Inside the Art Mind

I recently sat down to talk with Armand Tesla, who heads the avant-garde musical ensemble, The Atonal Retentives, an art noise collective based in Westfield, IL, whose soundscape compositions are manufactured largely through electronic means. The music and its sounds are a departure from a clear tonal center, key, or traditional harmony. Working primarily from the inside of an old farmhouse turned into a musical experimentation laboratory, Armand frantically and intuitively conducts sounds + music as an electronic wizard and sound alchemist, surrounded by cords, patches, sensors, pedals, keyboards, and more. Armand’s work is a further exploration of the Golden Age of Sonic Exploration of the 1960’s and 1970’s, pushing the boundaries of tape manipulation, synthesizers, free improvisation, and countercultural composition. Some landmark, experimental albums from the 1960’s immediately come to mind—Terry Riely- IN C; The Red Crayola- The Parableof Arable Land; Silver Apples, Morton Subotnick- Silver Apples of the Moon; The Roscoe Mitchell Sextet- Sound, and White Noise- An Electric Storm. With Armand’s work, I am immediately drawn to the idea of a cacophonistic poetry of modern life— with its ups and down’s, pulsating drone rhythms, static interruptions, and unexpected crescendos of what might come next. Unnerving and relentless to some, I find it rather soothing and meditative. Welcome to this podcast edition of Inside the ART Mind- To Defy the Laws of Tradition, with Armand Tesla.

An interview with the painter, Christian Rieben, on the evening of his opening reception for the exhibition, Paradise Tossed, on view at the Martin Museum of Art at Baylor University. I sat down with Christian and discussed with him about his influences, inspirations, processes, and more. Rieben's work uses the landscape as a vehicle for storytelling, illustrating and embodying a fantastical world that is a bit Lewis Carroll and a bit Carl Jung. The characters and narratives of this world are a combination of contemporary, political and social discourses, and a mirror for personal situations; intermixing, and planted in a moment of subversive, existential awareness. All in the family, the characters in Rieben's work navigate to an atavistic world that is dark, chaotic, comic, and joyful—a dreamscape of lush imagery and macabre humor. https://www.christianrieben.com

The official trailer and introduction for Inside the ART Mind, hosted by Michael Schuetz.In this trailer episode, I introduce myself and prepare you for a journey into the realm of the mind of the artist.