"When I was younger, I read The Bad Boy of Music by [composer George] Antheil, and it was the most interesting book by a composer I'd ever read," he recalls. "It's a scream! And then I looked around for his music, and there wasn't anything really available. And I got annoyed.
"I like to make up my own mind. And if I can't hear the music, I can't figure out if the guy was a genius or if he was full of hot air. And I thought to myself, 'I've got to rectify this.' And that's what I set out to do."
Betty Freeman
New music icon Terry Riley is frequently credited with
introducing minimalism and repetition to Western
music.
John Fago
Jazz clarinetist Don Byron and then-unknown (but now
Oscar-winning) composer Tan Dun at an artists'
retreat in the days before the 1995 Other Minds
Festival.
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If Amirkhanian and Other Minds have their way, everyone who wants to hear the sort of music they deal in will be able to, via an ambitious Web radio project. Sounds Like Tomorrow will feature Webcasts of present and past Other Minds festivals. Also, the organization recently purchased the archives of Amirkhanian's KPFA tenure, more than 6,000 hours of weird-music talk and performances covering almost every significant musician in the far-flung new music genre.
Spearheading this unprecedented project in weird music, appropriately, is Frank Zappa's former secretary.
Susan Rubio met Amirkhanian during the early 1980s, not long after she'd left a Los Angeles law firm to work as a sort of executive assistant to the scatterbrained Zappa, who needed help finishing a book and an album. Later, Zappa trusted her to coordinate auditions, manage record releases, and work with his management office. Amirkhanian wanted to interview Zappa -- who was nothing if not musically weird -- and Rubio set it up.
After Zappa's 1993 death, Rubio wound up at Reel.com, an Internet site devoted to film. But as the dot-com bubble began to deflate, she read a review of the Other Minds Festival. She got in touch with Amirkhanian and started working for his organization as a Web consultant.
In its current, bare-bones form, the Other Minds Web site (Otherminds.org) offers downloads of only a few performances and photos from past festivals. Still, even though Other Minds hasn't begun marketing it, the site serves up more than 1 million page views each month to listeners in as many as 30 countries.
Rubio, who says she grew up listening to Tom Petty and never totally warmed to much of Zappa's catalog, admits she has a hard time getting excited about the music Other Minds supports. "I'm definitely not one of those fervent fans we're trying to reach," she says. "If I didn't work here, I'm not sure I'd listen to this stuff. I mean, there are some of these concerts I've gone to where I'll just wince. I assume I just don't get it because I'm not a musician."
But she says she can't help but be influenced by the passion her co-workers feel for the music. She recalls a few marketing meetings before the festival this March, shortly after Other Minds had decided to advertise on a classical music station.
"Charles talked to their program director about playing some of this music, and they said they just couldn't because it would alienate a lot of their audience," she says. "And he said,'Well, I'm paying a lot for my advertising, and it's a big event in the city. Don't you want to expose your listeners to something interesting?' And they said, 'No.' There was this sense where Charles just kind of said, 'Shit, man.'
"Because we realized that there really aren't many places to hear this music. If we don't do it, maybe nobody will."
