Decade On

La Squadra 2026

10 years ago, a Pittsburgh-focused monthly release label was founded which helped to spotlight a cross-section of artists working within the city. Now after a decade, another round of releases from artists on their respective months are happening. As part of doing my April 2026 release interview questions were presented and archived here for improved linking/readability.

You can listen/purchase the 2026 release here. The 2016 release is also available here

Questions

  • Tell us how life has changed since 2016? [Life, work, love, etc]
  • Are these new tracks? or stuff you’ve had laying around?
  • Walk us through your process for creating these tracks. What software are you using? What’s your process like? Is that similar to what you were doing in 2016?
  • What was your approach to this EP? Obviously your process is technical, but is your artistic approach more organic?
  • What’re you listening to these days? What informs your music?
  • What does the future hold for the Spednar project?

Answers

  1. I am 10 years older. Time is a powerful force that I am fascinated by. It sharpens focus, opinion, and certainly seems to be moving faster as we progress along it. I relocated to Portland, Oregon in 2021 after Danielle completed her PhD and was offered a job here and I continued my role remotely. I’ve since upgraded to working as a system’s architect for my company and am pleased with how my career has progressed. Danielle and I had been living together and in a serious relationship in Pittsburgh for multiple years prior so it felt like a natural progression. Not surprisingly we are now married and own a home out here. I’d lived in the Pittsburgh region for my entire life (aside from college years in NC where Cosmic Sound was created), so was excited at the prospect of living in a new place, and learning about a new region. It’s a great mental exercise to learn/relearn your own association to an area. Being in close proximity to a heavy-EE minded area has encouraged me to develop an electronics lab and pursue a better understanding of audio synthesis/DSP and the history of both. Portland has an incredibly dense collection of inspiring synth wizards (across audio and visual domains) - showcased through the likes of portland synth library, heterodox records (and related events), and sound system crews like 3rdkltr. Not surprisingly a lot of folks here are creating highly technical music made from these approaches. The ‘state transition’ also still includes rivers and bridges, but the beaches and mountains are a nice addition.

  2. It’s a mixture of both new and old. Many of the tracks began as sketches in early 2023-2025, while others were created for this release. While learning more max in recent years, I created a decent number of test sketches that grew into a few of the selection here.

  3. The opening begins with samples used in my project 10+ years ago (some bug-screen samples and breathing) which felt appropriate to re-approach/contextualize. In 2016, I was very focused on usage of tidalcycles (tidalmidi, dirt/superdirt) with some final edits in a daw (shit jungle ii is an ableton track) for the amorphaux release. At the time I was very adamant about only utilizing linux/foss software for live performance. Now I own a macbook and have embraced paid software (like a traitor). It’s cool to pay your peers for their continued work in DSP! Now when performing, there are much heavier considerations for mixing, processing, time-clocking, and performance redundancy - this has made my sets a lot more polished at the expense of tactility and experimentation. This release utilizes some sounds from an ambika (6 x SMR-4 + custom edits to YAM firmware)/argon8m on the hardware side and a lot of digital synthesis (either via max, zebra, tela (fors), or default ableton instruments). I’ve largely moved away from usage of samples and have been having a lot of fun forcing myself to synthesize all drums in recent years. Technical info of note - viterbi path is max-sequenced use of the argon8m, acoustic shadow is utilizing fiedler’s atmos composer for 3d-spatial object positioning and rendered down to a binaural output.

  4. This release feels a bit like an ambient demo reel to me. After my latest release (.XOR/TXX Split on Tarantella) being a showcase of (overly?) technical timbres and disjunct rhythms from use of max/msp, this feels like a more relaxed approach. There is a heavy use of arpeggiation allowing some space/direction to the synthesis - hopefully this translates to the listener. Most of these tracks were not composed with a start or end, and hopefully feel like a gentle suspension into a headspace of your creation. I think this release works best on headphones (especially for the binaural track). I think the mixture of philosophical and technical track names conveys the mixed approach I’ve been taking recently. I have some perspectives about the goals of composed/recorded music and hope to get closer to accomplishing them with my own output.

  5. Fun question - Danielle has gotten me much more into classical music and specifically quartet performances. We have a growing collection of mixed early classical/electronic compositions that I think are fascinating and largely absent in the current era. I’ve been listening to more folk music while driving around Oregon for hikes. As you would expect, I still primarily purchase/listen/dj electronic music. Some modern artists’ work I’ve really loved in recent times: Nathan Ho, Katarina Gyrvul, Stefan Maier, Rashad Becker, E Wata, Gyrofield - list could go on for a while. I have to give a shoutout to one of our best pals out here Ryan/Xanopticon - who was formative in my perspective of what music could be in my teens and a general Pittsburgh legend - for encouraging my own growth as a listener and producer. Tri-Labs has also been holding it down in Pittsburgh on the frontlines of engaging scientific audio.

  6. I will be making music for life. Its endlessly interesting what is possible within such a small band of perceivable sound. Converting ideas into mass through sound systems, acoustics and adjacent engineering pursuits can impart entire perceptive worlds on top of the creative process. I’ve built our studio desk, portions of a sound system we frequently perform on, and various physical and digital audio tooling used on this recording. I doubt I’ll have the time to fully explore a lot of these concepts within my life but that’s an exciting challenge. Most of my time and energy has been going towards Danielle and I’s collective project Family Trust (fka DXGPVWZ). We’ve been having a lot of fun making highly technical but approachable dancefloor ready tracks under this moniker and expect to have various EPs/albums/remixes released throughout the year.