This Voidwave episode features a fascinating conversation with composer and musician Sasha Langford. It takes place in Krakow, Poland during the 7th annual contemporary, activist Jewish art festival: FestivALT. Taking place in an apartment located in the busy Jewish quarter – Kazimierz , Sasha dives deep into the ways her compositions connect with her relationship to Jewish cantorial singing and her Yiddish and Eastern European heritage. She discusses embodied prayer, ‘deep Jewish listening’ and ways she honors her ancestors through her musical compositions.

Sasha Langford is a musician and composer based on occupied xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ territories, also known as Vancouver, BC. Sasha employs sampling, field recordings, and digital and analog synthesis to create rhythmically-oriented and spatially-sensitive compositions. In her collaborations with choreographers and media artists, as well as her solo live performance practice, she is curious about the way that listening can produce expanded possibilities for embodied and relational attunement, particularly from a diasporist Jewish perspective. Sasha’s work has been presented at FestivALT (Kraków, PL), Lines of Flight Festival of Experimental Music (Dunedin, New Zealand), Ende Tymes (Brooklyn, NY), Suoni Per Il Popolo (Montreal), Big Joy Experimental Arts Festival (Vancouver, BC), and the International Noise Conference (Miami, FL), among other venues.

Voidwave is a web of experimental voices, sounds, and interviews with a focus on work by femme, gender non-conforming, and queer folx. Embedded in these sound practices are rebelliousness and longing, hunger for new subversive futures, irreverence, determined perseverance, political potency, uncompromising processes, and includes a celebration of lineages that spans across time and the globe. Voidwave is a 2-hour radio show that features work from artists who use experimental sound and music, performance, field recording, spoken word, sound art, sound poetics, and other disobedient audio speculations – adventures into sound and conversations with the people who made them.

Voidwave is a collaboration by multidisciplinary artists Melissa Vogley Woods in Ohio, Liz Roberts in Berkeley, and Kim Zumpfe and Katya Urban in Los Angeles, with occasional guest collaborators and hosts. Voidwave was formed by Melissa, Liz, and Gina Osterloh.