music to eat microwaved chicken pot pie to-Woosh
Lara Bartel is a music composer, producer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist. She was born in Salt Lake City, Utah and is currently studying music composition at UC Santa Barbara. Her primary work consists of concept albums of electronic work and songs, though she also works with concert work and individual studio tracks. Lara makes great use of the studio space as a compositional tool, and takes advantage of complex audio effects and sampling to generate her unique sonic landscape. She often uses electronics, noise, extended techniques, and novel sounds to create unique soundscapes for her music to live in. Lara commonly works with surrealist ideas adapted to music, such as intense juxtaposition, marriage of dreams and reality, and psychic automatism. The exploration of dreams in Lara’s music is expanded past surrealism and often is the basis of full works. She also tackles queer experiences and political statements in her music and lyrics as well as different combinations of all three. Lara often will deliberately put her music somewhere in between “classical” and “popular” music. A great deal of her work explores what happens when these two often arbitrarily separated musical worlds are crossed over or put in deliberate proximity. Lara also plays several instruments, such as trombone, piano, EWI (Electronic Wind Instrument), guitar, electric bass, and vocals. She plays trombone, piano and EWI in UCSB’s Ensemble for Contemporary Music and trombone in UCSB’s Pops Orchestra. However, For many of these instruments, most of her playing goes into recording her own music and so her composition and performing often intersect. She often uses the physicality of the piano, guitar, or even EWI, as a compositional device to generate ideas. The textural uniqueness of the trombone and EWI often serve to create the interesting sonic landscapes that Lara loves. Lara has worked with the queer-run record label Fourth Strike and was the sole composer and primary sound designer for the visual novel A Dozen Bloomin’ Roses. Lara loves rats, jellyfish, blaseball, and wearing capes.
When I make music, my primary motivation is simply to have fun. Everything else is rather auxiliary to that end. I feel that fun and enjoyment for its own sake are far more noble motivations than they often get credit for, and fun and joy can be far more than surface level reactions. I like to think that the point of art is simply to make the world a cooler place. “Cool” here is defined rather broadly but mostly refers to anything that can invoke interest or awe in people, even when it’s just myself. There are several patterns throughout a lot of my music representative of the main ideas I consider cool. I will commonly utilize electronics, noise, extended techniques, and textural experimentation to produce novel soundscapes that sound completely new from anything I’ve known. I also often take influence from the ideas of the surrealist movement in art, deliberately including strange juxtaposition, explorations of dream states, and improvisation to achieve surrealism in music. The most common themes I explore in my music and lyrics are explorations of dreams and discussions of queer and trans stories, and sometimes both at once. The bulk of my work is contained in large concept albums I record and put online that contain varying balances of songwriting and instrumental music which range between 40 and 100 minutes in length. These albums explore themes of personal, philosophical, or political nature and deal with all of the patterns I’ve mentioned here. One idea I find particularly interesting to explore in my music is the cross section between “classical” and “popular” music worlds. I put “classical” and “popular” in quotes because those terms don’t often accurately describe the styles and movements they tend to be used in reference to. There is historical divide between these two musical worlds, one often held up by academia and marketability. I however love to see what happens when I cross them over or even just place them in deliberate proximity. Combining contemporary compositional techniques with say punk or pop tone and instrumentation or just using pieces of different musical philosophies at once can create thing that I think are really cool. My identity as a performer often influences my composition. I am a multi-instrumentalist and play trombone, piano, EWI (Electronic Wind Instrument), guitar, electric bass, and vocals. For many of these instruments, most of my playing goes into recording my own music and so my composition and performing often intersect. I love using the physicality of the piano, guitar, or even EWI, as a compositional device to generate ideas.