Interviews

Tristan Perich: The 1-Bit Symphony

BY Zac Meyer PHOTOGRAPHS BY Diana Yee

Tristan Perich is a young experimental musician living and working in New York City. He creates interesting devices to present his original compositions, such as the recent 1-Bit Symphony. Encased in a CD jewel case are electronics and a battery that plays a lo-fi electronic piece through its 1/8th-inch jack. I was curious, so I went over to his apartment studio in lower Manhattan to chat.

In addition to mathematics and physics, who or what are some of your influences?

Philip Glass is a hugely influential figure in my life. It was through his music, and my uncle who was into Glass, that I learned about polyrhythms, which blew me away and occupied me as a kid. Another artist that is powerful in my mind is Sol LeWitt, with his adherence to process while creating art. Very conceptual, entirely rote work, his art comes from a series of instructions that are executed by people. But at the same time it's so moving and beautiful and profound; maybe in the same way as a NASA photograph, it gives you a sense of immensity behind the images. It's so computational; he was essentially writing software before there was software. And my work has a similar idea, but it's in a post-code world where now we have computers that can do these things eight million times per second, or at least that's what the crappy chips I use can do.