Name: Pidgins
Members: Milo Tamez, Aaron With
Interviewee: Aaron With
Nationalities: American (Aaron), Mexican (Milo)
Occupations: Sound artist (Aaron), drummer, percussionist (Milo)
Current release: Pidgins's Refrains of the Day, Volume 1 is slated for release on October 29th 2023 via Lexical. First single "Data Driven" is out now.

If you enjoyed this Pidgins interview and would like to find out more about the duo and their music, visit their official homepage. They are also on Instagram. More on Aaron With specifically, can be found on his personal homepage. 

[Read our Milo Tamez interview about Healing with Drums]



Can you talk a bit about your interest in or fascination for sound and what sparked it?

I think I’ve always had a bit of mild anxiety that has released itself through restless finger tapping. I was always tapping on things.

If you tap on enough things, you start to appreciate the different resonant qualities of physical objects. What rings? What thuds? Where in the table are the nodes that come a little closer to a resonant pitch?

As a kid you may not know the words “node” or “resonance”, but you understand the concepts in your fingers.

Where in your body do you experience sound the most? Where do sounds seem to be coming from?

Beyond the aforementioned finger tapping, I involuntarily hum to myself a fair amount throughout the day, usually in loops of a few notes that jump back and forth between head and chest voice. I think my body probably does that subconsciously because shifting that buzzing from chest to head and back is kind of a pleasant internal flossing.

But maybe I’d say the upper palate is the coolest and most mysterious sound spot in the body. I’ll find myself subconsciously testing out quiet click patterns there, and it’s also our formant filter …basically the key to all verbal communication is stored in subconscious muscle memory over that little air pocket there.

It’s funny I don’t think to credit the tongue as much, which is doing all the work. Somehow the hard upper palate is the place where it feels like the sound collects. Cheers to the underappreciated upper palate, one of the better membranes!

Are there places, spaces, or everyday devices which intrigue you by the way they sound? Which are these?

I’ll stay on the mouth theme here and give a shout out to my electric toothbrush! It vibrates at a resonant frequency and I can play with its pitch by changing mouth formants. It’s the same sonic phenomenon as overtone singing, but producing the pitch with the brush instead of the vocal cords. The sonic joy of this brush singing, even more than the benefits of oral hygiene, is what motivates me to maintain good oral hygiene!

I think I subconsciously modeled the vocal sound in “Data Driven” around my brush drone sound, although when brushing I usually incant other dental-themed mantras.

Tell me about some of the records or artists that you love specifically for their sound, please. What makes their approach distinct and how have they influenced your perspective on and way of working with sound.

One of my sound heroes is Jon Hassel. His trumpet playing incorporates vocal formants to achieve a gorgeous singing quality. It’s very organic, yet he’s also using very synthetic effects. But his processing is so refined and completely integrated into his tone and playing style.



His effects and sound decisions are never ornamental—they’re always rooted in clear musical values—his use of music to imagine possible cultures, his embrace of the corporeal qualities of music, etc. I don’t always manage because it takes a lot of discipline, but I aspire to be that clear in my values when making musical decisions, and to only use effects I’m willing to really integrate with the sonic qualities of my instruments.

I have an soft spot for musicians who design their instruments—from Harry Partch to Moondog to Bobby Brown. But maybe the most sublime output by any instrument designer/performer for me is Ellen Fullman, especially In The Sea. You can hear how her lifetime commitment and patience to develop the instrument give her an intimate awareness of its every subtle intricacy.



[Read our Ellen Fullman interview]

Lately I’ve mostly been listening to Central and Southern African field recordings. Among my favorites is !Kung – The Music Of The !Kung Bushmen Of The Kalahari Desert, Africa.



The show stealing feature is the advanced manipulation of circular time structures. But also, the integrity of every sound amazes me with each listen. It’s a beautiful document of a musical lifestyle—where music is so ingrained in daily activity that everyday speech flows into and out of song often without demarcation. They achieve sound qualities that are both technically impressive but also feel almost effortless, like the overtone yodeling that almost feels like breathing.

Maybe the best sound quality is just sheer joy: the effect dancing has on a voice—warbling its pitch and dotting sustains with each bounce. Plus, the bamboo fiddle completely shreds.

We can surround us with sound every second of the day. The great pianist Glenn Gould even considered this the ultimate delight. How do you see that yourself and what importance does silence hold from your point of view?

I think Glenn nailed it there. Obviously, there’s plenty of musical work and borderline spiritual theory about silence. That stuff has never really been for me. I haven’t been in one, but I understand that even in anechoic chambers people just hear their body sounds much louder, and sometimes describe the experience as deeply unsettling (though I’d love to try it!).

There is endless activity, and therefore sonic activity, happening around and inside us at all times. It might just be semantics—if pursuing silence has the goal of creating space to appreciate other subtle sonic activity layers, I’m all for it. But if pursuing silence is trying to eliminate sound activity, to me that seems futile, boring, and terrifying.

I think silence is often associated with the desire for some sense of peace or relief, which is a fine goal, but I’d rather get there by finding balance within the inevitability of non-silence.

In relation to sound, one often reads words like “material”, “sculpting”, and “design”. Do you feel these terms have a relationship to your own work of and approach towards sound? What are the “material” qualities of sound?

Absolutely. Sound has weight. It has position, depth, height, stereo width. An EQ “notch” is a subtractive chiseling … relief. An EQ “bump” is additive sculpture … throwing on a little more clay. Compression, what would that be? Punching a wet bust’s nose to smush up its face, or something.

Pure tones feel like polished surfaces, impure sounds are called “textured” because they sound like running your hand along a textured surface. A bass sound can feel thick and full-bodied, a piercing treble can sound like a strand of hair. Intervals, run through an oscilloscope, create gorgeous line shapes whose implied three-dimensionality is unmistakable. When those intervals are just, their corresponding Lissajous curves are fine, pure geometries … when they’re in Western tuning, their imperfections manifest as distortion across the geometry.

These are just a few of myriad examples of the spatial and material nature of sound. The relationship is reciprocal—all material has sonic properties. If you’ve never done it, Google “cymatics” and enjoy for a few hours.

Seth S. Horowitz called hearing the “universal sense” and emphasised that it was more precise and faster than any of our other senses, including vision. How would our world be different if we paid less attention to looks and listened more instead?

If that were true, I’d be pretty well-situated, given my angelic voice.