Tangled is an expansion on the chapbook started by Patrick Shiroishi, aiming to explore Asian American musicians in the experimental and avant-garde scene.

This month's episode features guests Umi Hsu and Alan Nakagawa.

Umi Hsu (pronouns: they/them) was born in Taipei and moved to Virginia at age twelve. Hsu is a trans nonbinary sound artist, musician, and writer whose practice is driven by inquiries about sound and migratory communities. Working to create social change through sound, Hsu leads LA Listens, a community engagement project on LA’s changing sonic and social ecology; and mobile placemaking collective Movable Parts. They also perform and write songs about the melancholic postcolony in their LA-based ghost pop band Bitter Party.

Alan Nakagawa is an interdisciplinary artist with archiving tendencies, primarily working with sound, often incorporating various media and working with communities and their histories. He has created a series of Invisible Architecture experiences that are mash ups of the recorded acoustics of historical sites, giving new context to historic places through a contemporary lens of sound. Nakagawa is currently the Artist-in-residence for two institutions. 1) Kaya Press at the University of Southern California, a small literary publication focusing on Asian and Pacific Islander American and Diasporic literature celebrating its 30th Anniversary and 2) the Gerth Archives, California State University Dominguez Hills assigned to the National Coalition for Redress and Reparations collections, which consists of materials pertaining to the campaign that led to the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. His first book, “A.I.R.Head: Anatomy of an Artist in Residence” was published in January 2023 by Writ-Large Press. It maps his artistic trajectory that led to his nine Artist-in-residencies in six years.