INTERLOCUTOR Interviews

A Cultural Anthropologist trained in Linguistic Anthropology, Ethnomusicology, and Folklore, Alex E. Chávez is the author of the book Sounds of Crossing: (Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño).Chávez's debut album, Sonorous Present, an immersive poetic and musical passage, extends sonic meditations on loss, migration, and mourning across America’s borderlands. What began as an improvised performance in 2019—inspired by the music and poetics of Chávez’s book Sounds of Crossing—has been reimagined as a studio album in collaboration with Grammy Award-winning producer Quetzal Flores. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chloë Cassens is the representative of the Severin Wunderman Collection, the largest in the world of works by iconoclastic French artist Jean Cocteau. It makes up the entirety of the contents of the Musée Jean Cocteau-collection Severin Wunderman in Menton, France. She is a longtime scholar of Cocteau with a unique perspective, as she is Wunderman’s granddaughter. Her past research has centered around Cocteau’s Les enfants terribles and its echoes in the later life and work of Yves Saint Laurent, as well as Cocteau’s Opium: Journal d’une désintoxication and how it illuminates the role that drug addiction and sobriety plays in the lives of creatives. In this extensive interview with Logan Royce Beitmen, Cassens discusses Cocteau’s massive cultural influence and her efforts to increase awareness about his life and legacy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Julia Hannafin is a writer and artist from a two-mom family in Berkeley, California. Their first novel, Cascade, was published with Great Place Books in April 2024, an independent press founded by Alex Higley, Emily Adrian, and Monika Woods.Cascade is a propulsive novel set on the Farallons—a rugged set of islands off the coast of San Francisco—about addiction, sex, gender, loss, and whether any of us can escape our biological inheritance. After her mother’s overdose, Lydia goes to work for her ex-boyfriend’s father, tagging and monitoring great white sharks. As rare and unforeseen interactions between species threaten her team’s research, so does Lydia’s growing infatuation with her boss. In this interview, Interlocutor Fiction Contributing Editor Nirica Srinivasan talks with Hannafin in detail about Cascade and its development. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Brooklyn-based musician Gabriel Birnbaum talks about his new record, Patron Saint of Tireless Losers, along with his developing professional focus on therapy and mental health for musicians, and why adequate mental health care for artists can be difficult to obtain and is often overlooked as a serious issue. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lara Aburamadan is an independent visual artist, journalist, and co-founder of the Refugee Eye organization. Born in Gaza City, Palestine, she is now based in the United States. She holds a BA in the Faculty of Communication Sciences and Languages from Gaza University.​Lara tends to embrace the human perspective through visual storytelling; her work explores the social and political narratives for refugees and marginalized communities. She captures documentary and artistic images of everyday life and excels at catching light and moments with intimacy and humanity.​She has been photographing since 2010. Her photographs have been published in a variety of news organizations and online websites such as Time Magazine, VICE, San Fransisco Chronicle, WorldPressPhoto, NPR, Refinery29, The Progressive Magazine, Pacific Standers, Al-Jazeera, Syria Deeply, +972, and elsewhere. Time Magazine has chosen Lara among 34 women photojournalists around the world whose work you should follow. She's also a member of Women Photograph and Survival Media Agency.In this interview, Lara discusses her upbringing in Gaza, her move to the US with the assistance of writer Dave Eggers, and her aims to portray images of Gaza that show the everyday life and culture of its people rather than the usual bleak and war-torn imagery that is often presented in the media. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lande Yoosuf is a writer, director, and producer with over 12 years of production development and casting experience, and has worked with several networks, including MTV, NBC, WEtv, truTV, Bravo, and others. Her short film, Privilege Unhinged, screened at the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival, Big Apple Film Festival, and the DC Black Film Festival, aired on Shorts TV, and is currently streaming on Chicago’s VonTV (Available on Amazon Fire TV, Roku, TV, Apple TV). Yoosuf’s second film, Second Generation Wedding screened at the Bronze Lens Film Festival, and inspired a prequel novel, “Ko-Foe.” She has an affinity for telling stories that explore media influence, sociology, gender/race relations, pop culture, and self-image themes and is currently developing a mixed slate of feature films, documentaries, and television pilots through her production company, One Scribe Media. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

aja monet is a poet, lyricist, writer, and community organizer from Brooklyn, now based in Los Angeles. Her debut studio album, when the poems do what they do, was released in 2023 to acclaim, and it earned a GRAMMY® nomination for Best Spoken Word Poetry Album.We published a version of this interview in the online edition of INTERLOCUTOR on February 1, 2024, and this episode is the full and unedited recording of the discussion between aja monet and our Contributing Editor, Logan Royce Beitmen. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Virginia L. Montgomery (VLM) is a multimedia artist working across video, performance, sound design, and sculpture. She is known for her unique, synthesia-esque, surrealist works that unite elements from mysticism, science, and her own lived experience as a neurodivergent individual. Her artwork is surreal, sensorial, and symbolic. It shifts in subject matter from stones to moths and machines, as VLM deploys an idiosyncratic visual vocabulary of repeating gestures and recursive symbols like circles, holes, and spheres.In this interview, VLM discusses her recent solo exhibition at Austin's Women & Their Work, Eye Moon Cocoon, which featured her ongoing examination of native Texas Luna moths and our multifaceted associations with the moon, along with her unique parallel career as a Graphic Facilitator. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tyler Nesler talks with leading AI researcher, author, and TED speaker Blaise Agüera y Arcas about his new book, Who Are We Now? - an exploration of how biology, ecology, sexuality, history, and culture have intertwined to create a dynamic “us” that can neither be called natural nor artificial.Identity politics occupies the front line in today’s culture wars, pitting generations against each other, and progressive cities against the rural traditions of our past. Rich in data and detail, Who Are We Now? goes beyond today’s headlines to connect our current reality to a larger more-than-human story.The book is available December 19 via Hat & Beard Press. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

French-American artist Miles Hyman has a solo show, Secret Lives, up at NYC's Philippe Labaune Gallery through December 23. Hyman's recent paintings lead us on a journey through his sources of inspiration. From his early childhood memories of the Ferris wheel in Bennington, Vermont, to his travels with his jazz musician father, to the bustling streets of New York, to the romantic embrace of Paris, where he has made his home for the past two decades, every stroke of his brush is a testament to that odyssey. The culmination of his artistic pilgrimage leads him to Italy, a country to which he already shares a deep artistic connection. Here, he weaves the pages of the Louis Vuitton travel book, an ode to the eternal city of Rome. These works are studies of light, imaginative juxtapositions, and records of personal geography. Alongside his paintings, there will be a selection of original strips from his latest graphic novel adaptation, La vie secrète des écrivains, penned by French author Guillaume Musso. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hallie Packard's works depict a place nostalgic and foreign—comfortable and untouchable at once. A place through which the presence of humanity echoes, but from a source that has long since expired. Human-made relics interact with the natural world, confirming the question of previous human existence and conforming to—even mutating to become one with—the wildly organic environment surrounding them. As reminders of the wonder that abounds and the respect it deserves, her works are dedicated to rediscovering and cultivating the magic of this world.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“Everyone is fascinated by crime,” says author/musician Harper Simon. “When you look at the history of song, romantic love songs may be the dominant mode of songwriting, but second would probably be songs involving crime—murder ballads, for one. Crime is a major theme in all songwriting.”Simon offers a new and expansive contribution to this legacy with Meditations on Crime, an ambitious multi-media project that includes an album he produced of musical collaborations with a sweeping range of contributors (Julia Holter, Gang Gang Dance, King Khan, the Sun Ra Arkestra) and a book he edited featuring essays by such notables as Ben Okri, Miranda July, Hooman Majd, and Jerry Stahl, alongside artwork from giants like Cindy Sherman, Tracey Emin, Julian Schnabel, and Raymond Pettibon. In this interview, Simon talks with host Tyler Nesler in detail about the genesis of this project and its development over several years into its present multifaceted form. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Born in Los Angeles in 1968, guitarist and composer Anthony Wilson is known for a body of work that moves fluidly across genres. The son of legendary jazz trumpeter and bandleader Gerald Wilson, his musical lineage has deeply influenced his creative trajectory, compositional choices, instrumental groupings, and the wide-ranging twelve-album discography that blooms out of them.In this interview, Anthony discusses his newly released album Collodion, which he recorded with producer and engineer Pete Min for Los Angeles’s innovative Colorfield Records. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Gigi Chen’s work creates an aesthetic that combines her training as a traditional animator and painter, along with her love of the techniques of Old Masters. Entrenched in the art of storytelling, the work pulls together her love of contemporary idioms of cartooning, photorealism, texture, and design to produce works that coalesce into Love, Craft, and Fun. Born in Guang Dong, China, and raised in New York, Gigi’s exhibition credits include Stone Sparrow Gallery, Superfine! Art Fair, Deep Space Gallery, and Antler Gallery. In this interview, Gigi discusses her deep admiration of birds and why she loves to place them in settings that mix the natural world with artificial aspects such as neon. She also discusses the deeply personal large indoor mural she created as part of a residency project with 4Heads in 2022 at NYC's Governors Island. Joining us in this episode is her friend and fellow artist Dan Alvarado. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Pete Min co-runs the innovative Los Angeles label Colorfield Records. At Colorfield, artists are encouraged to compose in the studio and often play instruments they’re unused to. There’s as much emphasis on sound as there is on composition and musicianship, and “chaos and chance are a big part of the process.” In this interview, Pete delves into what he calls his "sherpa" approach to guiding musicians out of their comfort zones and allowing them to express themselves in new and exciting ways. He talks about his background in music production and the freeform pandemic jam sessions with friends that led to the creation of his organic and playful approach to recording Colorfield albums at his studio, Lucy's Meat Market. Colorfield has already gained a solid reputation for releasing albums rich with expressive experimentation from artists such as Benny Bock, Anna Butterss, OHMA, with a forthcoming album Collodion by the accomplished jazz guitarist Anthony Wilson. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Martine Johanna is a Dutch-born female artist who has been actively exhibiting her work since 2007, starting from little daily drawings to Amsterdam street art with a small band of brothers. Within two years, she developed into a full-blown painter, saying farewell to her job in design and going back to her artistic roots while part-time residing as a freelance lecturer at the HVA.Johanna has exhibited internationally, including exhibitions at commercial galleries in Amsterdam, San Francisco, New York, Aalborg, Los Angeles, and San Diego. She has participated in exhibitions at cultural institutions, including the Mesa Arts Museum in Arizona and Collectie de Groen in Arnhem.In this interview, Johanna discusses her overall thematic approaches and the works displayed in her third solo show for New York’s Massey Klein Gallery, How to Eliminate Stress and Anxiety Through Good Housekeeping. Read our May 2023 Interlocutor Magazine interview and our 2020 interview, both conducted by contributor Isabel Hou. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sayazake is a visual artist who operates in the realm of Photography, Illustration, and Painting. His work speaks to a conversation of adventure, spirituality, anime, and eccentricity.In this interview, Sayazake talks about his expressive origins in performance and theater and what attracted him to pursue visual art in his early twenties, plus his thoughts on artistic influences, the commercial art world, his unique approaches to portraiture in both illustration and photography, and much more.Sayazake will release his latest body of work, Erasure, available exclusively on his website starting July 5, 2023, about which he writes, "This body of work focuses on topics of spirituality and facing your shadow. Working with the shadow aspects of yourself and integrating them to find deeper strength. This idea came to me while I was pretty sad about how a situation turned out after taking a pretty big risk. Grateful for the experience as it helped me become wiser and also draw some pretty great things." He will also have work up in the group show Free Your Mind, opening July 8 at JCAL in Jamaica, Queens. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

KIDLEW is an NYC-based color-blind Chorean (half-Chinese/half-Korean) artist. Born in Queens, NY, and raised on Strong Island, he started doodling the cartoon characters he saw daily on TV as a kid and soon discovered graffiti art on 1970s NYC subway trips with his grandmother. Big into skateboarding and metal music as teen, he segued into the music scene in the 90s and then studied toy design before returning to graffiti art as a part of the EX VANDALS crew. Now he may be best known for his character Lumpy Bumpkin, who has made appearances all around NYC and the world.We first talked with KIDLEW back in March 2023, but even 80 minutes wasn't enough to cover the scope of his shenanigans - listen here for a further dive into his early years as a creative troublemaker, learn more info about his time in the music biz, the specifics of how he got back into street and graffiti art in the 2010s, how his signature character Lumpy Bumpkin developed along with his stable of other characters + MUCH more... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jeffrey Everett is a successful designer, illustrator, and author working outside of Washington, DC. Jeffrey has had the pleasure of designing and illustrating for a wide variety of entertainment, corporate, and non-profit clients. Jeffrey has created designs for such bands as Jason Mraz, Social Distortion, Foo Fighters, The Decemberists, Flight of the Conchords, Gaslight Anthem, Lou Reed, The Bouncing Souls, and A Day to Remember. He has created work for companies such as RedBull, Simon and Schuster, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Washingtonian, Variety, Universal Records, LiveNation, Dreamworks, and more.Jeffrey's Kickstarter-funded book Let It Bleed celebrates 20 years of concert posters and will be released soon. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Founded in 2020, Philippe Labaune Gallery focuses on graphic design by featuring high-level artists whose common point is to explore new territories and to decompartmentalize the borders separating various modes of expression: illustration, painting, comic strips and animation. In this interview, Philippe talks in-depth about his lifelong passion for narrative art and how he came to start his gallery after a long career in the finance industry, in addition to the different ways that comic art has been perceived in Europe compared to the United States, and why those perceptions are now changing. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.