Shadows

I've long admired Brooklyn-based Alec Goldfarb's music and extraordinary musicianship and it's a pleasure to give him space to speak about his latest release Shadows, inspired by the traditions of shadow puppetry, on Which Sinfonia. You can listen to and purchase the album on Bandcamp and read all about it from Alec below.

– Anna Heflin

Edited transcription of a conversation between Alec Goldfarb, Elliot Cole (Long Echo Records), and Jan Esbra (Guitarist and Composer) on Zoom in mid June, 2025.

Elliot Cole: This record really sounds like the result of an adventure. I’d love for you to tell us the story.

Alec Goldfarb: The long arc is my study of Indian classical music, which I’ve been engaged with for many years. Alongside that has always been a question that’s driven me: “How do I move this music into new contexts—combine it with other sound worlds in a way that feels genuine?” For a long time, that was a hard question to answer.

I began looking into the musical histories of Southeast Asia, where Indian classical music had already entered other ecosystems centuries ago. That was my entry point—seeing these traditions as shaped, in part, by Indian influence. But once I started listening closely, what hooked me wasn’t the historical connection, but their internal logic, their beauty, their uniqueness. I fell in love with the musics themselves.

I encountered ideas of a pan-Southeast Asian classical tradition—music from Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar, and beyond that shares formal traits despite linguistic, cultural, and geographic differences. I started reading scholarship, listening deeply, and eventually, I knew I had to go. My first trip was exploratory—I met musicians, took lessons, ate incredible food. The second trip, funded by a jazz tour, was more focused. I had a sense of direction, and those relationships deepened.

Jan Esbra: How did you meet the musicians who appear on the record?

Alec: In Indonesia, a key collaborator was Dion Nataraja—a Bay Area-based composer and leader of Ensemble Sandikala, a Jogja-based experimental gamelan group. He knew of my interest in tuning and timbre and offered access to his custom-built instruments. That connection led me to Yusti Paradigma Umar, who plays gendèr; Roni Driyastoto, the rebab player; and Agnesia Nandasari Nuringtyas, the sindhen (singer).

In Thailand, I met Kengchakaj Kenkarna, a brilliant pianist from Bangkok who’s now based in New York. We initially crossed paths in the jazz world, but he has also studied piphat—Thai classical court music. He pointed me to a lot of great things to explore. And beyond these connections, I dug deep into every way I could think of to hear and learn these musics. I posted in Thai classical music Facebook groups and eventually found Teewin Houyhongtong, who taught me piphat and I focused my studies on Saw-U, a Thai bowed string instrument.

In Indonesia, I found it miraculously easy to find gamelan, jathilan, degung, and more. But in many other places, it can actually be quite difficult to access classical and folk musics—there’s just been vast changes over the last century, from loss of patronage, institutional shifts, cultural devaluation, war, and more. So part of the adventure was just locating the music. Sometimes in hilarious ways—like going to a show in Saigon expecting traditional cai luong and getting EDM with sparkly costumes. But then that same evening I stumbled upon a water puppet theater nearby—and the accompanying music, played live, was breathtaking.

Jan: You gathered source material from across the region. How did those influences shape your compositions?

Alec: Rather than calling them “sources,” I think of them as shared artistic strategies- especially the idea of shadow puppetry as a cross-cultural practice. Many of these regions stage epics like versions of the Ramayana through performance traditions that involve music, movement, masks, and narration. The thematic links—ritual, transformation, cosmology—gave me a conceptual thread to work with.

Musically, you start to hear similarities: heterophony, timbral/functional distinctions, rhythmic cycles that spiral and double and halve themselves. It felt natural to braid those ideas together.

Elliot: What instruments are featured on the album?

Alec: The album was recorded half in Southeast Asia and half in New York. From my NY scene, I brought in Steven Crammer on drums, Gideon Forbes on saxophone and nay, DoYeon Kim on Gayageum, and Matt Muntz on bass. Then there are traditional instruments: gender (a metallophone), rebab (a bowed two-string spike lute), and others.

Rebab is heavily featured on a track called “Rebab Consort”. The rebab usually serves an accompaniment function, trailing the voice heterophonically, echoing its movements in gamelan music. But it’s a gorgeous instrument, and whenever a piece features it solo, that is my favorite part. I thought it would be interesting to recontextualize it with polyphony and harmony, something I imagined akin to a viol consort. Roni and I worked on that together, mostly coming out of the Indonesian modes pelog and slendro.

Indonesia posed some recording constraints, especially for the last two pieces, Trancing and Epilogue, which feature a larger ensemble of all three Indonesian collaborators. I didn’t know how Dion’s custom gendèr was tuned, which he calls Gendèr Sandikala. I was thinking, “How am I going to write a piece for something if I don’t know the notes!”

So on day one in Jogja, I took voice memos of every bar on the gendèr, went home that night, and transcribed every note using Helmholtz-Ellis microtonal notation to try to conceive of all the accidentals and relationships. Over the next few days I wrote a skeleton for a piece that was actually quite different from what ended up on the record—we recorded the skeleton, and I ended up rearranging things and moving them around in the DAW to make the final pieces.

Jan: Was the music in Indonesia heavily notated?

Alec: Gamelan has its own notational system, which I was starting to learn. But because of the time constraints, I brought parts in Western notation. Yusti did a fantastic job with it. We worked section by section, and then we brought in Agnes. I’d sing a modal fragment from pelog or slendro with the correct fundamental (since the music I’d written had moving harmonies), and from there we’d develop something together, and the end result is mostly all her with my direction. She listened to my ideas for the piece and decided to sing lyrics in High Javanese that talk about birth and death cycles. I thought that was really beautiful and in turn inspired choices I made about the arrangement. I also told her I might chop up and rearrange her takes in the DAW, which meant the words might not be in the original orders, and she was game.

Jan: I’m curious about your compositional voice—the “Alecness”—throughout this record and your previous record Fire Lapping. There’s a lot of strange time cycles and grit that emerge suddenly. Steven is a great drummer, really accenting those moments clearly. These records come from very different contexts: Fire Lapping sounds like a very bluesy record despite its abstraction, and Shadows shimmers with an alien, unfamiliar quality but locks into perfect grooves in strange ways. How did you find your voice as a composer through this process?

Alec: I think of it like playing concert music (as a performer interpreting someone else’s composition): you can play someone else’s notes, but it still sounds like you, and that’s the beauty of it. Both records I deal with traditions I admire and feel connected to, but I filter them through my sensibilities. What draws me in? What creates friction or resonance with what I already know? Are there through lines narratively? Historically? Endless questions.

Some tracks, like Trancing, Epilogue, Rebab Consort, were arranged mostly in the DAW. The rest of the album was mostly through-composed in standard notation, with the exception of Ghi-ta. In some places, like on Mask (the single), Agnes overdubbed parts over a through-composed piece. In the studio, I’d say, “Here’s the mode, try singing this kind of melody,” guiding but not strictly directing.

Jan: I’m also curious about your guitar approach, which seems to bridge the New York scene, known for complex, mathy playing, and the more traditional approach you’re using. How is guitar learned in Southeast Asia? Is it oral or written?

Alec: Definitely oral for the lessons I took. In my piphat lessons, there was some notation too. My guitar playing is very specific to me and the result of how I’ve approached Indian classical music, Jazz, New music, and all kinds of things.

Jan: Did you have to rethink your guitar approach to make this music work?

Alec: I learned a lot putting this record together. There’s a Vietnamese guitar tradition that I relate to on the track “Ghi-ta” feat. DoYeon Kim. The guitar is heavily detuned, with a scalloped neck. The playing sounds like a magic trick—the bends, ornaments, wide and fast oscillations on many notes, big scoops from below—a rich palette that influenced me deeply. I still use these techniques today. I love that sound, and I see it connected to Indian classical music and other string traditions I’m interested in.

The track with DoYeon Kim references that tradition—it’s a recomposition based on her studio improvisation, paired with harmonic structures I wrote in response.

Elliot: Would you say your guitar imitates other instruments?

Alec: Yes, constantly. In my pre-concert talks for Hindustani classical concerts, I often demonstrate and say one goal is to bring the sounds of other instruments into the guitar—phrases that sound like nadaswaram, sitar, sarangi, etc. That approach is evident throughout the record, and the other instruments often function as different instruments too. On Relics, the melody is played by two soprano saxophones (both played by Gideon Forbes) in a deliberately unstable relationship, inspired by the Lanna region’s funeral music—two quadruple-reed instruments called Pi harmonizing in a way that’s beautiful and almost cubist. When recording, I asked Gideon to emphasize a reedy tone with ornamentation. Really to everyone recording, I said something similar: it’s fascinating how much innovation comes from “translation” or mapping one shape onto another where it doesn’t quite fit, and finding what does. That’s the history of music, and it’s endlessly inspiring and very generative for me.

Elliot: I love that idea. At the start of the project, you researched Southeast Asian folk and classical traditions and Indianization—the spread of Indian culture via sailors and merchants starting around the first century C.E., which influenced the region musically and culturally. You mentioned “shape onto another shape” translation—is that part of the same creative process?

Alec: Yes, it is. That’s always one of my favorite things to listen for—meeting points between vastly different places in music. Studying the history of Indian cultural influence helped me recognize not just aesthetic links, but also conceptual ones—modal hierarchies, extramusical associations, spiritual frameworks. Tuning was especially revealing.

Jan: That’s very cool. I wanted to ask about your process of taking raw materials and rebuilding them in the DAW. Is that something you’d done before or was it necessary here to get the sounds you wanted?

Alec: It was partly necessity and partly the right timing. I was getting interested in learning mixing and spending more time in DAWs, taking some lessons. Like everyone, I go through phases. At that time I was writing guitar and voice songs—I don’t really do that now, so that’s past tense. For me, the process reminded me of being 13 and using GarageBand—it was fun and reawakened a different joy.

Elliot: I’m thinking about the aesthetic experience for a first-time listener. The album is wild—when I first heard it, it felt like my hair was on fire. It’s so stimulating. We haven’t really talked about tuning yet, but there’s this intense, fresh, strange relationship of every note against every other note. Instruments and singing styles we haven’t heard before. I find I have to choose one element at a time and be with it.

There’s rhythmic density, tonality, unfamiliar instruments, just sheer intensity. It’s a very sensitive but also very intense album. For a first-time listener, what do you hope they experience? I’d also love to hear about the tuning.

Alec: I don’t know why it made me think of this, but when I was 17 and first learning Indian classical music, a raga would be introduced as romantic or something else. At that moment, it felt so far from my concept of romance- Maybe I’d imagined romance as a longing diatonic melody lingering on the four chord (laughter). But this raga I was learning was this melodic minor melody with lots of chromatic and microtonal touches—a completely different sound of romance.

It’s one of the richest things to encounter someone else’s version of something familiar: what is a romantic gesture? How do we celebrate the dead? How do we give praise or ask something of the almighty? Maybe my record isn’t as lofty as those ideas, but I was inspired by that idea. So for a first-time listener, maybe it’s approaching those familiar feelings but in a new way.

I’m too deep in it to be objective, but one text that helped frame my thinking—both for Fire Lapping and Shadows—was the Rutledge Handbook of Southeast Asian Music. The editors write in the preface that Southeast Asian music can feel very bracing or intense to many Westerners, with a different timbral and tuning palette, musical rhetoric, time cycles, and development. It’s quite far from, say, listening to a Beethoven sonata.

Elliot: Why don’t you talk about the tuning? Tell us about it technically and about your aesthetic motivations.

Alec: I love tuning—it’s one of the core expressive aspects of my music (of all music? Who knows) and has many worlds in it. It’s indispensable to me. Traditionally, tuning in Hindustani classical music is very specific, as your teacher teaches you. But it has a very different tuning flavor than most Southeast Asian musics, which sound very microtonal by comparison. But ragas as these melodic frameworks interface with the idea of mode in SE Asia in a rich way. Across Southeast Asia, similar modal concepts exist: pitch hierarchies, ascending/descending forms, extra-musical associations like time of day or religious meaning. But again, the tuning characteristics vary widely. That inspired me.

I responded to tuning systems across Southeast Asia, dealing with them in different ways depending on constraints. I didn’t do scientific analysis of each tradition or instrument’s tuning because tuning is usually variable in these traditions. Instead, my pieces are in 22 equal temperament, or just intonation, or quarter tones, whatever suited the material.

One piece, the bonus track Lullaby, is a field recording I transcribed in 31 equal temperament because it’s fine-grained enough to capture diverse tunings, but less complex and riddled with associations than just intonation. I wrote an accompaniment that painted the melody satisfyingly.

Elliot: So you set the frame to 31, then freestyle harmonize?

Alec: Exactly. The song already had a form based on lyrics. I harmonized it like you’d do a song—painting sections accordingly.

Elliot: Is it modal music?

Alec: It varies. The strictest mode is on Relics. Maqam influences many of the traditions I touched on in this project due to Islam’s spread in the region. I wanted to create a mode that dealt with various behaviors, and Relics was born out of that. Relics’ mode has a strict up and down with potential for modulation like maqam between tetrachords. It has a pitch hierarchy and can harmonize itself in specific ways. It’s the most constructed mode on the record.

Other pieces on the record have different versions of the same mode happening simultaneously, as is the case in much of the music I was interested in from SE Asia. For example, in Thai classical music, the ranat plays a skeleton melody loosely in seven equal temperament (not universally agreed). The reed instrument elaborates the melody in its own tuning. I love that simultaneous variation. Same thing with rebab and suling (bowed string instrument and flute), which oftentimes play in a slightly different tuning system on top of the gamelan.

Elliot: One last question: you described the project as a way of listening more deeply. How has this album changed how you listen to other music or the world?

Alec: Being thoughtful and curious means hearing the history of something. That’s how I interface with the world. I love history.

This project was a big lesson: not just appreciating beauty or novelty, but asking what’s the history here? What can I hear?

Like Fire Lapping [at the Creek], history is often hidden, and much of it is a guessing game. You can make educated guesses, but the best is listening closely to the music and what it tells you. There are markers about places, communities, and ideas embedded in music. This project taught me about that.