by Benji Heywood (@benjiheywood.bsky.social)
If you care about the future of music, you should care about experimental composers. Before The Velvet Underground, there was Steve Reich. Before Sonic Youth came Glenn Branca and his music for 100 guitars (“Symphony no. 13”). Frank Zappa, Radiohead, and Aphex Twin all cite modernist experimental composer John Cage as an influence.
We’re living in a new golden age of experimental composition. At its vanguard is Qasim Naqvi, the Connecticut-born, Brooklyn-based artist working as one of music’s most thrilling composers. Best known in rock music circles as a member of Dawn of Midi, the experimental band whose knotty 2015 album Dysnomia earned them a spot opening for Radiohead, Naqvi has quietly amassed a diverse discography of adventurous compositions, from the eerie choral music of Fjoloy, to the tautly atmospheric Preamble, to his recently-commissioned piece for the BBC Concert Orchestra, God Docks at Death Harbor.
Now, Naqvi returns with Endling, a modular synthesizer ambient piece released by the venerable label Erased Tapes, home to other experimental composers like Nils Frahm and the Icelandic polymath Ólafur Arnalds. In a wide-ranging interview, Naqvi takes us from his beginnings as a drummer in small-town Connecticut to cutting his teeth in twenty-teens Brooklyn and how the humanitarian crisis in Gaza inspired Endling, a sonic narrative about the last human on Earth. The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
photo: Smriti Keshari
Post-Trash: I’m always curious about musician origin stories, especially of a composer such as yourself who has such a unique approach to making music. What was the first piece of music that really made you take notice?
Qasim Naqvi: It was an experience more than anything. I was in middle school, walking in the hallway, and I heard someone playing the most incredible music from the band room. I looked through the glass, and this young woman in her early 20s was behind the drum kit. I was totally transfixed. So, I went in and introduced myself, and she ended up being the new music teacher for the middle and high school. Her name is Christina Allen and she got me into drumming. We ended up becoming friends. She was a very close mentor to me.
PT: Your older brothers also played music, right?
QN: Very much so. Before I could get into any style of music, they got me on jazz and experimental music. My middle brother, who's four years older than me, was going to college at NYU. When I was like 15 or 16, I used to go into the city, and he would take me to the old Knitting Factory on Houston Street where I’d just get my mind blown watching the downtown experimental music scene.
PT: Was there ever a Naqvi brothers experimental three-piece?
QN: When I was younger we used to play music together a lot, but as music began to take up so much of my bandwidth, now I prefer to just hang out. But, you know, we jam from time to time.
PT: What was your first serious composition you felt comfortable showing people?
QN: I think it was in high school for my senior project. I was really into art criticism and I wrote a bunch of scores based on paintings by the artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler. I wrote one called “Entrance to Southampton” based on his painting of the same name using this at-the-time very fancy notation software, which now looks more like morse code (laughs).
PT: It sounds like you’ve long had a fascination with connecting narrative and sound. Your new album Endling acts as a prequel to the piece you wrote for the BBC Orchestra last year called God Docks at Death Harbor. Both tell the story of the end of the world: first through the experiences of the last human on Earth, and then through what life looks like on Earth once we’re all gone. Can you give us a little insight into how you connected these ideas?
QN: Yeah, of course. I got an invitation to write a work for the BBC Concert Orchestra. Very early in the process, my wife—who’s a really great poet—had this dream of words. She woke up with the phrase “God knocks at death harbor.” There was no visual counterpoint or anything. It was just these words coming out of blackness. It was so evocative, it immediately fueled the inspiration for this piece where I imagined our planet, many, many years into the future, after the human race is extinct. Oftentimes, when we think about those scenarios, it's always this world plunged into chaos, a violent, barren landscape. For me it made me imagine a beautiful world getting a second chance. So, the piece is a tone poem exploring a landscape of an overgrown, empty city.
PT: The work for the BBC Concert Orchestra was composed for a full orchestra, so it’s interesting that for its prequel, Endling, about the last human wandering the Earth alone, you chose to compose for modular synth, much more insular and esoteric than composing for a large orchestra. Was that intentional?
QN: It's a good question. I wasn't thinking so much about the pared-down nature of the instrumentation in relation to just one human being. In fact, I think of modular as another type of orchestra, and that was what got me interested in synthesizers in the first place. I realized there's a way that you can compose actual pieces, then feed these compositions into this machine, almost like a piano reduction of the larger work. And then you can, in the moment, orchestrate it into this big, expansive thing. The improvisatory aspect is, to me, the orchestration determining how the pitches sound with the timbre or the rhythm, the volume, the dynamics, all these things.
PT: Is there a simple way you can explain how a modular synthesizer is different from synths we’re used to seeing on stage?
QN: The earliest forms of the modular synthesizer predate the keyboard synthesizer. Unlike a digital keyboard, where everything is under the hood so to speak, with the modular synthesizer, it's more a la carte. All of the things that a keyboard does with sound, like the envelope generator, attack, sustain, texture what you're hearing. With a modular synthesizer you can assemble those different facets with different types of modules.
PT: This may be getting a bit in the weeds, but for the heads, can you give me a specific example of how this works?
QN: Let's say you have an oscillator that can change its shape from a sine tone to a triangle wave continuously. You can send a low frequency oscillator sine wave shape into the wave shape—what they call the wave shape CV—and it will change the shape for you based on how this low frequency oscillator is moving. This allows you to create this sort of ripple, kind of like a chain reaction effect. You can get really crazy about letting the machine make all the decisions for itself—which is what a lot of people find very desirable about modular sythesizers. There are people who just turn the thing on, and let the machine create this ‘process music,’ where it just does its thing.
PT: But not you.
QN: No, my relationship is very different. I like to have my hands on everything.
PT: So, if we’re thinking of modular music as deterministic, you’d be the one starting the chain reaction. You’re the first mover in the Big Bang and everything we’re hearing is the result of one initial moment. But aren’t you also the force that’s tweaking the sound as it develops?
QN: Yeah, absolutely. I’m sort of determining what gets heard, what doesn't get heard, you know? A comparison I like to use is that a modular synth is like an organism, and like any organism, energy flows through it, and you're controlling how the energy is moving through the different parts of the organism. And in this case, the energy is a voltage range of about -10 to +10 volts.
PT: Does this mean any piece of music composed with modular synth can never be identically recreated? Like, is the version of Endling we hear on the album the only time the music will sound like that?
QN: Yeah, a modular performance is always different, and that's kind of what I like about it. Having also come from this background as an improviser, I welcome that variation from performance to performance. It's always wildly different, and it's always surprising.
PT: At the same time, you do have a history of interlocking pattern work. Obviously, if you look at Dawn of Midi—I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but I would be blown away if you said, ‘Yeah, we improvised for 45 minutes, and what came out was Dysnomia.’
QN: (laughs) I wish that were the case. That piece was mostly composed by (Dawn of Midi) pianist Amino Belyamani, including my parts. I did help with the orchestration of the rhythms and the tuning and things to make the drums sound electronic without the use of effects.
PT: Do you remember where the inspiration for that came from?
QN: When we were in school together we all studied this form of West African drumming, music from Ghana called Ewe music, a very old musical tradition. We studied this music with master drummer Alfred Ladzekpo at CalARTS. We were all getting into this art form and we thought, you know, why don't we make a fully worked-out piece inspired by Ewe rhythmic traditions. And because Amino is from Morocco, the Gnawa and Berber musical traditions are in his blood and some of that 12/8 language is also in Dysnomia. The whole piece is in 12/8.
PT: Really? It sounds so much more complicated than that.
QN: A lot of people think so! Once someone wrote a dissertation on our record and notated the whole thing—the score had parts in 15 and 17. And, God bless him, everything in that piece is 12/8 (laughs). Oftentimes I'm outlining the pulse on the bass drum, but because of all these orbital rhythms around it, it seems like I'm playing a weird polyrhythm that I'm not.
PT: And what about Fjoloy (Naqvi’s 2014 composition exclusively featuring voice)? That also feels pretty hands on, determined, and not very improvisational.
QN: You would think, but there's actually a very interesting story about how that piece was made. We were going to work with a really nice radio choir in Norway, but the funding fell through at the last minute. I had to scrap all the music I wrote. And because we had no budget, I approached a couple of extracurricular choral ensembles at NYU—a women’s choir and a mixed choir—to see if they'd be willing to do it for free. I was having all these strange ideas of what we could do and came up with this idea of a playback piece where all the melodic lines would be composed on an ARP Odyssey synthesizer. Each singer was given their part in the form of an MP3 recording. To conduct the ensemble, I created this sort of hand gesture system to control the shape of their mouths—fully open to fully closed, panning, muting the group. It became this process of opening and closing these gates of what they're hearing, telling them to come in, telling them to go out, and all the while they're basically singing along to this continuous, sort of melodic line that's changing but not in any sort of specific time. The only time that it's in is in minutes and seconds.
PT: How did you record that?
QN: On the day of the recording, everyone had their MP3 track on their phone. And I said, ‘Okay, we're gonna do movement one.’ Soprano one, find your part for movement one. I would go, ‘1-2-3, everyone press play on three,’ and then just follow your guide pitches.
PT: That’s insane.
QN: It was a really magical experience. And we recorded it in this giant marble room that looks like the main hall of a bank. All the acoustics and reverberation were natural. The whole thing was born out of this need to be resourceful—having no money, no time, but knowing how to create a work of complexity that, again, also has these aspects of controlled improvisation and an extreme sort of interpretive flexibility, which was something I was into at the time.
PT: What fed that curiosity in you? For someone like me, hearing your work first through Dawn of Midi, compositions like Fjoloy and (2019’s) Preamble seem to come out of left field.
QN: At the time I was checking out a lot of the early music of Krzysztof Pendereckandi and his Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, where he was using this quasi-notated language that classical musicians could understand. He was very focused on how far they could go, how far they could stretch, and so that choral piece (Fjoloy) and Preamble are two examples of that phase of my writing.
PT: I happened to be in Hiroshima when I received the email from your press agent and I listened to Endling right after visiting the Peace Museum. Seeing the aftermath of nuclear apocalypse then listening to the album really stirred something inside me. The piece is so beautiful, but it's also—oh, man, I don't know—it kind of fucked me up a little bit. While the allegory is powerful on its own—one human at the end of the world—was there a personal experience that inspired you to write this?
QN: It was a lot of the things that were happening in 2024. Being Muslim, our parents and our grandparents, they all have known this moment of extreme war, extreme violence, of people being massacred at a mass scale. So, for me in 2024, that moment was Gaza. I couldn’t turn away from it. I had to take note of and acknowledge it, this brutal and horrible time. There were also things happening in my personal life, being a father and trying to grapple with raising a kid and balancing some kind of career as an artist. Endling was a way for me to process all these things that were happening. To have a cathartic reaction to the music I was making served as a type of therapy for me.
PT: That tracks. Often the most transformative music begins as healing for those who make it.
QN: My hope for this record is for it to provide an outlet for people to offload and to process things they might be struggling with. I've talked to quite a few people (about Endling) and catharsis has been the common theme—which for me is most important. I'm interested in music as a process of accessing a deeper part of myself and mining those rare minerals that I find in the zone of creation. Hopefully, when those minerals come out and you share them with people, they have a similar kind of experience where they too can be transported.
Endling is out now on Erased Tapes.