#8 - A Conversation with Rafiq Bhatia (and Son Lux)
Introduction
This interview is part of The Sonic Atelier – Conversations with Contemporary Composers and Producers, a long-term project dedicated to exploring the evolving role of the composer in the twenty-first century. The series investigates how today’s creators inhabit hybrid identities at the intersection of composition, production, and performance, and how their artistic practices intertwine with technology, aesthetics, and the changing dynamics of the music industry.
In this conversation we meet Rafiq Bhatia, American guitarist, composer, and producer, best known as a member of the experimental trio Son Lux and for his solo work that blurs the boundaries between jazz, electronic, and contemporary classical music. Bhatia’s practice embodies a deep investigation into sound as a sculptural and spatial medium, where composition, production, and performance are inseparable facets of the same creative gesture.
Throughout the interview, Bhatia reflects on the interdependence of the roles of composer, performer, and producer, and on how the studio becomes a generative instrument in itself. He discusses the role of technology as a creative environment, the construction of sonic identity through timbre and space, and the collaborative dynamics that define projects such as Son Lux and his work for film.
His reflections reveal an artist who perceives sound as a living material, capable of dissolving the boundaries between the acoustic and the electronic, the composed and the improvised, the human and the technological, transforming music into an ecosystem of interrelated gestures, spaces, and temporalities.
Date of interview: 29 October 2025
Question: Today we often hear about the hybrid figure of the composer, producer, and performer. Do you identify with this description, and how do these three dimensions coexist in your work?
Rafiq Bhatia: I do identify with that description. What really matters is the connection between these three roles: the boundaries between them are porous and interdependent. This relationship is always present, even when I’m not wearing all three hats at the same time.
For example, when I’m producing or composing, the part of my mind that has been shaped by performing still informs the process. Each of these practices, composing, producing, performing, forges different pathways in the brain, and those pathways can enrich each other when we move between them.
There’s also something self-selecting about how the world responds to this kind of practice. When you create work that integrates multiple lenses, people begin to seek you out precisely for that reason, which in turn deepens the connections between those roles even further.
Question: Which composers, musical movements, or past sonic aesthetics have left the strongest impression on you, those whose languages or philosophies resonate most with your way of thinking about music?
Rafiq Bhatia: I draw from many musical communities, lineages, and movements across time. Some I’ve been part of directly or experienced from the inside; others remain at a kind of mystical distance, but the idea of them still informs my work.
Even though this pool is broad and diverse, there is a common thread running through the artists who influence me most: when you hear two seconds of their work, you know exactly who it is. Their sound feels deeply personal, not just an aesthetic choice, but an articulation of who they are. Their personhood is embedded in the music.
I’m thinking of artists as different as Tim Hecker, D’Angelo, George Ligeti, Madlib, or John Coltrane. They each create an entire world within the universe of musical possibilities. It’s less about pointing to a specific technique or style, and more about that totality, the immediate recognizability of a sonic identity and the completeness of the universe they build.
Question: Focusing on your solo work, what is the most frequent starting point for you? Is it a melodic or harmonic idea, a sound texture you discover on the guitar or through electronics, a technical limitation you set for yourself, or perhaps an abstract concept?
Rafiq Bhatia: It can really be all of the above, it varies a lot. The only constant is that I don’t need to impose technical limitations on myself, because there are already plenty that exist naturally.
It depends on where the inspiration comes from, but many of my heroes have spoken about how our limitations are what define us. One of the most cited examples in jazz and improvised music is Miles Davis. We might never have had Miles if he had tried to do what every other trumpet player was doing, playing like Dizzy Gillespie in the high register.
For Miles, the middle register felt more resonant, so he followed that instinct instead of chasing what others were doing. I don’t think of Miles Davis as limited at all, but he thought of himself that way, and that self-awareness shaped his voice.
Question: Do you see choices of sound, texture, and time, as well as production and mixing, when relevant, as a separate phase from composition, or as an inseparable part of the creative act itself?
Rafiq Bhatia: For me, it’s inseparable. Coming from a performance background, the sound coming from the instrument is a huge part of what makes the music what it is. You can’t play all the right notes and rhythms and have the sound be wrong, it’s not the same thing. Sound production is what makes or breaks a performance.
I actually played violin for nine years before I ever picked up the guitar. With an acoustic instrument, you learn quickly that the sound you produce is the thing, and that mindset has never left me. It led me down the rabbit hole of learning to work with the studio as an instrument, to think sculpturally about audio.
The sound that comes out of the speakers needs to be as intentional as the sound I’d want to produce from a violin. I don’t see a distinction between those things. The decisions I make in the studio, how something sits in the stereo field, how deep it feels in the space, whether it’s bright and forward or dark and withdrawn, those are not just technical details; that is the music*.*
I’ve worked with people who feel very differently, though. I remember having lunch with the great Henry Threadgill, and he told me: “When you sit in a restaurant, there’s the lighting, the menu, all of that, but I don’t care about any of it. I just care about the food on the plate.”
For me, it’s the opposite. I care about the whole experience, the totality. But I can still hear where someone like Threadgill draws that line in his own work, and it makes perfect sense for him. For me, in what I do, there’s no line to draw.
Question: Speaking of technology, what role does it play in your process? For some composers today, the DAW has become a primary creative space, almost replacing the score, while for others it’s more of a tool to refine or finalize ideas. How does this balance work for you? Do you still think mainly in terms of notation and live performance, or do you also use technology as a generative space for sound and structure?
Rafiq Bhatia: I think you probably know my answer to that one, the DAW is a primary creative space for me. It’s definitely not just a tool to refine or finalize ideas. I don’t think mainly in terms of notation or live performance; technology is a generative space in itself.
I’m actually quite happy not to deal with notation too often. Even when I was playing violin, I learned through the Suzuki method, by ear, so I was never a strong sight-reader. Working by listening and responding feels natural to me.
I mainly work in Ableton and Logic. Those are the spaces where I can sculpt, experiment, and organize sound in a way that’s both intuitive and compositional.
Question: Do you ever find yourself thinking in visual or symbolic terms, even when you’re not composing for images?
Rafiq Bhatia: Yes, very much so. I had the good fortune to spend some time with the experimental trumpet player Wadada Leo Smith several years ago, when he was teaching at a workshop I attended. We played some of his music in an ensemble he led, and it was a deeply formative experience.
Wadada uses his own notation systems, many of them graphic and color-based. I remember someone in the group asking, “How do I read this? What does the orange section mean?” And Wadada replied, without hesitation, “When you think of orange, what do you think of? I think of a flame, and the hottest part of the flame is the part you can’t see.”
That moment really changed the way I thought about abstraction. It set a new standard in my mind for what it means to be rigorous when dealing with abstract or symbolic concepts.
I’ve always tended to think in abstract visual terms when making music, I think many of us do, but after that experience, I became much more precise and intentional about it. Working to picture has also refined that specificity: even when I’m not scoring to film, I often find myself conjuring images or environments in my mind.
My recent recording Environments is a clear example of that. It’s the most representational music I’ve made, an improvised album with trumpet, guitar, and electronics (with Ian from Son Lux) that evokes imagined spaces. Each piece constructs and evokes a different atmosphere, almost like painting with sound. It’s been a really meaningful exercise in exploring how music can describe what doesn’t yet exist visually.
Question: You collaborate with artists from very different backgrounds, from the Kronos Quartet, which comes from a classical tradition, to the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater. When you work in these collaborations outside of Son Lux, what is your primary method for communicating musical ideas?
Rafiq Bhatia: The Alvin Ailey project was a bit of an exception, because they used my existing music to create new choreography, so I wasn’t directly shaping the score for them. But the Kronos Quartet collaboration is a really interesting example.
That piece was part of their 50 for the Future initiative, fifty new works commissioned from twenty-five women and twenty-five men, designed as repertoire for the next generation of string quartets. Since I grew up playing violin before moving to guitar, I wanted to explore how my experience with one string instrument could inform my writing for another.
I used the guitar in special tunings that allowed me to access the full harmonic range of the quartet, the cello’s low C, the viola’s and violin’s registers, and even the natural resonances and overtones of those instruments. My idea was to create a guitar-based texture that could evoke the quartet’s sound world.
Rather than writing the piece in traditional notation, I approached it as an aural work. The “score” I delivered was actually made of guitar recordings, separate stems for each voice. The Kronos team later transcribed it so it could be read on paper, but my intention was for young musicians to learn it by ear: to listen, transcribe, and internalize the sound.
To me, that process teaches something essential, the ability to hear a sound from outside your instrument and translate it into your own language. That’s one of the most valuable skills a musician can develop.
Question: So when you collaborate with orchestras or ensembles, how do you communicate your sound ideas in technical or notational terms, especially when they originate from abstract or textural concepts?
Rafiq Bhatia: In many cases, I work closely with an orchestrator, but in a way that’s quite specific. I’m not simply handing over sketches and saying, “Do whatever works.” I’m very precise about the sounds I imagine, while still leaving space for the orchestrator to bring creative input beyond what a strict transcription would allow.
For example, I wrote a piece that was first performed by orchestra and later by Alarm Will Sound. In one section, the sound world is built from recordings of the ocean. I wanted to hybridize that electronic texture with live instruments, so I asked the wind players to remove their mouthpieces and blow through their instruments. Depending on their placement across the stereo field, the ensemble collectively evokes the undulating movement of the sea.
The envelopes of these breaths are deliberately unsynchronized, each performer’s gesture begins and ends independently, creating a fluid, organic wave texture that mirrors the ocean’s spatial motion.
I didn’t notate each breath envelope myself; instead, I worked with the orchestrator to realize the idea in detail. The notation that the musicians receive isn’t abstract, it’s clear, specific, and performable, but it originates from an abstract concept that we then translated into precise musical gestures.
That’s the balance I try to maintain: starting from a conceptual image and finding a way to make it audible and concrete, without losing its expressive ambiguity.
Question: When you compose for ensembles such as the Kronos Quartet, you tend to use traditional notation. Do you ever feel the need to explore more unconventional or graphic systems to preserve specific sound or design effects?
Rafiq Bhatia: I’ve done that before, yes, but for me, it’s never about what the notation looks like. I don’t care if the score appears “experimental” or traditional; I care about what actually translates to sound.
If I’m using notation, I want the simplest and most direct way to communicate the idea so that it sounds the way I intend it to. If another composer has already developed a clear and effective way to represent that sound, I’d rather use their convention than invent a new one. It gets the performer there faster, and ultimately, the audience doesn’t see the score, they only hear the music.
There’s a lesson I often think about from Chris Tabron, a brilliant mixing engineer and friend who’s worked on many Son Lux records. He says, “No one is looking at the plugin interface when they’re listening to the track.” In other words, what matters is not how elegant or complex your tools look, but what they produce.
I feel the same way about notation: the goal is to find the most efficient and elegant solution to convey the sound. Like in mathematics, the most concise proof is the best one, clarity is the highest form of sophistication.
Question: In my research I’m exploring alternative ways of representing music, systems that can integrate elements like sonic character, gesture, or even production aspects alongside traditional notation. The idea is to make the communication between acoustic and electronic musicians more fluid. From your perspective as someone who moves between composing, performing, and producing, do you think there’s a practical need for this kind of approach?
Rafiq Bhatia: For me, it really depends on the context and on the reference points of the players involved. If you’re working with musicians who are also composer-performers or producers, and the boundaries between those roles are already blurred, as is often the case today, then I can absolutely imagine how such an approach could be useful.
What matters most is finding the most direct way to communicate the idea, while still leaving room for your collaborators’ contributions. Historically, even within the Euro-American classical tradition, composers who relied heavily on notation were in constant dialogue with the ensembles they wrote for. Much of the music was transmitted not through the score alone, but through shared language, time, and aesthetics.
If drawing a gesture or using visual envelopes helps a performer understand both the sound and the intention behind it, then by all means use it. The key is to convey not only what something should sound like, but why it should sound that way. When musicians understand that intention, they become active participants, not just executors of instructions, and they might even propose something you hadn’t imagined that fulfills the shared vision even better.
Question: Space plays a crucial role in your solo work as well as in Son Lux. How important is the spatial dimension you build within the production, for instance, through reverb, delay, panning, or other forms of processing that shape the musical narrative?
Rafiq Bhatia: It’s very important. There’s a lot that can be done even within two channels, the stereo field still holds so many possibilities for rendering sound in expressive ways. I feel like I’m still learning what’s possible in that space.
That said, immersive and spatial formats are often limited by accessibility, not many listeners have a true Atmos setup at home. I don’t currently have a studio equipped for that either, so at this stage, those technologies don’t have much practical application in my recorded work.
However, I’ve been experimenting with immersive audio in live settings. For instance, with the new album, we’ve performed on an L-Acoustics L-ISA system, which allows for a highly localized and spatially detailed sound field, and we also presented it in quadraphonic format at Public Records in New York.
So I do explore these approaches when the context allows, when people will actually experience the music in the environment it was designed for. But when I’m in the studio working on recordings, I usually stay within stereo.
Question: Son Lux brings together three very different musical voices. How has this collaboration changed the way you think about composing and producing? And when you create together, how do you find a balance between your individual ideas and the shared identity of Son Lux?
Rafiq Bhatia: It’s really changed the way I think about both composing and producing. When Ian and I joined Son Lux, we were coming from the perspective of performer-composers who wanted to bring production more deeply into our musical identities. Both of us were fascinated by the space between the microphone and the speaker, the space where the sound truly becomes itself, and by how that space had become inseparable from composition.
When we met Ryan, he was coming from the opposite direction. He had spent years focused on composing and producing, and had more or less set aside his identity as a performer. Working together reawakened that part of him, just as his approach challenged Ian and me to think differently about sound and structure. There was an energy that came from that exchange, and over ten years of collaboration we’ve all grown enormously. I see Ryan and Ian as my teachers. They both have that quality I deeply admire, you hear two seconds of their work, and you immediately know it’s them.
Finding balance among our identities is challenging, though. We all have strong opinions and distinct musical personalities. Sometimes two of us are excited about something while the third isn’t convinced. It’s rare that only one person pushes for an idea, those usually don’t survive, but in a trio, a majority can move things forward. Over time, this tension has helped us evolve: we’ve learned to appreciate aspects of each other’s perspective that we might not have understood at first.
It’s like when you look at people who’ve lived together for many years, they start to resemble one another. That’s how it feels for us. Our identities as musicians aren’t fixed; they shift and grow through collaboration. We each continue to make solo work and pursue other projects, and that constant movement outside the band keeps Son Lux alive and open, allowing the music we make together to remain fresh and vital.
Question: How important is live performance for you?
Rafiq Bhatia: Very, very important. I come from a background rooted in improvised music and have always been fascinated by collaboration in an improvisational setting, where the act of creation is collective and the music is reshaped every night. It’s a process-oriented approach: the work comes to life in the specific space where it happens, in dialogue with the audience. Each performance is unique, almost site-specific, shaped by the shared conditions of that moment.
Through repetition, the music evolves. You build on what came before, refine it, and sometimes strip things away to reach a new place, only to realize later that an element you abandoned might now serve a different purpose. It’s a living organism, constantly transforming, and that growth also reflects the changing relationships among the musicians themselves.
Some people from the improvised music world say that a record is just a snapshot of a live moment. I don’t entirely agree. I see recordings as a distinct medium, one where I work very deliberately to shape sound in ways that are impossible to replicate live. It’s the same for us in Son Lux: the studio and the stage are two different mediums, each with its own creative language and potential.
Question: When you compose for film as part of Son Lux, do you feel that your musical language, the electronics, textures, and architectural sense of sound, remains consistent with your studio albums, or does the presence of images fundamentally transform your process?
Rafiq Bhatia: I think the process remains consistent. The difference lies in what the music is serving. When we’re scoring a film, the music only matters insofar as it serves the story. It’s a different mode of creation, one where we’re coexisting with other forces: the images, the narrative, the pacing, the emotional arc.
In that context, the music becomes part of a larger ecosystem rather than existing on its own terms. But the language we use, our approach to sound, texture, and atmosphere, still comes from the same place. It’s just being redirected toward a shared purpose.
Question: I’m very curious about how you work on a score as a trio. For a massive project like Everything Everywhere All at Once, how do you divide the work? Does each of you tend to focus on different aspects such as harmony, production, or rhythm?
Rafiq Bhatia: Each film project we’ve done has been completely different. It’s not as simple as saying Ian handles rhythm, I handle harmony, or Ryan handles production. We divide things more fluidly, usually one of us becomes the point person for a particular scene. Sometimes one person completes an entire cue, and the others might just say, “That’s perfect, let’s leave it as it is.” Other times, it’s deeply collaborative, with all of us shaping the material together to the point that it’s hard to tell who did what.
On Everything Everywhere All at Once, the process was unique because the directors wanted each universe to have its own distinct musical identity, as if every world existed in a separate sonic dimension. That made division of labor easier: each of us could focus on specific universes without worrying too much about stylistic cohesion early on. Later, we used recurring melodic themes to thread all those worlds together, creating a sense of continuity amid the chaos.
Question: How did you collaborate with the other musicians and vocalists involved in the film’s soundtrack, like Mitski, David Byrne, André Benjamin, or Nina Moffitt?
Rafiq Bhatia: It varied from person to person. The end-credits song This Is a Life, with Mitski and David Byrne, was approached much like one of our usual songs, Ryan wrote the lyrics and melodies, and the two vocal parts were conceived as different perspectives that occasionally converge.
With André Benjamin it was completely different. He recorded a series of flute performances and sent us voice memos. We analyzed the recordings, determined the tunings of each flute, and then matched them to scenes where those timbres could fit. Sometimes we gave him musical material to play over; other times, just abstract verbal directions. And occasionally, he’d send something so incredible that we’d build an entire cue around it.
We also worked closely with pianist Chris Pattishall and vocalist Nina Moffitt. With Chris, I sat in the studio as he improvised to picture, shaping performances in real time. With Nina, who effectively became the voice of Jobu Tupaki, we worked scene by scene, guiding her phrases directly in response to the visuals. Every sound was sculpted to interact with what was on screen, often down to the smallest gesture.
Question: Could you describe the compositional and sonic character of your score for Memoria by Apichatpong Weerasethakul?
Rafiq Bhatia: That film was an extraordinary experience. Apichatpong rarely uses music, but the way he treats environmental sound feels more musical and expressive than most film scores. When I first watched Memoria, my instinct was that maybe it didn’t need music at all.
The goal became to dissolve the boundary between music and environment, to make it impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. The ensemble, electronics, and ambient sound all function as a single organism. Many gestures in the score grow out of sounds already present in the film, birds, wind, machinery, and then recede back into them. Often people ask me what instrument produced a certain sound, and I have to tell them, “That was a bird.”
It was also one of my first chances to write for a large ensemble, and I was fascinated by the quieter end of the spectrum, where you can hear the mechanics of instruments as much as their pitch. I wanted many musicians making very soft sounds, exploring that delicate zone where timbre and noise coexist.
Question: When working on film scores, do you prefer to be involved from the earliest stages, even pre-production, or only once there’s footage to work with?
Rafiq Bhatia: So far, we’ve always been involved very early. It’s often more work, but by the time you reach the later stages, you’ve already developed a shared language with the director. You understand each other’s references and intentions, which makes communication faster and deeper. It’s an investment that pays off creatively.
Question: Finally, what are your hopes for the future of artists and composers in today’s changing landscape, with technology, algorithms, and so many uncertainties?
Rafiq Bhatia: There’s so much missing, and so much that feels uncertain. On one hand, technology has allowed a wider range of voices and perspectives to enter the conversation, and that’s been incredibly enriching. But at the same time, we’re also seeing backlash and resistance to that diversity, not just in the arts but everywhere.
My hope for the future is that artists have safe spaces to create, to ask questions freely, to take risks, to express vulnerability without fear of being silenced. The challenges ahead are enormous, but what we need most is more heart, more openness, and more beauty in the world.
Acknowledgements
I warmly thank Rafiq Bhatia for generously sharing his time, reflections, and creative process. His openness has been essential in shaping this conversation within The Sonic Atelier - Conversations with Contemporary Composers and Producers.
By Francesca Guccione