by Khagan Aslanov (@virgilcrude)
The opening sentence to poet and scholar Fred Moten’s incredibly soulful 2008 essay Black Op calls Black Studies “a dehiscence at the heart of the institution.”
Simply, what “dehiscence” means, in academic, medical, and botanical terms, is an opening. It can be presented as something violent and exacting, a stitched wound coming undone. Or, in the aspect Moten focuses on, an act of constructive disruption, something that abstracts or dismantles boundaries and pushes forth to new light.
Moten and dehiscence is how I came to virtuoso double bassist Brandon Lopez in earnest. A friend in a record shop recommended an album of his, an incendiary 2023’s solo bowed bass record called vilevilevilevilevilevile. I was hooked, dove through López’ back catalogue of improvised goodness, and stayed on the lookout for new material. Then, in April of 2025, came Revision, his collaboration with Moten, with López’ avant-garde playing acting as minimalist foil to Moten’s words.
Both artists trade in idiosyncratic assemblage, putting together something infinitely elaborate, and then somehow making it look so easy, impossibly natural, like primordial ooze descending. For the hour of Revision, they sound bound to one another, locked into something bigger than mere collaboration - a conclave of sheer art. Just as Moten has been pushing against the stodgy walls of academia, so has López been against musical composition. Their collaboration was a display of activism, a celebration of civil empathy and unrest.
I reached out to López soon after, asking for the interview. Fast forward a month or so later, and we connect over a video chat. As our conversation goes on, he moves from room to room in his New York City apartment, constantly shifting positions, tall and full of nervy energy, a lean frame offset by tense, muscled arms that look permanently coiled, a result of both years of working manual labour, and from playing his instrument every day for decades.
At times, he speaks openly and ardently, and then goes back to tweak his wording or laughs and asks me if I got the answer I was looking for. In other moments, he takes long pauses, carefully measuring what he’s about to say. What’s not betrayed in this humane presentation is one of the best and most talented free improvisers and experimental composers of this century.
Brandon Lopez by Julia Dratel
KA: Let’s start at the beginning, your family coming to the States, and how you began in music.
BL: Like most Puerto Ricans in the States, we were displaced because of foreign policies. There was an operation called Bootstrap that was designed to turn the Puerto Rican populace into a cheap workforce. People were displaced and sent to New York and New Jersey. You obviously don’t know this history living in the States without doing a little digging. So we ended up living in the Puerto Rican ghetto in Jersey, a place called Passaic.
(As for music), my mother’s family, there are at least three generations of professional musicians. My great-great-uncle was José Armengol Díaz, a well-known guitar player, who’s been on some iconic recordings from the 20s going into the 60s. His nephew, my uncle Hector, was a timbale player, involved in the pre-Fania (Records) New York Tropicalia phase. And then his daughter was a pop star, she was in this freestyle Latin band called Exposé.
So the idea of being a performer was always in the house. My brother is an actor, he was just on Broadway. My cousins as well. I never had the knack for being a performer. It was something my mother encouraged strongly. Then my friend got a guitar, so did I, and I got obsessed with it. I slept with that guitar. I didn’t know how at the time, but I had decided I would be a jazz guitarist. But being a performer was always considered a viable job in our family, it was supported.
And I was always attracted to the weirder things - I love Monk, and Mingus’ bands with Dolphy, and the noisier aspects of Hendrix. That all sort of developed into whatever the fuck I’m doing now.
KA: So how did the shift to double bass happen?
BL: I went to the Berkeley College of Music (laughs). Which will make anybody hate guitar. I went for a semester, and I felt so stuck in specific rigid techniques. I had dabbled with double bass in high school. So I thought that I want to focus on this, something more intuitive, rather than scholastic techniques.
I think it’s extremely difficult to develop a voice within an academic framework. Most of the things I love about jazz and the musicians of jazz is that everyone has a very personalized approach to dealing with structures. I don’t think that can come from learning to think about harmony and rhythm in a scholastic sense.
KA: It does seem like endlessly learning notation and practicing will either make a symphonic player or beat the love of music out of you completely.
BL: Or both!!
In some ways, to understand López’ craft, his covenant, one needs to see him play. You can see it in the distortions of his face as he does – small, sometimes barely perceptible shifts, a creased brow, or a tightly wrung mouth. He writes, notates, composes and improvises; all with steadily ascending levels of virtuosity, but the primary component—the most vital aspect to take in when you watch it—is that he feels it, on an elemental level. That is why these pieces move in such a splendid and rarified way—when Lopez plays, it’s like a tendon has been cut out and left to exist as something almost pure, as abject passion.
KA: What do your recording situations look like, album to album? Do you use the studio often, do you record off the floor to get the sound right?
BL: The reality is that in the studio, it’s just far too expensive to really get what I want. Not only that, but you enter a hermetic space, you use the boards, you mix and tweak things in post, you can dial in a solo over the piece, you can elevate certain frequencies. There is no conversation with the audience, with the room. Improvised music, jazz music doesn’t operate at its best in that way. That’s not what’s interesting about it. My favourite records are live ones. They may not be recorded as well, but they’re more honest in a sense. I want to hear a weird room, I want to hear unclean, rough sounds.
KA: Something like Matanzas? (López’ excellent 2023 release, a freely improvised and intensely groove-laden live album with saxophonist Steve Baczkowski and percussionist Gerald Cleaver)
BL: Matanzas, actually, was two pieces from one performance, unedited. It was a band I assembled because of certain sonic elements, and booked some gigs, and we played, and something happened, like lightning in a room. It was interesting too, because the recording itself was fucked up, it wasn’t operating well. I had to send it to my friend, John Lipscomb, who had to compress the shit out of the fucking thing. It sounds almost like a metal album, it’s aggressive even in its most sensitive sections. And it’s perfect. It ended up working out somehow.
This music can be too difficult, too unvarnished or feral, and like a lot of art that’s the result of a profound communion with an instrument, it can feel very desolate. There’s a long argument to be had on whether this is actually what makes experimental art click with the consumer (if it ever does). Yet there is something to a record like vilevilevilevilevilevile (2023) in particular that manages to bypass these strictures. More than any other avant-garde work in recent history, it boils things down to fractal parts, invoking both primal urges and a patient suggestion. Even a casual listener will have a moment listening to these relatively terse, raw-boned suites, so sodden in both persistent dread and a tremendous display of humanity. When I point this out, López smiles pleasantly:
BA: Thank you! That makes me really excited. It’s a painful process, writing and recording a solo record, and then listening back to it. I’m too close to it to know if it ended up as something functional. It’s an emotional process that I don’t necessarily like.
KA: Well, tell me what the process is like, to make a protest album that’s purely instrumental.
BL: I think protest music is just framed in the way that it necessarily needs to involve words. But it’s very easy to transmit the core of a political idea through the work itself. Obviously, speaking about it is quite important too, especially because people get ostracized for speaking out, for organizing.
You can’t divorce your politics from what you do. We have this idea that our artistic lives are separate little packages, but the whole thing is so enmeshed into itself. My work can’t exist without physical labour, without practice and playing. But there’s something to say, to be uncovered there. Also, I collaborate with people, I depend on people. There is a strong political statement in that alone.
In a way, organizing these gigs and collaborating with all these people feels like an answer to my own isolation. In another sense, it doesn’t really feel like a difficult process. When you get the right situation, the right facility, and the right people who have the right mind, it’s the easiest fucking thing. It’s joyous even when it’s difficult.
From there, the talk turns political, and López’ engagement with his community and with the human race at large, as both the child of immigrants and an artist trying to carve out a comfortable space to exist in, emerges in full. He speaks passionately and at length, pointing out persisting and worsening sociopolitical inequities, money being used for control, and a rigged system built to undermine, polarize and isolate groups and individuals, untether them from a larger, collective pursuit.
BL: I’m not a Republican nor am I a Democrat. The whole thing is a lark to support a corporate state. And where did this money and power come from? It comes from the immiseration of the majority of people. In New York City, you can’t walk down the street without seeing someone suffering. It’s built into the cultural apparatus. To me, that’s not only cowardly, but vicious.
(pauses)
I’m not excluding myself from this. I get to make music and travel the world. That is predicated on the support of this very system.
From there, we speak in a ranging fashion. López touches on how even well-established artists have to maintain daily jobs to eat nowadays, and in the middle of it, are expected to spend half the year in crummy hotels, eating gas station food, and still somehow bring their A-game artistically. We talk about how in the late 90’s, the National Endowment of the Arts introduced a morality clause into its selection process, devaluing itself utterly. How sports are used to shore up chauvinistic thinking, and an “us vs. them” mentality. How even avant-garde music festivals aren’t immune, and that with the barest research, you sometimes find that they work with contractors that put up tent cities for migrants. Most importantly, we return to the topic of art being used as a means of hope, of possibility.
BL: Look at genres like rhumba or jazz. We create the most beautiful and complex things in abject conditions. It’s worth preserving, as painful as it can be. There is this bewilderment and beauty to life. I don’t want to leave, because my whole life is aesthetic (laughs).
What Brandon López does leave us with is something he returns to throughout our conversation, no matter the topic, something he repeats like a mantra, an indoctrination, a desperate plea for dehiscence as a restorative force:
BL: The more we actually talk to each other, the more we shed the tools that are used to divide us. Humans weren’t meant to be alone. We need to communicate.