Sound, Invention, and Creative Philosophy with Jay Kreimer
- 7 days ago
- 7 min read
Jay Kreimer is a sound artist, new‑music performer, and inventor
of unconventional instruments built from everyday and found
objects. A two‑time Fulbright Senior Scholar in India, he has
toured internationally, collaborating with musicians and visual
artists on performances and installations that merge sound,
sculpture, and textiles.
This interview taken by Anugrah Smitha Reghu explores the
intersection of instrument invention, experimental sound, and the
creative philosophy of discovery over expression. It traces Jay's
journey from modifying family instruments to his current work with
found materials and international collaborations.
Anugrah: You have spoken about playing in bands as a teenager
and gradually drifting toward modifying and then building
instruments yourself. Can you trace a moment when conventional
instruments stopped feeling sufficient for what you wanted to do?
Jay: Conventional instruments stopped feeling sufficient from the
very beginning. I spent a summer on the couch learning where
the notes were on a guitar that belonged to my younger brother.
About the same time, I sawed the neck off of a family violin. I had vague plans to make it into a new instrument, but I had no idea what to do next. What I did accomplish was breaking the rules
that said instrument design is sacred. I wanted something other
than what was handed down. The door was open. My parents
weren’t too happy about the violin.
A: You also have a background in writing and teaching; how has
your MA in creative writing and your work as an educator shaped
the way you think about sound, structure, and audience?
Jay: I went to graduate school in San Francisco. The beats and
hippies and Rolling Stone magazine provided hints about how a
person might live and make things. Music and poetry and art. It
was a city and it hadn’t yet become absurd in the way silicon
valley has made it absurd. I was drawn to the aesthetic and
absorbed it. Thirty years later at the Guthman instrument
invention competition in Atlanta, an inventor and guitar player
from NYC said,”I saw your instrument and thought - San
Francisco.” Forty five years later, 2026, I was sitting in a fish
restaurant in Bangalore next to guy who had been at a
performance I had done for a SoundWave festival in 2006 at an
auditorium on Capp street in San Francisco’s Mission district.
In my writing I hunt for surprise. William Burroughs has been a
major technical influence on my writing and creative life. I have
used the cut up method for fifty years. That lead to the Oulipo,
and most recently mining AI hallucinations for triggering ideas.
John Cage’s Cartridge Music has been a constant for 50 or so
years. My personal goal was to absorb those techniques, so I
could “spin the dials” and find something fresh in whatever
materials were at hand. Valuing sound over conventional musical
content relates to this. Bring a bow and musical mallet to the
hardware store and flea market.
Right now I’m reading Adam Phillips’s new book, The Life You
Want, and the chapter titled On Not Being Taught shines some
scattered light on my teaching and performing methods. Phillips
describes his teacher, the paediatrician and psychoanalyst
Donald Winnicott, warning students that they would need to pick
what they could from the chaos of his lecture. Phillips emphasizes
the human importance of keeping the chaos in, never pretending
to be concise and complete because we learn key things about
living by making those selections from the mess by instinct, or
some other faculty we can’t be completely aware of. This rings
true for me. I value exploration and I don’t feel a performance is
“good” unless I discover something new during it.
I want new sounds or new contextualization of sounds, in
emerging structures. This is a close parallel to the way a poet
starts working with a promising line and finds ways to draw on the
cadence and sounds of the language, extending and contrasting
as the materials suggests. The audience completes the music
because the quality of attention and physical response to the
performance has an active shaping influence on it.
A: When you pick up an object: a radon‑removal tube, a metal
bowl, strips of 16‑mm film, what arrives first for you: an imagined
sound, the visual form, or a bodily gesture you want to make with
it?
J: When I pick up an object my first thought is sculptural, (Look at that!), quickly followed by touch and sound. I imagine and try
ways to activate the object sonically: thumb tap, bow, stick tap,
finger tip roll. And it’s sometimes a slow process. I kept a broken
tape measure around for a year before I knew what to do with the
spring. And the spring developed a beautiful patina in that year.
I usually consider my design constraints right away. How can I
make this fit in a suitcase designed for air travel? How can I make
it as light as possible? Can I make it work with a guitar style
magnetic pickup rather than a piezo, to simplify the signal chain?
A: You've talked about how you prioritize discovery more than
expression in the arts. Can you expand more on that?
J: I’ve always been interested in making something new. I don’t
believe this precludes expression. Expression will always shape
the curve discovery takes. But starting with expression feels
repetitive, stuck in what your parents taught you, stuck in
historical patterns. Focusing on discovery gives you more of
chance to move beyond that stuff. Though that stuff really never
goes away.
When I’m playing music or making an instrument, which I
consider to be a long slow improvisation, I almost always enter a
trance-like state. It’s a kind of silence, a silencing of the directing voices which limit creative response to situations and materials.
This can cause trouble if a performance has elements which are
conducted. When I was playing with the DILLI improvisors
orchestra. It took me an embarrassing length of time to remember
what the conducting hand symbols meant. Not easy to penetrate
that improvising trance. I take the sequence of hand signals to
represent an expression of the conductor, which reflexively puts
me off, but leads to discovery because the conducting hand
symbols only shape one aspect of the directed performers
response.
A: You’ve worked for years with other builders and improvisers
like Bryan Day and Marco Albert, as well as with textile artist
Wendy Weiss and composers like Stacey Barelos. How have your
experiences with such people changed the way you design or
approach an instrument?
J: It varies by individual. Bryan Day and I both approach
instruments as means to create textures. We’ve described our
music as a hybrid of foley and sound design. Wendy Weiss is a
textile artist. Our collaboration has lead to a lot of sound design and sculpture for installations and not much in the way of musical instruments. But my instruments play a strong role in the sound design. I’ve modified toy pianos for Stacey Barelos. Our
collaborations are very natural, and if anything have moved me to
achieve piano-like sounds. More recently I’ve made instruments
for other musicians, a cello player and an electronic musician who
also plays found objects. In both cases I felt compelled to make
versions for myself after playing the commissioned pieces. Last
year I made a fretless bass, based on a Fender jazz bass, with a
stainless steel fingerboard. The results were so satisfying that I
modified an earlier instrument by adding a stainless steel
fingerboard. That fingerboard was salvaged from the stainless
steel front of a dishwasher. This interaction of materials and
design elements is the most common recurring pattern in my
recent work.
A: If you had to name one thing you always carry with you in your
practice, whether it’s a physical tool, a concept, or a way of
listening, what would it be, and why has it become non‑negotiable
for you?
J: Curiosity. Team that curiosity with an open minded approach to
materials and you get my day at the flea market. I believe that
original instruments give a player an advantage over experimental
players who play conventional instruments. The same curiosity
applied to conventional instruments on which the player is
accomplished will yield less surprising music than when an
accomplished musician plays an original instrument. With original
instruments, there is far less limiting tradition. Original instruments have close relatives in traditional instruments, but they remain odd cousins. And curiosity is the key that unlocks the surprises in what the odd cousins can bring to the conversation.
A: From your vantage point as an improviser and instrument
inventor working with found materials, where do you feel this
wider art form of experimental instrument‑building and sound art
is headed in the next decade or two?
J: In this historical moment higher education is backing off of
sound and experimental sound. The school of the Art Institute of
Chicago dropped its sound program, Mills College is finished,
Steim shut down some years ago. Sound art is getting absorbed
by media arts programs which protects it from the conservatism of
music schools, but media arts is mostly digital and I don’t see
much hands on instrument making there except for the purely
electronic.
On the happy side, access to materials, information, and
performances has never been better. Internet access feeds the
democratic fire in this case, as long as it keeps people face to
face listening to each other and playing music on original
instruments. I wonder why education would back away from a
growing and vital folk art? Is it too difficult to define and contain in the academy? Too broad to formalize?
I have had great experiences working with students, artists, and
enthusiasts in India over the past few years. Working visits to TheI.S.R.O. in Bangalore have become a regular part and highlight ofmy calendar, and the new sound program at CEPT in Ahmedabad, a well planned outgrowth of W.I.P. Delhi, is very promising. Both attract exceptionally talented young people, and it seems that approaching instrument making and performance from a design perspective works very well. I hope to keep working with
these programs, share what I’m learning, and plug into their
energy.
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