of pressure, then they’re going to be left with an impression. It is very easy to lean into making music very frictionless, right? 

And that’s the weird side effect of how pervasive ambient music is now. If you go back to Japanese ambient composers from the 80s, the “Kankyō Ongaku” movement. They are calling that environmental music, not even ambient environments. Like Satoshi Ashikawa, or Hiroshi Yoshimura. If you listen to Ashikawa’s work, it’s much more willing to not develop or do anything, or be limited in the scope of what’s happening from moment to moment.

OAW: I’m a big fan of Kali Malone and she’s talked about that in some of her liner notes: she’s rejecting the contemporary music trend of being obsessed with complexity, and trying to fill up her music with as much stuff as possible.

RF: That’s exactly what I’m talking about in terms of abandoning this rhetorically argumentative motivic form. For people my age, maybe someone is still ensconced with this thinking that was more prevalent twenty years ago. Now we’re just older and it’s part of our habits still, and it’s hard to pivot. If you’ve been writing constantly for the last twenty years, in the same environment, I can see your thinking kind of being more ensconced. 

OAW: One person’s coming to mind is Arvo Pärt, because of how carefully every note is kind of chosen in his pieces, and he does have a very restrictive harmonic language, but that’s really where his music comes from. 

RF: Someone that I more directly think about would be György Kurtág. Because unlike Pärt, a lot of what I write now is actually extremely short, or very long pieces that are actually a bunch of fragments. 

OAW: Like the Voynich Transcriptions. 

RF: Yeah, 28 fragments essentially. That’s also part of what really drew me to this manuscript, the mystery of it. I like the idea of this manuscript being literally impenetrable. From page to page, it seems like it’s an unfinished collection of ideas, and that’s pretty much how my work is. I’m not interested in developing anything. Maybe I will be at some point, And this is actually the part of my earlier music that feels to me kind of retrograde in a way, in a way that I don’t like. 

My impulse towards writing kind of undeveloped fragments or refusing to develop ideas is also in reaction to this need for things to be perfect. If I can reject that, then it’s like trying to separate myself a little bit from that need for things to be perfect. 

I feel two ways about this phenomenon of doing something with older music, which is such a commonplace feature of the contemporary music landscape now. On one hand I feel like this is an unhealthy trend, because I wonder why there is this preoccupation with this repertoire still. It just shows the limitations of what’s acceptable in terms of influence. But on the other hand, if you’re going to break this apart, deconstruct it and use it for its constituent parts, that maybe breaks away from the kind of fetishization. It breaks the mystique, breaks the quote-unquote masterpiece nature of it. You can look at it both ways, and I think it depends on the individual’s approach, although I do still feel overall like as a general trend, it points towards something unhealthy in the culture.

It’s funny to watch older genres like popular music now fall into similar sorts of patterns to classical music or masterpiece mentality. It’s a fandom culture now. And fandom culture is always reactionary. Classical music culture is one of the original fandom cultures, where you’re not really allowed to criticize anything. But at least those people have the advantage of being dead, and not having to live up to the expectations of their fandom. Everything has become fandom, and it’s toxic. 

OAW: You recently got a teaching job at Pacific University. How is that going? 

RF: It’s been great. I’ve been reworking the theory sequence with the rest of the faculty, which is a really interesting process. Being able to be more present as a faculty member and being able to work more closely with students, helping students with mixing their albums or working on a composition. I have the literal space to help them with that kind of thing. And then feeling more part of the academic community, which is different than being an adjunct instructor. There’s just more responsibility, which is nice to feel.

I had been teaching there for a better part of a decade. I get a very different perspective on the institution, being with the faculty. And I have a lot of respect for that university. It feels like a really healthy, like environment. There’s a rich life outside of the classroom that I have there now, and I have some influence over the direction of the department now. 

OAW: You’ve mentioned music that inspires you creatively, but then what music do you just enjoy listening to? 
RF: I’ve listened to a lot of Raï. It’s basically Algerian pop music, but maybe more politically charged. I’ve been listening to this one group called Acid Arab. They’re a French-Algerian electronic group. They marry this really beautiful, polished French production, but like a lot of North African artists they are maybe more rooted in full traditions. I’ve been listening to this Turkish group, Altin Gün, which again feels like beautifully produced modest pop music, but really beautiful vocals which I love. I still listen to Chromatics a lot. I love Chromatics. I do like early Interpol, the first album specifically. I listen to a lot of Arabic pop music, honestly. I really like that lately. What other kinds of stuff have I been listening to? I’ve been listening to Kim Deal’s new album. Wham! Azealia Banks. Baloji. Hall and Oates. I like College a lot. I’ve been listening to Googoosh too. Is that enough?