This interview was originally broadcast over the KALX airwaves on December 8, 2025.
Velvet Einstein: You’re listening to KALX Berkeley. We’re here with Thomas Kotcheff and you’ve got an amazing new album out, along with Brian Curt Costers, called Between Systems. Let me try and describe it and you can kind of correct me, but the way I interpret it is…so it’s piano, synthesizers, and, and live audio processing of reworkings of classic piano pieces. Is that a good summary?
Thomas Kotcheff: Reworkings feels correct. But with the caveat that we did not change a single note of John Cage or Morton Feldman’s music. So the piano parts are played exactly as they had written it, and we have added to that synth landscaping and additional levels of audio processing to be with those original piano parts.
Velvet Einstein: Logistically, how is that all plugged in? So you’ve got a piano there, and then the output is going through these other systems?
Thomas Kotcheff: Brian and I wanted to focus on some sort of different element of audio processing and, uh, synthesis. And so some of the pieces we are running, the piano mics direct through a modular synth that’s processing the audio live. Some, the piano part is as is and we’re adding to it extra synth layers. And the audio is just of, the piano is of the piano, so each one is kind of a bit different. And sometimes we brought those two things together to create an amalgamation between piano, process piano and added synthesizer.
Velvet Einstein: What was the origins of this project? How did you decide that this is something you wanted to work on?
Thomas Kotcheff: This project began with Brian and I both being doctoral students at USC where we were both pursuing our doctorates in music composition. And while there, I immediately clocked that Brian was pursuing and practicing a different form of composition than anyone else.
To me, it felt like he was 10 years ahead of everyone else there, because what he was doing 10 years ago, his exploration of synths, analog synths, and bringing that into his concert music and combining that with live performances, feels like what’s happening right now at USC. And he was the only one doing it 10 years ago.
Thomas Kotcheff: And we became fast friends and our friendship was actually really based upon a love of art. And we went to see a lot of avant-garde films together on the weekends, uh, including The Visitors. We, we just loved music and film and art, and we would share our passions together and through our friendship, I said to Brian, let’s work on some music together. Let’s, what do you, what do you wanna do?
And he knew I was a pianist and I was playing. So he wrote a piece for my piano duo called Hocket at the time that involved tons of synthesizers and audio processing and, and live piano for hands. And the music box was on stage, like tons of bells and whistles. And immediately both him and my brains were turning like, this is cool. Like synth and piano, what we can offer to this, to this combination, felt like it was something that excited us both. We knew it wasn’t just ours, but we felt excited by the possibilities of it.
COVID happened and I said, Brian, do you wanna write a piece for me in synths? COVID started ending. I flew to visit him in Michi, uh, Missoula, where he is on faculty. And I flew there with the intention of us working on more collaborative pieces together, and we’re still under the, um, under the guise that we’re gonna write original work for each other. And when I was there for that week, we collaborated on two original works for piano, plus synth and processing, the end of 2021.
That kind of sat for a while, and then we were talking about an album. Now we were like, “Hey, we should, we should do something together”. We should really put, you know, take our ideas and make something. And we then started gathering ideas not just like repertoire, what to play or ideas for compositions, but also like just colors.
Aphex Twin being a color, like some of Aphex’s synths, Squarepusher. Tracks and ideas that we loved and we brought ’em all to a playlist, including works we might wanna play together. Included like Bach. And we were talking about all sorts of random things and I, ideas just, it was a real free for all brainstorming kind of playlist.
And from this whole playlist, Brian and I always knew that John Cage’s In a Landscape was a piece we wanted to record. The piece just seems so ready to have a landscape of synths brought behind it. And so that was always like a cornerstone piece for us. And then as we were discussing things to go with it, we just found more and more Cage and Feldman and those two are obviously always paired together ’cause of their great friendship when they were alive.
That just kind of felt like the album was slowly merging onto Cage and Feldman through our process. And then by the time we got to the studio, the album was gonna be exclusively John Cage and Morton Feldman.
Velvet Einstein: And then thinking about the, In a Landscape, So to me, that piece…there’s a lot of space in it, and there’s like the, the sustain from the piano. Was that something that you were getting at there? So rather than like sustaining the piano, now you’ve got this magical synth, right? That comes off of the, of the hitting the piano key.
Thomas Kotcheff: You nailed it. Yes. Is the answer. Yeah. The piece is…so I think incredible because it says in the beginning, hold the pedal down the whole time. Most pianos when they play the piece don’t really do that. They do some sort of really elegant, like up and down of the pedal, releasing some of the resonance, holding onto some, like just controlling it a bit. And so Brian and I said, well, what would it be like if we took this idea of resonance? And just blew it up a bit into synth world.
What would it sound like? What would it be like? What would it mean? There’s an element that I love that Brian brought this whole album, which he brought in John Cage’s Indeterminacy uh, into it, Chance Music by making some of the synths. We do use Chance Operations. So even though he, he has pre-programmed the, the modular rack, we’re always not a hundred percent sure what it’s gonna do. And as we…and that the In a Landscape was one of the pieces we tracked live in the studio with the synth and the piano, like fully recorded live. Brian is live like turning knobs on the synthesizer as I’m playing it, to adjust the parameters of the chance operations. So he himself is like the pedal and he’s controlling the resonance of the synths through the whole performance.
Velvet Einstein: Is he controlling it in response to the randomness or just to make it even more random?
Thomas Kotcheff: He’s, he’s, uh, responding to the randomness. Or the chance operations. So if all of a sudden, like I play something and it starts to like reverberate and ring out, he’s like turning it down and adjusting it. It’s parameters to again, play it live in a way. And it’s really cool because when I hear that piece played it. To me feels live because I know we did it live. Everything about it’s live. The piano and the synths are done…all done live.
Musical Interlude
Velvet Einstein: And then the other tracks on the album… are those completely pre-programmed then, and then it’s just up to you to play it live?
Thomas Kotcheff: Every single one of ’em does have an element that we took. We tracked live in the studio some more than others. Half the album is fully tracked live. Like just, we recorded it together. He was playing live synth, I was playing live. Pianos all done. But an important part of the process of this album is we decided it is gonna be a studio album. It’s gonna be produced. So the next phase was Brian taking our live recordings to his studio and working on them. Adding more things to it, processing more of the audio, and then that internally into another dialogue between us about, ooh, how about this moment here?
Could we add more things to that moment there? And you put somewhere, okay, let’s turn this and let’s change that. And again, this ongoing back and forth between us that had been going on for almost a year at that point on this album, continued once using the studio, working on it, and, and fine tuning things.
Velvet Einstein: And then you mentioned a moment ago about Aphex Twin and Squarepusher. So how did that tie into this? So were you trying to make a an EDM album, um, of that sort or were you more just using that like as an influence because you liked that soundscape?
Thomas Kotcheff: What I loved about working with Brian so much on our collaboration was we spent a lot of time upfront kind of discussing our influences and what we loved. Both Brian and I worked the same way in that we like to define our aesthetic by what we love. Not what we don’t like, you know? So it’s like, I love this. Oh, I love that. Oh, that’s so good. Oh, that’s great. Like just really a lot of positive artistic energy and it felt like we had spent so much time on the, we’ll call it R&D phase, just talking about what we loved about what this album could be like and what our collaboration could be like.
And plus we had done, already done four collaborations up to this point that were original works. We got into the studio, start recording, and it didn’t feel like we had to like do much. Well, what, what’s next? Or what, what should this be like? It felt like we were just kinda like on a trajectory of, I would play a part of like the Feldman Nature Piece One, and he would, he would pull out, uh, some sort of pedal or synth that goes with it. Oh, that’s really cool. Yeah. Yeah. That’s, that’s right. That’s right. I’d be, well, what should it be? A little bit more of this? I’ll offer an idea like, yeah. So he pulls another thing out and we build this idea together. And the influences of Aphex Twin and Squarepusher, were always there, and from the beginning, because we already talked about that stuff, we love to do. Philip Glass as well.
I mean, Philip Glass is one of the first concert composers to really bring in the synthesizer to the concert hall, and it feels like it’s just beautifully aligned with the aesthetic. So like we just were riding that same wave, you know, of influences in our work and with no discussion of what it should be or shouldn’t be.
Velvet Einstein: And there’s a wonderful arc to like the sounds that come through. So you’ve got, in the Nature Piece One, there’s like a nice kind of cacophony there. And then, and then the second one, there’s a beautiful, like, it sounds like a video game of like a choo choo choo sound. And then by the fourth piece, then you kind of mellow things out.
Was that an an intentional arc that you were going for or, or did that tie back, was that something that you heard in, in Feldman’s original pieces?
Thomas Kotcheff: Good question. When we were going through each of the tracks and each of the movements, Brian and I were really aware of what it meant to create a multi movement work.We always wanted our interpretation of these pieces to reflect the music. We only see what we’re doing as some sort of explosion or zooming in and on Feldman and Cage. So the answer is yes. We believe that we are just doing what we see on the page and doing it to an exponential amount higher than we normally be with just the piano.
At the same time, we also wanted on the tech side that each movement, including the John Cage and the… but, but the Feldman specifically, that every movement featured a different element of synthesis. So each track has a synth that only appears on that one track. And that was more for our own edification that we knew that there, we were carving some space for it.
And obviously you, you heard it too a bit that on Nature Piece Four, that’s quite lyrical and it’s where the Lyra 8 plays is this synth that only appears in that one track. And I think limiting ourselves as artists to this idea made each the creation process have this uniqueness for each track.
Musical Interlude
Velvet Einstein: And then as you performed these, you obviously knew that the synth sort were hooked up. Do you think that you would’ve performed it differently if you were just trying to play the original piece?
Thomas Kotcheff: I am performing the original works, uh, in two months from now, on Morton Feldman’s Centenary. We’re doing a big here in Los Angeles, a big, uh, um, marathon concert, two days of all of his keyboard works. Um, and I’m playing the original major pieces and the original intermissions. So when performing this piece live, you know, Brian and I, we believe that there’s the studio album and the live version, and we really wanted that the live version is different than the studio album, meaning I as an artist want to give you a reason why you heard me play it live.
And if for some reason you’ve memorized my performance on the album, you came to the concert, it’d be something totally different and you were there that day to see us play it totally differently. And that to me is why I love live music is the joy of also hearing mistakes. Like you get to be part of those mistakes. You are in that room when the mistakes happen.
When Brian and I were taking these pieces to concert, we started thinking ourselves, well what would it mean to play at this piece live? You know, what elements do we build in the studio? What elements do we track live? How can we translate this? Also, how can we make it different?
And a good example is on Nature Piece Four, which is a zippy minute and a half on most performances. We did it live in concert. We did four minutes on it. We just felt like it could be cool to play it with a couple repeats and add some more synth and draw out the pads and make a version that if you’re there that day, you got to hear the four minute version of Nature Piece Four.
Velvet Einstein: And so to make it four minutes. So, so you mentioned some repeats. Is that also just playing it slower?
Thomas Kotcheff: No, we didn’t play it slower. We, uh, we put in repeats. We added some more moments where a synth would have a big shining part in the middle, and we actually added, Brian took a solo in the middle on a synth, uh, not a crazy one, but like a, in the style of. And yeah, just, you know, one of my big influences for me personally has always been Frederick Rzewski, amazing composer, pianist, improviser. And this is someone who truly believed in live performance. I love that about him and about what I do is that if you come to hear me on a Tuesday and I play kind of poorly, well then you heard me on a Tuesday, I played kind of poorly.You know, I’m not gonna strike that from the record, you know, I’m not gonna, you know, withdraw that performance. Like that’s what you heard that one day. And that’s, in a way, it’s also kind of beautiful.
Velvet Einstein: Yeah. From the, from the press release for the album, there was discussion of the notion of modern music and how it’s different from pop music and that there is like a notion of like how something’s supposed to be performed. That you’re supposed to do it to the perfect note. It sounds like you, you don’t agree with, with that notion that, that we should kind of shake things up in, in modern classical music. Right?
Thomas Kotcheff: Yeah, I mean, I think it depends on why you’re going to the concert hall. For me, as an audience member, when I go to the concert hall, I want to hear the artist. I’m not looking for them to recreate the piece for me. I wanna hear them play the piece for me the way they want to do it, the way that’s them and their interpretation. A lot of our audience, most, some of them may be older, they go to hear a piece recreated for them, and that’s for them. That’s okay. But for my personal aesthetic and what I want to promote in my artistry, is it’s almost irrelevant on what you’re hearing me play that day. You’ve come to see me do it, and you come to see me, how I do it. And if you’re not there that day, you won’t see how I do it. You won’t know how I do it ’cause there’s no way of understanding it unless you’re seeing me live do it.
Velvet Einstein: And I think it, it, it’s interesting that in this day and age where, where we’re so exposed to prerecorded media and now you’ve got gigantic stadiums with the jumbotron.Like, I’ll go to one of those concerts or I’ll watch it on TV and I just think, well, are they actually performing? Like you don’t know. And if, if they screwed up, it would be so much better for me.
Thomas Kotcheff: We know how much tech can aid a performance quite simply, and I think we all want that human quality more than anything else. To go back to your previous question, a bit about older works. Let’s say you’re performing Beethoven. What does it mean to play Beethoven? Are we just trying to recreate how Beethoven would’ve done it, or are we trying to recreate it, how it would’ve been done by the great Beethoven performers, or we’re trying to modernize it?
You know, these are great questions that every artist should be asking themselves before they take Beethoven to stage. And that’s all that I want from my belief system in my, and my aesthetic is that I, I am challenging other artists to also ask the same questions. Why are we playing these pieces?
What does it mean to play these pieces and how are we playing them? Especially if they’re our old ones, you know? And I would consider John Cage and Morton Feldman old because these are old pieces that have been played a lot and recorded a lot. So why are we playing these pieces and what, who are they for and how do we wanna do them?
Velvet Einstein: And did you think at all of, well, I think of Wendy Carlos right? In the work with Bach and the synthesizer. Was that something that crossed your mind in this at all?
Thomas Kotcheff: When Brian and I were, were looking at this album and discussing different ways we could go about it, we pulled a lot of influences of people who had done air quotes, remix albums, and just trying to decide, well, what are we doing? And we never viewed this album as a remix album. We always saw ourselves as performers interpreting this music. The best analogy I can use is if we are going to go play Bach on the piano. Well, Bach never had a piano, so what does it mean to play it on the piano? In the modern era, we add dynamics quite simply.
We actually add quite a lot that were never there. Would Bach have freaked out if he’d heard his music with that much dynamics on it? It’s hard to know. But when you’re the interpreter and you’re going to translate his music to his instrumentation, you make some choices that are beautiful choices.
And we see the same process for this album and John Cage and Morton Feldman being brought to an interpretation that involves synthesizers filling in Morton Feldman silences with pads, synth and, and, you know, synthesizer beats, maybe it would’ve freaked him out and offended him. Maybe he would’ve loved it. It’s hard to tell. But for us, we just see it as an interpretation and taking that music into this interpretation.
Velvet Einstein: Wonderful. Thomas, thank you so much for, for taking the time to speak with us. In terms of upcoming performances, any plans to come up to the Bay Area?
Thomas Kotcheff: There’s a few things I can’t quite say yet on the record, but uh, I’m sure I will be there in the near future.
Velvet Einstein: Okay, great. Wonderful. Well, thanks again.
Thomas Kotcheff: Hi, I’m Thomas Kotcheff, pianist and composer, and we’re listening to KALX Berkeley.
