Name: Kevin Sun
Nationality: American
Occupation: Composer, saxophonist
Current release: Kevin Sun 's The Depths of Memory is out October 27, 2023 via Endectomorph.
Recommendations: The Melancholy of Resistance, a novel by László Krasznahorkai — his ability to slide into the consciousnesses of different people and transport you into their neuroses and internal monologues blew me away, and his writing is just astonishingly funny and depressing.
Fear & Hunger is a singular old-school roleplaying game designed by Miro Haverinen that has an unyielding atmosphere of bleakness and desperation that I find deeply compelling. It’s for adults only due to disturbing content and violence, but it captivated me in its art style, lore, and music, and it’s taken up a lot of space in my mind since playing it a few months ago.

If you enjoyed this Kevin Sun interview and would like to keep up to date with his music, visit his official website. He is also on Instagram, and Facebook.  



When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening? Do you listen with your eyes open or closed?

If I’m listening to instrumental music, I usually relate first to the musicians and their bodies in motion: the sounds and texture of shared, coordinated action.

I generally prefer to listen with my eyes closed because I find it easier to sink into the music and slip away from my active, thinking self.

Entering new worlds and escapism through music have always exerted a very strong pull on me. What do you think you are drawn to most when it comes to listening to and creating music?

For me, music is less potent as a tool of escape from daily routine (compared to, say, video games or film) and more attractive in its immediate sonic impact.

When I listen to or play music, I find the most pleasure in the complexity or simplicity of the vibrations and timbres at play, how music feels in the ear and the body, which for me is somewhat analogous to the pleasures of cooking and eating.

What were your very first steps in music like and how would you rate the gains made through experience?

I started on piano before learning saxophone, but didn’t take to music seriously until I was 12 or 13.

I’d say most of what I learned in the first few years of music was primarily mechanical and having to do with execution, and I think experience has led me toward developing expressive technique: channeling emotion into physical decisions that best convey those feelings through sound.

According to scientific studies, we make our deepest and most incisive musical experiences between the ages of 13-16. What did music mean to you at that age and what’s changed since then?

When I was began diving into music as a teenager, music was like a euphoric drug that heightened my already-intense feelings and headiness at that age.

I rarely feel that way about any music I hear or play now, although my appreciation and love for music has deepened into a more ritual and spiritual practice, which feels related directly to my own character and ability to relate with other people.

How would you describe your own relationship with your instrument, tools or equipment?

When I was younger, I thought of my instrument as a kind of sacred artifact, but now that I’ve owned many instruments and cycled through innumerable saxophone parts, I just think of it as a vehicle for my musical expression and exploration.

I’ve found that some vehicles are better suited for certain avenues of creative work, so I try to be flexible and open to making adjustments as my artistic path winds and curves.

Where does the impulse to create something come from for you? What role do often-quoted sources of inspiration like dreams, other forms of art, personal relationships, politics etc play?

I think my impulse for creativity is rooted in social connection, because all my music requires creative and empathetic people to interpret it and make it come alive. When I’m writing music, I’m trying to design a playground or an environment for play for people, with a certain amount of accessibility and challenge to keep it interesting, and the part that’s gratifying isn’t the composition, but the act of creating in real time with other people.

I often steal or adapt formal ideas from other media like film. When I see something that is striking in some way like its composition or sequence of events, I think about how would could potentially work in an improvisatory musical setting.

Are you acting out parts of your personality in your music which you couldn't or wouldn't in your daily life? If so, which are these? What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music?

I keep my daily life and artistic life fairly separate and compartmentalized, because the demands of my daily life require me to act in ways that are not conducive to being captivating and emotionally moving in music.

At this particular moment, I am trying to balance many elements in music so that I can conjure and sustain an immersive atmosphere of wonder and mystery for the listener from start to finish.

As a musician, I am trying to be strong and supportive as a source of rhythmic momentum and a pillar of groove when called for, and I’m trying to make the ensemble sound best at all times (especially if that means playing less or not at all).

If music is a language, what can we communicate with it? How do you deal with misunderstandings?

I’m not sure that it is, but I think its ambiguity and polysemous nature are integral to its wider appeal and its ability to remain interesting and rewarding for listeners over decades and centuries.

I’m more concerned with misunderstandings between musicians who are collaborating, because that can affect the flow of the music and its reception.

Making music, in the beginning, is often playful and about discovery. How do you retain a sense of playfulness and how do you still draw surprises from tools, approaches and musical forms you may be very familiar with?  

I try to always have a challenge of some sort in my music, something that I don’t know or understand when I’m composing. I usually start from the perspective of wanting to learn something new or discover something, so I often write music that’s just beyond my current abilities.

As a result, the sense of play and surprise is inevitably a part of the process of learning and performing it.

Sound, song, and rhythm are all around us, from animal noises to the waves of the ocean. What, if any, are some of the most moving experiences you've had with these non-human-made sounds? In how far would you describe them as “musical”?

I’ve had the most moving experiences with sounds in nature that can evoke memories or a sense of nostalgia: for instance, the sound of branches and leaves in the wind in autumn, which remind me of the backyard of the home I grew up in and the years I spent there with my family.

“Musical” would be subject to the openness of a human listener, but given that we have the opportunity to embrace the spectra of sonic parameters (including timbre, duration, pitch), we could hear anything as music if we were sufficiently open-minded.

There seems to be an increasing trend to capture music in algorithms, and data. But already at the time of Plato, arithmetic, geometry, and music were considered closely connected. How do you see that connection yourself? What aspects of music do you feel can be captured through numbers, and which can not?

This would be a better question for mathematically conversant friends of mine like Jacob Shulman or Sidd Viswanathan and not a former English major like myself, but certainly geometry and math can be related to sound and vice versa through ratios and relations of frequencies.

For me personally, numbers are useful as a practical tool for accounting and storing information, and similarly can be used as a tool for organizing musical information in the form of metrical schemes, the duration of pitches or musical events, and so on.

Recorded sound is captured digitally in numbers, but the part that can’t be captured is in the in-person, real-time sensation of engaging with music being made by others in the same room.

How does the way you make music reflect the way you live your life? Can we learn lessons about life by understanding music on a deeper level?

I try to get through life without stepping on others’ feet too much while bringing some degree of comfort or joy through my interactions with others. I hope my music can similarly provide some sense of human connection or inspiration without just being novel or momentarily entertaining.

I think the more you engage with music, the more you see how it is inseparable from people and their relationship with others and the world.

We can surround us with sound every second of the day. The great pianist Glenn Gould even considered this the ultimate delight. How do you see that yourself and what importance does silence hold?

I think sound can be a source of comfort, but it can also be a source of intrusion or even violence to our well-being.

The absence of background music during my everyday routine is something that I prefer; I’d rather not listen to music unless I really want to, so I do enjoy silence or, barring that, some soft voices on radio in the background.

Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

Not really, since they all exist on a spectrum of human endeavor.

I think you can put as much intentionality and purpose into your daily tasks (turning a doorknob, pouring water into a kettle, whatever) as you do when you sit down to write music, and it would probably make you a better person to be that present as much of the time as you can stand.

If you could make a wish for the future – what are developments in music you would like to see and hear?

I’m very curious to hear the first convincing AI or machine learning-generated Charlie Parker improviser.