Signifying Something is an immersive interview and new-music podcast hosted by Safie Flato. Each episode features an in-depth conversation with a contemporary artist or musician, centered around a distinctive piece of newly released (or forthcoming) work. Through candid dialogue and contextualized listening, the show uncovers how these pieces emerge from personal inquiry, technological relationships, and sonic curiosity. Ideal for adventurous listeners and curious creators alike. Signifyingsomething.com and Patreon.com/signifyingsomething -- Venmo is @Steven-Flato-1 and last 4 digits are 5591 for verification for one-time-donations.
Episodes
Tuesday Jul 08, 2025
Tuesday Jul 08, 2025
(This episode was originally broadcast April 25, 2017)
G Lucas Crane speaks with Steve Flato on today’s episode of Signifying Something. Crane is a sound artist, performer, and musician whose work focuses on information anxiety, media confusion, and new performance techniques for obsolete technology. He is one of the co-founders of the experimental art and performance space the Silent Barn, located in NYC. He makes collages of reconstituted sample-based sound using the medium of cassette tape and has been in bands such as Woods, Wooden Wand and the Vanishing Voice. His solo work is released under the name Nonhorse.
Crane and Flato discuss playing with time and the nature of an instrument based on recordings of previous events; how people continue to use technology that is useful to them regardless of whether it’s “obsolete” or not; the importance of creating encounters with yourself in a performative setting; the diaristic nature of Crane’s sample library; associations with sound; listening and playing as two discrete modes of interacting with his material; musical problem solving; achieving a trance-like state during a performance; performance conventions in experimental music and otherwise; imperfection within the context of looping; tradition and vocabulary in what is usually considered “non-traditional” music; and what art can achieve beyond the expression of the author.
Tuesday Jul 08, 2025
Tuesday Jul 08, 2025
(This episode was originally broadcast on March 30th, 2017)
In my work) there’s this sort of underlying belief or tenet that whatever sound we’re hearing probably has a lot more going on with it than we’re either aware of or are giving it credit for.” - Sarah Hennies
Today’s episode is all about identity and understanding yourself through your own creations. Sarah Hennies joins us and premiers the piece “Pressure”, which is created entirely from one piece of percussion: the hi-hat. By varying the pressure of the foot pedal on the hi-hat, Sarah changes the quality of the sound and the various tones that are emitted. Different speeds on the metronome are set and multi-tracked, and the results are presented as they were recorded. The result is a cascade of overlapping percussion sounds that can be felt physically in the body.
Sarah discusses how a piece like “Pressure”, which is one of the first recorded examples of her composed music, gave her clues about herself. At one time, it seemed like a good idea to use this approach in her music. She came back to the idea of music that can be “felt” later in life, and realized she touched on it with “Pressure” at a previous time. Looking back with renewed clarity, Sarah was able to gain insights about herself at that time in her life and use this to create a more refined work. At another point, Sarah decided that physically demanding, labor intensive performances were going to be her focus. What does that say about her? There was a reason she came up her ideas at a specific time in her life. Sarah saw inadvertent signs in her music, and now she uses these signs and layers of meaning purposefully as tools in her compositional process.
Tuesday Jul 08, 2025
Tuesday Jul 08, 2025
(This episode was originally published in March 2017)
He and Steve Flato have known each other for quite some time, crossing paths via various internet platforms like Soulseek and web forums over ten years ago. Their conversation is as playful and unexpected as David’s music, covering a wide range of topics such as David’s experience living with a medicine woman in the mountains of South Carolina; his net label Homophoni; psychedelic drugs and experimental music; dimensional listening; the connection between improvised music and failure; his current avoidance of four-track tape machines and preference for simple handheld recorders; the falling availability and rising cost of cassettes; what the format of cassette tapes offer as a unique experience separate from vinyl or digital; the distinction between using tapes as instruments vs. as an end-product for the listener; David’s thoughts on recordings of improvised music and the loss of data involved; the loss of physical media as digital distribution becomes more widely adopted; the connection between electroacoustic improvisation and jazz; and booty shorts.
Tuesday Jul 08, 2025
Tuesday Jul 08, 2025
(This episode was previously broadcast March 15, 2017).
Fear, risk, and expressivity are the themes that Matthew and Steve Flato discuss on today's episode. Topics include why Matthew feels it’s important to be out of his comfort zone while engaging in the creative process; why he wouldn’t describe his music as “experimental” — or describe his music as anything but “songs”; music as a therapeutic process; how Matthew approaches words in his music vs. words in his novels; not being embarrassed by using “hackneyed” tools (like drenching your voice in reverb) in his creations; how he recorded an entire record while suffering from the flu; and the importance of empathy in film scoring and how Revert approached his first project for the screen; and why labeling your art before you make it can be paralyzing.
Tuesday Jul 08, 2025
Tuesday Jul 08, 2025
(This episode was previously published in 2017)
Lea Bertucci is an interdisciplinary artist, composer and improviser working with installation, sound, and projection. As an instrumentalist, she focuses on an electro-acoustic preparation of the bass clarinet that heavily utilizes speaker feedback. In recent years, her projects have expanded to site-specific compositions for electronics and instruments, multichannel sound installations and music concrete collage. Her new album, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, is being released on NNA Tapes at the end of March.
On this initial episode of Signifying Something, Steve Flato and Bertucci play and discuss her composition Oracle (Quartet Version). From there, the conversation goes onto explore Lea’s process in making a composition for voice— an instrument she has not studied— and how she demos and listens to these scores without being a vocalist herself; beating patterns in notes, microtonality, and just intonation; her focus on the spatial aspects of the room where her works are performed; Schoenberg and “New Music”; systematic composition and rule-based work; the pieces made at her Issue Project Room residency— Cepheid and Cepheid Variations— and their exploration of resonance; extended instrumental techniques; Lea’s multichannel piece, Double Bass Crossfade (which appears on her new NNA release All That Is Solid Melts Into Air); her approach to her tape music and her view of digital processing in that context; Lea’s ongoing concert series Dense Mesh; and how to know when you’ve finally finished a composition.
Links:
Artist Statement Generator: www.500letters.org/form_15.php
Lea Bertucci's website: http://lea-bertucci.com/
Intro & background music by Steve Flato
Featured music by Lea Bertucci