Alexander Kaye
Sound & Visual Artist
He / Him
Los Angeles, CA / Detroit, MI
akaye.world
instagram @akaye.world
twitter @akayeworld
Q What do you do?
“This probably changes slightly every month.. but! ..I am a sound and visual artist whose main goal is to create an emotional space that allows people the opportunity to lose themselves in the experience, even just for a few brief moments.”
The medium I’m creating in often changes between sound, song, visual art, field-recordings, compositions, poetry, immersive/3D environments, or any combination of these together with other elements to create something new.
Throughout this path I have learned a lot of concepts and methods related to making art and sound, so I often freelance as an editor, producer, consultant, or engineer on client projects as well.
Q What steps did you take to get to where you are now?
When I was 11 years old I got my first guitar and started taking lessons, but I hated the lessons and stopped playing entirely soon after. The guitar sat in the downstairs closet for years, but when I was 13 I picked it up one day, figure out how to tune it, and then started teaching myself how to play off the internet. I spent my high school years making different bands and figuring out how to record music from the internet. I didn’t have a mentor or a teacher, I just fell in love with the process of creating music from scratch. It was the space I felt safe to express and truly be myself. At 18 I was able to test into a university music program in Detroit, MI where I got a Bachelor of Fine Arts. While I’m grateful for the education, I’ll always prefer to teach myself. There’s a sort of magic that comes from the process of figuring out a new instrument, software, or collaborative effort without formal education on it. Since moving to LA in 2017, my work has grown away from strictly music and is now venturing into the art world, or maybe it’s straddling the two at the same time actually… the truth is I’ve really never considered myself just a musician I guess. I’ve always made my lyrics more as poetry and have always been producing visual art for the album covers as well.
Experimenting with different forms of art and sound has given me the chance to learn and become comfortable with many different software programs to aid in the journey, including Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Audition, Pro Tools, Ableton, MAX, Cinema 4D, Unity, etc. etc. Often it is the clash between 'real life' tangible creations and elements of the digital realm that produce my favorite results, so being able to use many different types of software to help facilitate this creation without boundaries is key to whatever I’m making. Following this more DIY path of making, along with pushing my creative processes through collaborating with artists of different mediums, has helped me develop my work and style into what it is today.
Q How do you stand out in your field?
In the past few years I've had the fortune of realizing how to contextualize my interest in randomness and chance-based operations within my work. This is in big thanks to my studies of the ancient Chinese I Ching and the general ideology of accepting things as they may naturally come to be, instead of strictly forcing things to be as you want them. For me, this translates to decisions and inspirations within my projects being a collaborative-effort with the elements of chance and randomness. Keeping an open mind, ear, and eye to unforeseen circumstances or variables during ideation and creation has led me to exciting results that I alone would not have been able to achieve. Leading without ego is an important part of the creative process for me and working closely with randomness and a collective-conscious-mindstate helps me to keep that part of my humanity in check.
Q What are you working on right now?
I’m excited to work on a handful of different personal and collaborative projects right now! Aside from producing and recording a few albums for friends and other artists, I’m also working on these projects at the moment:
‘Requiem For Lost Plants’ is an audio/visual project centered around ecological preservation of the Los Angeles area. Reminding us to take careful consideration of our anthropocentric tendencies while celebrating the beauty and wonder of our natural world is at the heart of the project. My collaborator Alice Yuan Zhang and I concepted and created this 3D & AR world together. More specifically, I created the sound design elements which were made with a mixture of collected plant data, randomized synthesis variables, and traditional interpretive sound design and instrumentation. I then implemented each plant’s ‘score’ into Unity’s 3D audio engine to create an immersive experience. The project just debuted with Berlin’s 3HD Festival for 2020 and is in live online exhibition through January 2021.
[[ Super super side-project in the early stages (shhh): Creating a visual art series focused on food justice and the sugar industry. Cookie Crisp is a crime against humanity! Pass it on! Preview on my website right now x0 ]]
‘Free Instruments For Social Change’ is a personal project focused on providing high quality pay-what-you-can virtual instruments, or ‘software instruments’. The PWYC non-profit model achieves two important things for this project. One, it enables young or low-income people to have full accessibility to the instruments free of charge. Two, any income received for the instruments from those who can afford to give will be donated 100% to non-profit organizations whose goal is to address systemic social inequalities. I am looking to release the first of these instruments in early 2021.
‘Temporary Castle’ is an ongoing chance-based ambient music concept that I created during the live scoring of a 10-week meditation series my partner and I hosted on our rooftop in East Los Angeles. It is minimalist music, composed by a mixture of chance based modular synthesis operations and my own human vocal and instrumental responses to those results. The basis for the sound is randomly derived pitches and rhythms that I believe parallel the arbitrary fluctuations of everyday life. This sound palette is meant to inspire and encourage regular meditative practice. I am working on the 3rd album for this project now and looking to release in the first half of 2021.
A collection of my own poems, songs, and compositions written between 2019 and 2020. Keeping the practice of working on pieces of music and art whose only purpose is to just exist as itself is important to me. Music and words together can create some of the strongest emotions possible in humans, and I really enjoy channeling different bits and pieces of our collective-consciousness and weaving them into sound and song.
Q Out of all your slashies, which one do you wish you could do more often?
As much of a non-answer that this is (sorry!), I’d like to focus on adapting myself better to everything. I like to work on a lot of different projects in different mediums at the same time, and with that sometimes a lot of brain-splitting has to happen, so to speak. I think it’s hugely beneficial to not get tunnel vision when working on different things. Like, just because I’m working on an album or sound project, I don’t always want to be thinking “Okay this is a sound project so therefore I need to do X, Y, and Z for it to be appropriate or to fit in the sound world”. I think that the best results come from throwing all of these labels and preconceived notions at the wall and then seeing what comes out of it. So maybe the answer is that when I’m working within a certain medium, I don’t really want to have any absolutes in my head just because I’m working in that medium. I want it to all be loose, fun, clunky, smooth, bright, loud, dark, red, yellow, or whatever else feels right in the moment!
Q What is frustrating you right now?
Society is frustrating right now. For how many people that are brilliant, incredibly talented, compassionate, understanding, and forward-thinking, there is a near equal amount that want social and environmental injustices to stay exactly as they have been, so long as it doesn't adversely affect them in any way. This hard to swallow fact makes every single thing more difficult for us to move forward as a society right now. Some days, it is so frustrating that it is hard to get up and get any work done at all. However we cannot let it be this way. It cannot and will not remain this way. Together, I believe that we can move past this phase of modern human greed and egoism into one that treats all people, as well as our own home on earth, with the respect that it all deserves.
Q If you could hire someone for $20/hour, what would you have them do to make your day easier?
I've found when experimenting with different art and sound ideas while using software in often unconventional ways that I run into some processes that just frankly take a lot of sheer time to accomplish. If I were to hire someone it would be to help me with some of the tasks that take a lot of human-power to get through.
Q What do you wish you could have told yourself, when, and why?
Dissolve.
Dissolve your unhealthy expectations, dissolve your ego
dissolve your grasping to understand things that could never truly have understandable answers, dissolve your notions of fair and unfair, right and wrong. Be fluid, like water.
Q If you could talk to an expert to gain more insight on something, what would it be about?
I think if I was going to ask an expert about something it wouldn't be directly about work or creativity, it would be about the things outside of that. Maybe about how they balance it all together -- living, learning, working, creating, breathing, giving, receiving. It's such a balancing act. Sometimes I think it may take a lifetime to get your balance really down. Talking with someone who you think really has that figured out would be pretty insightful.
Q What kind of opportunities/projects are you looking for?
I really enjoy working on so many different types of projects, as long as there are good people with good intentions involved, I'm always game to at least talk about things! Projects that are focused on forward-thinking art as a way of adding more beauty and depth to humanity would be at the top of my list though. Oh! And also I am a HUGE podcast listener, and have done some podcast audio editing and audio production in the past. I would love to help out with some podcast sound design, composing, or audio editing & mixing :)
Q Describe your ideal job/client/collaboration.
Ideal work collaborations, for me, are always about mutual respect and the push-and-pull of good ideas and creativity. The less ego involved, the better. When you can work without ego and without unhealthy expectations, you can open the door to some incredible things that no one may have seen possible in the beginning.
Q How should someone approach you about working together?
Email would be great, and don't be shy! I like working with people, and love different personalities. I'd be happy to speak with you about anything :)
Q Who is a creative you admire?
Too many to list! But here are some good ones :)
Alice Yuan Zhang, ig: @aliceyuanzhang - Incredibly inspiring digital artist, group facilitator, and collaborator focused on improving social and environmental inequities through art.
Gretchen Booth, ig: @g_g_g_g_g_g - Community organizer and facilitator focusing on self-healing using body based practices. This person has undoubtedly changed my life for the better.
Jay Carlon, ig: @jaycarlon @carlondance - Jay is a contemporary choreographer based in Los Angeles whose highly physical work is focused in experimental, site-sensitive dance theater… also a close friend and collaborator!
Q Oh! and… how do you stay creative?
Relentless social progress with no exceptions.
This member profile was originally published in December 2020.