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Working: Composer Fabian Almazan on His Green Alternative to CDs and Vinyl

Slate Daily Feed

Slate Podcasts

News, Business, Society & Culture

41.1K Ratings

🗓️ 27 February 2022

⏱️ 45 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week, host Isaac Butler talks to composer and band leader Fabian Almazan. In the interview, Fabian explains how he uses physical places, like the Everglades or a region in Cuba, as a jumping-off point to compose music. He also discusses Biophilia Records, a label he started as a way to gather like-minded musicians. His latest album, This Land Abounds With Life, was released as a “Biopholio,” which is Fabian’s green alternative to traditional physical media. After the interview, Isaac and co-host Karen Han talk about Fabian’s approach to inspiration and their own relationships to classical music. In the exclusive Slate Plus segment, Isaac asks Fabian about his experience working with composer and Spike Lee collaborator Terence Blanchard. Send your questions about creativity and any other feedback to [email protected] or give us a call at (304) 933-9675. Podcast production by Cameron Drews. If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get benefits like zero ads on any Slate podcast, bonus episodes of shows like Slow Burn and Big Mood, Little Mood—and you’ll be supporting the work we do here on Working. Sign up now at slate.com/workingplus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

The first thing you have to do as a musician is not think about music. You have to ask

0:14.9

yourself, who am I? What is my relationship to the society that I live in? How can I be

0:23.4

honest with myself to answer that very basic question?

0:30.1

Welcome back to working. I'm your host, Karen Han. I am your other host, Isaac Butler.

0:36.4

Isaac, welcome back from being interview-wee for a week. Now that you're back in the interviewer's

0:41.4

chair, who did we hear you talking to in this week's Cold Open? You know Karen, it's good to be back.

0:46.7

You're such a terrifying, you know, interviewer. You're so cruel with your questions.

0:53.4

Isaac's canceled now in the wake of our working episodes.

0:56.2

Yeah, exactly. All right. Anyway, this week we're listening to my interviewer, the composer,

1:01.0

band leader, pianist, and record label in Prasario Fabian Almazon. And I was really excited to

1:07.0

talk to Fabian because he is both a band leader and as the head of his own record labels,

1:13.8

really concerned with the environment. And I wanted to talk to him about ways that he embeds

1:19.6

environmentalism into his creative process as a composer and as a record label honcho.

1:26.5

I'm so excited to hear this interview. But first, I believe that you have an extra segment for

1:31.2

slight plus members this week. What will they hear? Yeah, so we will be talking about Almazon's

1:36.4

experience as a long time collaborator with Terrence Blanchard, who is probably most famous for

1:41.9

scoring the films of Spike Lee and Fabian plays with him a lot. And we're also going to talk about

1:46.7

Fabian's own experiences as a film composer and what it's like to translate a music that is so

1:51.8

free like his jazz into a form as rigorous and precise as a film score. That sounds fascinating.

1:58.6

And it is. Fortunately, it is incredibly easy to listen to it by subscribing to

2:03.6

Slate Plus. As a member, you'll get no ads on any of our podcasts, unlimited reading on the

2:09.0

Slate site and member exclusive episodes and segments from us and other shows like the culture

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