Preston Swirnoff is a musician, composer and sound artist who’s released over 30 albums with numerous bands, collaborators and as solo projects.
He’s recently been commissioned to compose work for the Plein Soleil festival in Corsica, the Singapore Biennale and the Scent Art Festival in Riga, Latvia. His sound art and compositions have been exhibited at Tate Modern, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MACBA in Barcelona, MOMA PS1 in New York City, Niterói Contemporary Art Museum in Rio de Janeiro, and elsewhere throughout the globe.
Though he’s toured and performed extensively throughout Europe, Asia and South America, for the past 35 years he’s made San Diego his home. During the 1990s, he was a fixture in San Diego’s vibrant punk scene, and since, his music has spanned contemporary classical, art rock, experimental, Brazilian folk, jazz and sound art.
I sat down with Preston in his Mission Hills home to discuss his music.
You have a new piano record coming out in 2027. What’s it sound like?
I’m working in the tradition of repetition, minimalism and rhythmic playing, but also weaving in some minor chord romantic/classical melody within it. So instead of this upbeat major key Terry Riley thing, who I love, don’t get me wrong, I injected something that was a little darker and closer to my roots—Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Scriabin and the Russian pianists. But then appropriating that for a more avant-garde style of piano.
Many musicians have a particular genre they’re known for, but your music is so diverse. What accounts for that?
It always felt really natural to me that if you’re a musician or an artist you would have a palette that’s broad because you would want to explore the different areas of your craft. I think it’s weirder to stay in one lane because your curiosity guides you as you age. We go through phases in life and we get into different things, and I trusted myself to know where the best direction would be and didn’t really overthink it too much.
You’re noted for site-specific compositions, and you did a piece for the Silo Room in Barrio Logan. Tell me more about that.
Bread & Salt used to be a bread factory about a hundred years ago. And as soon as I saw these huge, fifty-foot-tall grain silos that have this really long reverb, and the strange shape of the room they were in—it’s a little bit claustrophobic—I knew it would have really interesting acoustics to work with for singing with no amplification. Just the natural reverb would be enough.
I was at that show. You played organ and the singers moved throughout the room.
Yes, I’m always looking to break out of the traditional concert venue model. It’s visually and acoustically very interesting to have them move around during the performance. In sets of two, I had them singing directly into the silo tanks and then slowly walk out through the audience. I was using the space itself in the composition like another instrument. And the organ mixed really well with the voices because of the acoustics in the room. I found this churchy quality of the organ with the voices that was really evocative for me.
Did you use a local choir?
Yeah, that made it special and more of a community-based thing, which I really like doing. They’re called the San Diego New Verbal Workshop. They’re a collection of local musicians and singers who perform experimental and avant-garde music. I gave them the score and they rehearsed at USD (University of San Diego). My piece was unconventional in the way it uses duration, extended tones and plays with harmony in ways that a conventional choir would find challenging, but I knew they would totally get it.
How has San Diego influenced your music?
It’s been totally formative because the first bands I was in were in Mission Beach, where I played in punk bands as a teenager and in my early 20s. The wild freedom of skateboarding, surfing, punk and youth culture in California was a huge influence on me. It was that DIY culture where everyone had their own label and zine. That’s the ethos and undercurrent still in everything I do. I learned about music from watching all these incredible San Diego bands in the ’90s like Drive Like Jehu, Tanner, Fishwife, No Knife and Boilermaker. Everyone knows these bands if they’re into underground music because San Diego was such a hub. I got so lucky to spend my 20s going to the Casbah, the Che Café, and the World Beat Center seeing all these homegrown bands that were so original. They didn’t sound like anyone else—we had our own sound.
