Friends After Good Sound are a newcomer to Portland’s experimental music scene. They are a collective of young, queer composers and performers that exclusively play works composed for them by Portland-based composers. Their approach to music has a gaiety and a wicked sense of humor. Hence their name, which abbreviates to a reclaimed slur for queer people. The name is clearly meant to ruffle some feathers, acting as a shibboleth separating the gays and their allies from those who would be provoked by such a name. 

The eponymous Friends are: Michael Anderson, James T. Hickey, Chanchito Loko (who said, “Soy un criatura de la noche,” while introducing themselves), and Mia Chavez Lysaght. The four got together to form a collective as an outlet for local composers to get their music out there. All four are multi-instrumentalists, ready to tackle whatever the music requires of them. 

So far they have performed music by eight composers. Many of these composers are current or former PSU students. In addition to quarterly concerts, the Friends have also put on workshops at Performance Works Northwest. 

In early October they prepared for their upcoming quarterly concert. The band rehearsed late at night in a large room in Portland State’s Lincoln Hall. Their space was appropriately a mess. Unused instruments lay scattered on the floor, cases cracked open. The band sets up wherever they can find space between stacks of chairs, instrument stands and desks. The clock in the corner of the room remained stuck at 9:02, and someone stuck googly eyes and a fake mustache on the frozen clock face. 

Sitting atop an ancient upright piano in the corner of the room is a relic of a past Friends After Good Sounds concert, the “tree harp,” a sculpture constructed of wood, silver beads, and two thrift store auto-harps. They preferred to practice in the low, warm lighting of a few small lamps over the ceiling lights’ harsh fluorescence. 

Anderson played another unconventional instrument, what he called a “frankenstein harmonium.” Chanchito said of the instrument, “it spent seven winters outside. It’s microtonal.” This frankenstein harmonium, tuned about a quarter-step flat, wavered in crunchy dissonance against Hickey’s accordion drones. 

The environment felt less like a typical music rehearsal and more like a casual get-together among friends. They break many so-called rules of rehearsal etiquette: they talk over each other, they sip tea and chew on crackers mid-piece, they joke and riff on each other’s musical comments. They often chuckle mid-bar at what someone just played, and loudly announce their mistakes with an “ah I fucked this up,” or “shit!” while others tell them to keep going. 

That night they were rehearsing a piece for their upcoming concert by Violet Heger. The music is semi-improvised, with Anderson on the harmonium, Hickey on the accordion, the composer on a typewriter (yet another unusual instrument). Using pre-determined scales for each paragraph of text, their improvisations drift between soft melodies, oddball chords and evocations of circus music. The rehearsal was focused on determining what scales and modes would work best to accompany each paragraph of the text. Their music accompanies a cut-up, purple prose-suffused monologue written by Heger, which Chanchito delivered in a Groucho-Marx-inflected New York accent, with rapid shifts in tone and perspective – like one of Willam Burroughs’ more troublesome passages. Throughout their run-through, Hedger giggled frequently, partly from hearing aloud the words she wrote, partly from Chanchito’s zany line delivery. 

One gets the sense that they truly are friends. After rehearsal, they give each other lengthy hugs, note the beginning of Libra season, and compliment each other’s outfits: “you all look so fabulous, adorable!” I sat down to interview Anderson, Hickey and Chanchito after the rehearsal, with all three chiming in on each other’s responses. The fourth Friend, Lysaght, was not present.

Friends After Good Sound’s next show is on November 8 at the Leaven Community Center. They will perform music by three local composers: Violet Heger, TJ Thompson and Warm Canopy. The show starts at 7:30, with tickets sold at the door on a sliding scale from $10-30. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and flow, while retaining the feel of the original. 

Oregon ArtsWatch: We have to address the name of the ensemble. How did you become friends, and what are the good sounds you are after? 

Michael Anderson: Basically PSU. I met JT [Hickey] through the SAMP program here at PSU, and then I met Jay [Chanchito] in the Laptop Ensemble, and we also took a Taiko class together. That’s how we became tight friends. That’s where I learned and fell in love with JT and the type of person he is, and where I found the eternal fountain of artistic spirit that Chanchito has. 

James T. Hickey: The good sounds we’re after, for me, are the sounds that make you feel things. Emotional things, things in your body. 

Anderson: For me, the good sounds are the new sounds, because all we do is new shit. We don’t do anything that is old. We are on this edge with the people we are making the music with. And the fact that we’re doing it with our neighbors, only local people. 

Chanchito Loko: The sonics of community. 

Anderson: That’s the title, bitch! [laughs]

Hickey: We’re a queer new music collective, so the collective element comes from the band itself and the composers we work with. I would think of the Friends After Good Sound collective as everyone we’ve worked with thus far and played with. So I think the good sounds are the sounds of us coming together to create something new. The tongue-in-cheek acronym is a representation of our collective queer identity. 

OAW: It’s definitely provocative. 

Hickey: Our band is provocative. And we lean into comedy, although we’re not a comedic group by any means. This is real serious music. We work with a large breadth of composers with different perspectives, so leaning into the levity of a performance piece is something we do. 

Anderson: To have some bright, fun personality to what we do is important to me. To not have it be so solemn. 

Hickey: New music and classical music can be very stuffy, and all of us come from professionally trained musical backgrounds, as well as having other projects outside of that. To me our name and the acronym is representative of breaking out of the stuffy, exclusive, traditions of classical music. 

OAW: I notice that you call yourselves a band and not an ensemble. 

Anderson: It’s something I go back and forth between. When I really think about it, I do consider ourselves an ensemble. I use them interchangeably, maybe because we aren’t a non-profit at this point. So maybe there’s some sort of bias at this point. An ensemble, or a band, a performing group of whatever…

Loko: A collective.

Hickey: An electroacoustic ensemble. We play acoustic instruments, we run stuff through electronics. 

Anderson: We haven’t done an indie rock song yet, or worked with an indie rock artist yet, but we totally could. I would be feeling like I was in a band at that moment. So it depends on the collaboration, but so far all them have been very ensemble-ey. 

OAW: If you were able to get a bigger budget, are there more ambitious projects you would like to tackle? 

Anderson: The core project, making new work with local composers, is always a throughline with me. It’s a matter of how much that can be funded, which is the ambitious part. We applied to some grants this year, so fingers crossed. The Oregon Creative Heights grant is on my mind for the near future horizon. 

Hickey: If we were to get a grant, I would love to work on a bigger, longer project and break out of the quarterly thing where we have limited time with the composers. If we were getting paid, having scheduled rehearsals, I’d want to do a large-scale show, maybe work with one composer on a whole sixty-minute show and do more niche concepts. Moving up to bigger venues and audiences. 

Anderson: I know plenty of people who make DIY costumes, visual artists in town, and being able to get them into the fold would be cool. We could do that now, and probably will. 

Hickey: Bring more mediums of art into our show.

Anderson: But being able to bring them in with payment promised would be great! [laughs]

OAW: Did you start this group because of the opportunities that were available to you as a young composer? 

Anderson: I look up to a lot of the other ensembles in town. It was more that I’m a composer and I wanted an opportunity to write a piece. I wrote one of the first pieces we did. But I also know a lot of composers in town, so I wanted them to have an opportunity to write for groups as well. Plus on an ego side, making my own version of the Philip Glass Ensemble – at least of what it used to be – seems daunting. Always writing new music for a group seems insane. 

Hickey: You’re outsourcing. Crowd-sourcing our musical work. Grifting.

Anderson: Truly [laughs]. I wanted to give them an opportunity, and getting your music put on by other people is extremely difficult. We could tell people we know to come write for us. That’s a huge door-opening moment that a lot of people in our position don’t get for free. 

Loko: It’s not limited either. You get people who weren’t even traditional musicians coming at us – people from sonic arts tend to have more of a visual representation of their works. They have an opportunity now that is different than it was in other times. You didn’t have a Renaissance pay to go up to some composer being like, hey, could you turn this into a fucking song for me, please? And nowadays we can go down those avenues of people that didn’t have these traditions before them, and they can traverse the landscape and work with musicians directly. When you have the composers here, they’re sociable, they like to talk and have a lot to say. It’s enlightening for a lot of them. They get to be heard and understood by us. We’re not like, you’re wrong!

Anderson: Which then influences the work we’re making with them. It’s different from what they would do by themselves. 

OAW: So it’s also a collaborative process in the creation of art. It’s not like someone hands you a score and you make it happen. 

Anderson: We find it most fulfilling when we get to workshop the piece with the composers. 

OAW: I saw how you rehearsed Violet’s piece, combining music with performance, dramatic monologue reading, and her prose. 

Loko: It’s wild. You see her script, it’s eight pages. 

Hickey: This is the first piece where we’ve had an element of performance art. We’ve done strictly music up to this point. Violet is the first composer where we have a bit of acting and dramatic monologue. 

Anderson: Violet before this didn’t consider herself a composer. They thought of themselves as much more of a writer. 

Loko: Violet’s traversed basically any artistic means you can think of. A writer, percussionist, multi-instrumentalist. Tons of stuff written on a typewriter, presented in these beautifully-wrapped little forms. That aspect wasn’t really present in the mind besides writing a few songs for bands – but that’s still composing. What’s the difference? You have a poem, musicians, make it work. 

OAW: As composers and musicians, does it change how you write knowing the musicians you are writing for? You have a ton of instruments in here–do you try out instruments for parts, or write for what one person likes to do? 

Hickey: I haven’t written a piece for the band, but the composers who write for us have come to our shows and have seen the instruments that we play. There’s usually a bit of discussion of what we’re leaning towards in this piece. I had a meeting with TJ [Thompson] to go over accordion structures, and he was on board with writing for accordion. It’s collaborative. I write traditional jazzy pop songs. I have a background in jazz training. Breaking out of the pieces that we learn as an ensemble challenges my brain in a different structural way because we’re getting notational sheet music or graphic scores from totally different musical brains. 

Anderson: We tell composers, these are the toys we have to bring to the table, what do you think about them? There’s a lot of instruments in the room, but this is a low-tech rehearsal compared with stuff we’ve done and can do. 

Loko: Patches, software…

Anderson: We’ve used Max, done electroacoustic music. 

Loko: We had a composer that wanted a tree harp, so I made it. It’s up there. 

Hickey: This is a very accordion-heavy show for me. I’m playing in, like, every key. We’ve all played at least two instruments per show. 

Anderson: Or three. 

Loko: We could have somebody ask us for something and we can figure it out. 

Hickey: Since we’re all multi-instrumentalists there’s more room to play around. 

OAW: What would you have to say to someone who is skeptical, who may think, “this is all pretentious nonsense?”

Hickey: “Pretentious” is not a word I’ve thought of. 

Anderson: Not at all! [laughs]

Hickey: If you’re interested in experimental music, come to our show. 

Loko: Come one, come all!

Hickey: The body of work we’ve played in just three concerts has been all over the place. 

Anderson: Fucking crazy. 

Hickey: Anyone interested in experiencing new sonic environments, I hope those people would come to our shows. Each show is very different. 

Loko: There’s no scowling, no frowning, and the audience can yell, whimper or whatever the hell they want to do. We’re not sitting there like if someone coughs like excuse me, pianissimo. 

Hickey: I’ve been to new music shows and worked many of them. I think that a big part of our ensemble or band identity is that we really do try to break out of that. It’s a very welcoming environment. 

Anderson: Oh totally. 

Hickey: I think the whole goal is to be anti-pretentious. 

Loko: Well I want to be pretentious. 

Anderson: We want to bring in as many different people as possible, and not all my friends are music people, but I want them to come too. I want it to be a happy, cozy environment – not that it has to be always comforting music. Come here and experience something that you wouldn’t normally get to see all the time. 

Hickey: Some of the music we’ve done is very meditative. 

Anderson: Sure sure, totally. But by no means are we trying to lull our audiences to sleep. 

OAW: Nor try to shock or disturb them.

Anderson: More like, this is different. 

OAW: As a queer collective, is that a statement based on you as individuals being queer, or do you think there’s something queer about the way you approach music or the kinds of music you do? 

Anderson: It’s both. All the members of the band or ensemble identify as queer. The majority of people who we’ve worked with are also queer themselves. But certainly the way we work with music is queer and outside the box. We give access to composers so easily, that’s quite unusual. The music itself is quite unusual. 

Hickey: We are all, quite literally, very gay. [laughter] And that was not really intentional in the formation of the band, it just kinda happened. We obviously know other queer people and realized we’re doing a queer ensemble. And people who come to our shows, you are an ally!

Anderson: We’ve performed composers who are straight, it’s not exclusive. 

Loko: As long as you have something to say. 

Hickey: The way we approach music is queer itself. 

Anderson: Absolutely, because we don’t follow convention. We don’t only operate through standard notation. We can’t because everyone has different levels of comfort with those systems. We also all come from different educational backgrounds: some of us come from jazz, all over the place.

Loko: From the streets!

Anderson: I grew up in the classical tradition, that’s where I found my roots. 

Hickey: Mya plays in a punk band. 

Anderson: The way we have to communicate with each other and with composers about music can’t be in this one convention of a lead sheet or graphic score or whatever. 

OAW: So you consider queerness, at least as it manifests musically, as breaking out of conventions. It’s community-focused, instead of fitting yourselves into preconceived boxes of how things are to be done. 

Loko: To each their own form of expression. 

Anderson: We’re far more concerned with the community aspect, and making something that feels good making it with your neighbor, instead of saying, “this is the model we operate within, you have to fit into this.” 

Hickey: We have some composers returning to write a second piece for us at a later date, and I would love to continue working with people. 

Anderson: Yes. One-offs are so sad. 

Hickey: If you’ve written a piece for us or played in the band, you’re in the collective, and we’d like you to come back. 

Anderson: Francisco Botello is gonna come back in the winter of next year. 

OAW: Do you have any models in mind for what you wanted your ensemble to be? 

Anderson: I think Third Angle is sick. FearNoMusic is sick. These smaller groups that are able to focus on new music from all over the world or locally are fantastic. What I want to do that feels more attainable for us, but also makes us different, is only looking with local people on truly new stuff. I don’t want us to play a piece that’s already been written for someone else. I don’t find that to be the best use of our time. 

Loko: No greatest hits. 

Anderson: We’re still riding that line of if it’s okay for us to re-perform a piece. We performed Botello’s Threshold no. 1 three times by now. We premiered it in January in 2025, and performed it again with them twice, or coming up to three. 

Hickey: Because we premiered it and it was written for us, it feels okay. I hope we can do more auxiliary concerts and smaller shows and perform the pieces that were written for us again. 

Anderson: We’ve done that with Performance Works Northwest. But for our core concerts, I always want them to be full of premieres.