Ezra Feinberg has lived a thousand lives. West coast folk-rock aficionados will recognize the name from Citay, the San Francisco ensemble, founded by Feinberg, which worked its way into a sizeable presence in the early 2000s microscene. Two decades later, Feinberg has pivoted into warmer harmonic arms. He began releasing new projects, textured instrumental portraits, in 2018. In 2024, Feinberg released his junior album Soft Power. Since its release, the project has become a favorite amongst the ambiguously delineated ambient-scene-enjoyers and found its way onto a slew of end-of-year lists. Soft Power comes just shy of 40 minutes but weaves an astoundingly complex inner world, untethered from a rigid inner structure. This fluidity can, perhaps, be attributed to the relationships that brought the album together.
Dotting the credits of the album are Feinberg’s friends. Ambient (though he’s hesitant to call it that) is a group effort – how else could one get David Moore’s synth solos flitting over an array of Jefre Campbell Ledesma’s spaced out chords propelled by Feinberg’s hypnotizing guitar work? Neither hanging out with friends nor making fantastical sounds are Feinberg’s day job. In person, Feinberg is unassuming, wearing a charmingly academic uniform that seems like a psychiatric self-fulfilling prophecy. During the week he’s a psychoanalyst, trading pedals for notepads. Though Feinberg disavows any conscious effort to bring in the analysis to his musical projects, there is a curiosity for inner workings that draws his worlds together. Over disarmingly loud coffee-shop music, Feinberg tells me about his musical timeline, what makes a master improviser, and how to find collaboration organically.
BB: With your previous project, Citay, the power was very much at the forefront. What led you into making more subdued music?
EF: I originally wanted Citay to be more like what my solo work is, but then when I wanted to perform it live, it just became a rock band.
BB: Is there an aspect of performance that makes things necessarily louder?
EF: Yeah, I kind of think so. I mean, I’ve found that when you’ve set a bar, sonically, on a stage, that’s what becomes the performance.
BB: How do you keep that restraint, then, with this project? Improvisation is such a central part of Soft Power, and it seems like improvisation could get so fervent – how do you keep that energy held back?
EF: There’s one kind of boring answer, which is that I don’t have a drummer. I mean, Citay was a project that I did in my 20s, early 30s, and now I’m in my late 40s. I’ve been making solo records for the last seven or eight years. My life is just different; how I listen to music is really different. At a certain point it became less about the architecture of rhythm section, bass, chord, melody, and about a plain patterning of textures. It’s not that a bottom end, mid range, and high end don’t exist, of course, but it’s a difference between a kind of band-like mentality and something a little more chamber-y, maybe? In that zone, there’s a lot more room for subtlety: For melodic subtlety, for harmonic subtlety, for textural subtlety, even for improvisational subtlety.
BB: You’ve mentioned in other interviews that you admire Terry Riley’s “interior dialectic work”. Do you use similar schemas or similar conceptualizations when you’re crafting a piece?
EF: Probably as a backdrop, but not consciously. I just mess around with what could be cool or fun. I have various north stars that I’m going for on a given day. Something in my mind will be elaborate and inspired, and then when it gets to trying to get that into actual audio form, everything gets narrowed and difficult.
BB: What are some of those hindrances that prevent the north star from being fully realized?
EF: Because the concept is really different from how something sounds. Once you actually hear it, it has problems. Then it’s time to adjust and then you’re in a compositional process. That process is a dialogue with yourself about what works or what does it. The difference between what works and what does it is like completely not in your brain, at least for me. It’s just something that I feel. Most of the time when I’m writing, it’s usually partial at best on a given day or not at all. It’s either like, “this might be okay, but it might be bad,” or “this is definitely terrible.”
BB: As you work more through a project, are you able to predict what problems you’ll run into more accurately?
EF: No, never ever. It’s totally in the moment what might be cool or what might be bad. A huge piece of it is the temporal dimension. You work on something on Tuesday, you think it’s terrible, you come back on Wednesday, you think it’s really cool, you start to develop it, and then by Friday, it’s bad again. And you were wrong. You just sort of go through from there.
BB: Speaking of the movement and structure of the pieces, one of the things I like the most about Soft Power is the sort of the boiling frog effect you get dynamically and texturally. You manage to work through significant shifts in volume and instrumentation that happen very subtly. Is that something that you do very consciously? How do you get us there?
EF:I think of my work as very narrative. I don’t have any words, you know, but I still think these are pieces that have movements in their own small way. You are always ending up in a different place from where you started. I’m very drawn into forms of release, forms of ecstasy or joy. But also to lament, also to the melancholy. But it never stays in one place. I was talking about it with my friend Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. He’s a really close friend and we live by each other and hang out all the time, and we play music together a lot. His music to me is so different from mine and we have completely different approaches, although we do overlap in certain ways. His music is like a painting. It’s about one place and being in that place. Compared to his, my albums are like collections of short stories, where each one starts out here and ends there and there’s different character developments and different plot points and different twists to the narrative throughout.
BB: Are there books or movies that you come back to for narrative inspiration or reference?
EF: Not in particular. I don’t think of my music as like any novel or like any film or anything like that. Other than being interested in certain soundtracks, but that’s kind of not what I’m talking about. It’s more that I’ve always been drawn to narrative. I studied literature in college; I’ve always been very into film and the machinations of story. I think of that actually as an overlap with my earlier work in Citay, which is also really narrative.
BB: Switching gears pretty intensely, you’re very outspoken about the current genocide happening in Palestine. How does it feel creating music and creating stories in a time where such violence is so present?
EF: I mean, I think it’s fucked up, but I think it always has been. Any artist probably goes back and forth between feeling like – well, I’ll just speak for myself. Sometimes I feel like what I’m doing has some microscopic importance, you know, and that there’s something really important, that part of a resistance movement is bringing beauty into the world. Part of a resistance movement is being honest, and I think of making art in its best forms as less about creativity and more about honesty. But then also I feel like, “What are any of us doing?” It does feel really maddening to just go through my day-to-day life with whatever it is I’m doing, music included, as well as working and trying to make money and support my family and be with my partner and be with my kids. In some sense that’s perennial but there’s also an exceptional situation happening too, so I don’t know, it’s a complicated thing.
BB: What inspires you to collaborate with somebody? Is it opposition, in the way you mentioned you and Jefre look at music very differently?
EF: Well, I think that there’s different registers of collaboration. On my records, I’ll call up people I know, and who I know are really good and say, “Will you play on my album for either nothing or a very small amount of money?” Thankfully, they usually say yes. Soft Power was recorded mostly during the pandemic, it was totally remote, so I wasn’t there with them. Is that a collaboration? Kind of. It was more like favors. [Laughs] It was favors before that on my last record, they were just in the studio.
I have a project with Jefre and my friend Omir, who also plays with me for my solo stuff. The three of us, every Thursday, make Indian food and jam and it’s really, really nice. It was very casual for the first few months of it, but it’s been almost a year now and now we’re talking about making a record. [It’s] totally open improv, but we get into some fucking cool zones, three of us, and it’s been really fun. But that happened so organically. I was never like, I wanna have a project with Jefre and Omir. It was like, “Why don’t you guys come over and I’ll make daal?” And we played music and then we did it the next week, and then the next week, and that was almost a year ago.
BB: Is that how most collaborations and projects arise for you, realizing you might as well make a formal project out of preexisting musical relationships?
EF: Kind of, yeah, because that’s what [Earth Room] was too, with John [Thayer] and Robbie [Lee]. I got asked to do two hours of music at this club called Nowadays. You know Nowadays? They were like “It’s called Planetarium, it’s a chill night, we’re gonna set out bean bags and have this kind of ambient thing. We want you to play for two hours.” And I was like, “Sorry, what? Two hours?” My set is like, 25 minutes. So I was like, “I need to get people to play,” so I got John and Robbie and we did it. It was really fun. That show was billed under my name, but it was not me. It was clearly the three of us. So then we started recording these jams, when I still lived in the city and we kept it up. We jammed a year ago and we’re slowly going through those recordings now. But it just happened.It wasn’t planned at all. Before that, it had been so long since I was in a proper band. Citay was super deliberate – I have these songs; I need these players to come and be in my band for which I am the clearer leader. It was collaborative, but I wouldn’t call the whole project a collaboration.
BB: Has moving away from the city affected how you produce music at all?
EF: It’s funny, I only moved a year and a half ago and I haven’t gotten a chance to really work on the follow up to Soft Power. I’m doing this Aquarium Drunkard Lagniappe Session. [Aquarium Drunkard] is a music website and they ask people occasionally to do a Lagniappe session; you do covers of your own choice, and they put it up. I’m working on that right now.
BB: Can you say which covers you’re looking at?
EF: Not right now…
BB: We’ll wait for it to be out.
EF: I feel like the “shift” in my music to an extent, like it’s changing, but it’s always changing. It was never static. It’s also really defined not just by the environment but who I’m around. I couldn’t tell you where the line between my taste in music and my taste in people is. You know what I mean?
BB: Kind of… That’s so interesting. Could you elaborate a bit on that?
EF: From the very beginning, I’ve been into music as an interpersonal endeavor. If a friend of mine wants to play me something, I might like it, I might not, but the relationship that I have with that person is gonna be a huge factor. I couldn’t tell you how. It’s totally unconscious, but I know it’s there.
BB: Is it inevitable, then for whatever music you make to reflect a vulnerability that you can’t mask?
EF: Yes, that’s what I mean about honesty. I do have the experience, in composition, of working really hard, struggling, like you’re in the woods, it’s foggy, you can’t find your way. It’s so frustrating, it’s maddening. You ask my wife, every album, I’m like, I can’t do it, and she’s like, dude, shut the fuck up. Just keep at it, you know? When I arrive at the thing that feels right, I often have the experience of feeling like, oh, there I am. That’s where I am. It’s a very powerful thing. Oh, there I am – I didn’t realize that.
BB: Improvisation is a central part of your work. Has your relationship with improvisation changed over the years?
EF: I think it has. I don’t consider myself to be an official improviser.
BB: What makes an official improviser?
EF: I mean, there’s a long standing, deep improv scene in New York. It was a downtown Manhattan thing for a long time and now it’s obviously elsewhere. Other people I played with definitely are, and I like to have an in through my people, but I’m not that. I’m something else.
BB: Is there a distinct scene that you feel like you’re fully a part of?
EF: No, I am not. It both feels like an asset to my process and it also is probably some kind of commercial liability.
BB: Like, if you wanted to have more of a marketable brand?
EF: Yeah, yeah, definitely.
BB: Is that something you’d ever be interested in?
EF: No, no, I would never, no. I mean people are like, “Oh, it’s ambient,” but come on, it’s not ambient music. Of course it’s obnoxious to then say I somehow transcend genre, which I don’t feel like I do at all. I can only do what I do. But it’s sort of tiresome, isn’t it? I mean, everyone always thinks that they’re uncategorizable.
BB: There is that in between of maybe you can be not part of the genre that everybody labels you as, but does that really mean it’s like not anything categorizable?
EF: I think of myself as part of a community or several overlapping communities, and I’m happy with that. I’ve been doing this a really long time and I know a lot of these people and a lot of musicians. There’s a lot of love and a lot of mutual respect and a lot of awesome, talented, loving, beautiful people making beautiful music, and I feel very lucky to just be around it. I’m playing this show in a few weeks upstage. Do you know Scree? They’re a kind of weird, woozy, ambient jazz, really cool. I’m playing, and opening is this guy J.R. Bohannon and Dave Shuford. Bohannon plays with TORRES, but he has solo guitar stuff. He’s made ambient music, collaborates with this guy Dave Shufer, who was in the No-Neck Blues Band. Like, holy shit, this bill’s amazing and I can’t believe I’m my part of it. We’ll probably play for 40 people.
BB: Looking into the future of whatever your projects are, do you have a specific trajectory you’re trying to reach with a certain amount of albums, or is it open ended?
EF: I feel pretty strongly that I’ll be making records for a really long time. Especially now, I mean, I would be doing it anyway, but Tonal Union is a new label doing so much really fucking cool stuff. That’s another community. The total Union family is rad and so alive. Being whatever I was, the third, fourth, maybe, fourth or fifth release on the label, who knows, labels come and go, but it definitely feels like a full tank.
BB: Is there anything you’d like to plug?
EF: I’m playing that show at Tubbies in Kingston on December 4th with Scree. I’m gonna be playing upstate again in February, no one will remember that, but on February 8th, with this woman, Nora Stanley. I wish I had a city show coming up. I don’t know. I might. I’m working on it. ★
You can stream Soft Power here.