Angela Winter crafts sonic koans for troubled times, and her latest album, Forbidden Questions in Space, unfolds like a memory through the psyche, accumulating layers of meaning the way sediment builds on a riverbed. These pieces crystallize around questions too large for ordinary thinking, wordless vocal improvisations that hover between drone and hymn, experimental collages designed to interrupt our habitual responses to catastrophe.
Born from the collision of ancient Zen wisdom and contemporary climate anxiety, the album emerged when Winter found herself caught between earthbound dread and cosmic perspective in 2021. There’s an alchemical precision to how these sounds work, converting socially transmitted stress into frequencies that restore rather than exhaust. Winter reveals herself as both rigorous practitioner and generous guide, someone who has learned to hold beauty and terror in the same breath, creating space for others to practice that same radical acceptance.
Forbidden Questions in Space is OUT NOW on Past Inside the Present. Angela Winter’s website can be found HERE.
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Can you take us back to your earliest sound memories? What were the environmental sounds or musical moments that first awakened something in you as a listener?
My parents met in high school chorus, had me and my sister when they were super young, and stayed engaged in music as they raised us, mostly at church, where my mom was a choir member and much-loved soloist, and my dad was an audio engineer. He was a true audiophile and gear head; at home (if memory serves), he had a reel-to-reel player, an 8-track, various cassette players, mixers, and microphones, and a vinyl turntable system with a diamond needle and massive speakers. I recall seeing him cut tape with an X-Acto blade to make tape loops, though I don’t remember what he did with them. I do remember that he loved his vinyl records. He’d play tons of soul, R&B, disco, and funk—great music for dancing—and other times, he’d play classical records, especially from the Deutsche Grammophon catalogue, which he insisted was the best. I grew up hearing heavy, dramatic music like Wagner, Tchaikovsky, and Prokofiev, but also beautiful, dreamlike fare such as Ravel, Debussy, and Satie. Still, the musical moment that really awakened something in me was when I walked into the living room early one day and heard the album Aja, by Steely Dan, for the first time. “What is this?” I asked my dad. “It’s Sunday morning jazz, baby,” he said. Those sumptuous California chords totally stopped me in my tracks.
When did you first realize you could make your own sounds, not just consume them? Was there a particular moment when creation became possible?
I’ve always sung, and melodies have always flowed through me constantly. I thought that was true for everyone until I was in my early twenties, walking through NYC with a college friend, mindlessly humming the internal melody I heard. “So very you to sing along with the world,” she said. Fortunately, she was smiling; I imagine it might get annoying.
Before you were making “sonic koans,” what were your early compositions like? How has your relationship to melody, harmony, and structure evolved over time?
Though I’ve sung all my life and took a few piano lessons when I was a kid, I’m pretty feral when it comes to music theory and composition. I’m an ear player, more drawn to improvisation and experimentation than formal structure. As an adult, I chose the ukulele as my first instrument because it was simple, easy on my hands and fingers, and gave me a way to write and communicate sonically with other musicians. I wrote songs on it for my first album, Hollow, which I released independently in 2018. The arrangements, created by Hollow’s producer Tim Carless, were for a blend of strings, synths, and voice; some tracks were acoustic and others electronic. The songs were idiosyncratic; I suppose they were a kind of freak folk or acid pastoral. Back then, I said my music was like what you might hear at a Renaissance festival during the apocalypse.
Since 2020, when I began producing my own music by necessity during the pandemic lockdowns, I’ve moved ever more toward abstraction, experimentation, and improvisation; electronic instruments and wordless vocals; and acousmatic, chance, and repetitive forms. Drone, ambient, experimental, and noise music just seem to better fit the nebulosity of these times.
You describe this new album, Forbidden Questions In Space, as emerging from “spiraling internally over the state of the world” while mixing your previous album lightness. Can you walk us through that moment when the koan first landed? What was that shift from despair to creative possibility?
I wish I could walk you through it! That koan landed with me in spring 2021 when I was reading a lot about climate change and the very real possibilities of civilizational collapse, but I don’t remember the actual koan. I found a note in my composition book from that time that says that a longtime friend, fellow musician, and martial artist had sent me the koan, which led me to listen to an Upaya Zen Center podcast about koans by the astrophysicist and author Adam Frank. I checked out Frank’s book Light of the Stars from the library. Reading it propelled my imagination into space, and I wrote the first songs for FQIS two weeks later. I remember that I was relieved to have a new creative project to use as a transmutational vessel for the dark, depressive emotions I’d been feeling—to help me convert them into something more useful.
The music transformed dramatically from piano-based songs to more experimental sonic collages, plus a wonderful use of mostly wordless vocals. What drove that metamorphosis? Was it conscious or did the material itself demand a different form?
Time and the material itself demanded a different form. I set aside album development for a long while because those original piano-based arrangements didn’t move me enough. The ideas and themes for the album shimmered and excited me, but back then, I felt I couldn’t do them justice compositionally.
I created almost all of the tracks for Forbidden Questions In Space in January and February of 2025 based on the ideas, themes, and song titles I’d drafted in 2021. Their energies were consistent with the intent of the originals, but their final forms were very different—more abstract, ambiguous, spacious, and dark.
You describe creating “sonic koans for troubled times.” Can ambient music function the same way as a traditional koan? Can it stop thought, create that leap from logic to insight?
Has an encounter with a work of art, a piece of music or writing, or a moment in nature ever catapulted your awareness into the sublime? I remember almost driving off the highway one night in Atlanta when I first heard Duke Ellington’s Far East Suite on the radio. Ellington’s achingly brief piano break in the middle of “Ad Lib on Nippon” put me in a sudden, tearful awe, so I pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway for safety but also to scribble down the album’s title so I could later order a physical copy. I just had to have it. I had a similar experience at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. I was standing in front of what seemed to be a relatively boring landscape painting by Antoine Chintreuil when something about its light and radiance gobsmacked me. My thoughts stopped, and I dissolved into tears and gooseflesh—all of it a surprise. I just stood there and wept.
I think those transcendent leaps can happen anywhere and anytime, whether propelled by smaller, more ordinary moments or by the more sensational or peak experiences we sometimes get to have. Sometimes music offers such an invitation and vehicle.
Traditional koans were developed to be teaching and meditation tools. I don’t create my music to serve a teaching purpose; I hope listeners will approach and experience it as they see fit. But could it serve as a floatation device? A catapult for imagination or awareness? It often works that way for me; I’d be happy if it could work that way for other listeners, too.
Bashō’s haiku about the rough sea stretching toward the Milky Way clearly resonated with you. What is it about that particular marriage of earthbound observation and cosmic awareness that draws you?
The strong and surprising contrast Bashō establishes between the sea and stars propels my consciousness from Earth into space. I love the sensation of being pushed into sudden motion or realization. That feeling of falling forward while the ground drops away is wow.
Reflecting on those earlier moments of awe, frisson, and wonder that I just shared, I see that both experiences were sparked by strong contrasts. Ellington’s fleeting, meditative piano interlude is shockingly different from the dazzling, big-band jazz arrangement all around it. Chintreuil’s contrasts between light and shadow are starkly fascinating. (The online version of the painting unfortunately doesn’t do it justice.)
I loved playing with sonic contrasts from track to track (and sometimes within tracks) on Forbidden Questions In Space. I felt as though they gave the music fuel to propel my awareness into new territories.
You write about “interrupting the energies of strife and socially transmitted stress to transmute them into deeper, slower, more nourishing resonances.” That’s such a specific description of what this music is doing. Can you elaborate on that alchemical process?
That intention was a lodestar for me as I created the album, but I’m not sure that it’s what the music actually does. As a creative process and practice, yes, I did my best to neutralize negative, depressive thoughts and stressful incoming energies and convert those neutralized energies into something useful and constructive. As aikido master George Leonard once said to his students, “Take the hit as a gift.” My thinking about this was also influenced by Roy Scranton, who wrote in his book Learning to Die in the Anthropocene:
“So long as one allows oneself to be a ‘conductor in a stress-semantic chain,’ one is strengthening channels of retransmission regardless of content, thickening the reflexive connective tissues of mass society, making all of us more susceptible to such viral phenomena as nationalism, scapegoating, panic, and war fever. Interrupting the flows of social production is anarchic and counterproductive, like all good philosophy: if it works, it helps us stop and see our world in new ways…. Responding autonomously to social excitation means not reacting to it, not passing it on, but interrupting it, then either letting the excitation die or transforming it completely. Responding freely to constant images of fear and violence … perpetual media circuits of pleasure and terror … the ongoing alarms of war, environmental catastrophe, and global destruction demand a reorientation of feeling so that every new impulse is held at a distance until it fades or can be changed. While life beats its red rhythms and human swarms dance to the compulsion of strife, the interrupter practices dying.” (pp. 87-88)
The phrase “practicing dying” appears in your notes. Can you speak to how mortality awareness influences your creative practice?
I’m smiling because now you know where that phrase comes from. I think we humans are all pretty much buggered if we refuse to contemplate our mortality. Denial of death (hello, Ernest Becker) seems to be driving most of the wicked problems we face now as Earthlings on a finite planet. We don’t want to deal with finitude; we resist change; and we’re not often keen to invite Death over for a cup of tea and a chat before our final meeting. But as the poet Wallace Stevens noted: “Death is the mother of beauty.”
I’m still struck by something a hospice nurse said years ago, when my husband and I were caring for his mother during her last days. The hospice nurse said, “People tend to die the way they live.” Her bracing observation has only borne out more true over time. I started asking myself how I want to die, which quickly made me question how I want to live.
Since then, I’ve embraced the art of letting go as part of my creative practice, and when you practice dying, it seems like a good idea to start small. It’s actually an experience I offer to audiences at my shows. I invite people to write down on paper whatever they’re ready to let go of, crumple it up, and drop it in a metal bowl. I convert and release the energies of these offerings as I improvise an experimental noise piece, and later, I burn all their papers in a ritual fire. People always go for it! They drop some heavy shit into that bowl, and I help them transmute and release it. I think it’s important to provide opportunities for folks to practice letting go in fun and surprising ways. Whatever gets us doing the work, I’m here for it.
You ask yourself, “Who do I want to be in these times?” How has that question shaped not just the content of this work, but your approach to being an artist during what feels like a civilizational transition?
That question is a zip line to what matters most and helps me center my awareness there, no matter what else is going on. The psychologist Viktor Frankl, who survived Nazi concentration camps during WWII, emphasized that we always have the power to choose our responses to whatever life serves up. The available choices may be shitty; the circumstances terrible. But we can decide how we want to respond. True power comes from deciding who we want to be and acting from there. I resonate with that stance.
My life is finite, so I want to do what I feel I’m here to do here in these transitional times. I’m here to listen, learn, grow, make music, organize sound, move energy, and share the gifts I’ve been given with the world. I resonate with the electronic music pioneer Pauline Oliveros, who in the wonderful documentary Sisters with Transistors said: “The path that I hope to be on is one where the energy that comes out of the work that I do is beneficial to others as well as myself. I want my work to be mutually beneficial. I’m not interested in making an object of art and entertainment. I’m interested in making something that helps me to grow and expand and change as an individual and in relation to others.”
You address “fellow awakeners” directly. What do you hope listeners carry with them after spending time in this particular space you’ve created?
I hope listeners come away with more of an appetite for questions and ambiguity, a friendly curiosity toward the unknown, or whatever they need most in the moment. I make music because it makes me feel more alive. I hope it spurs others to feel more alive, too.
And lastly, to close, as always… what are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
The sound of laughter, especially through tears. The sounds of birds, particularly owls, whose calls evoke mystery. And the sound of snow falling on snow.
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