Name: Pidgins
Members: Milo Tamez, Aaron With
Interviewee: Milo Tamez
Nationalities: American (Aaron), Mexican (Milo)
Occupations: Sound artist (Aaron), drummer, percussionist (Milo)
Current release: Pidgins's Refrains of the Day, Volume 1 is slated for release on October 29th 2023 via Lexical. Second single "This Simple Hack to Fix Your Stomach" is out now.

[Read our Aaron With interview about Sound]

If you enjoyed this Pidgins interview and would like to find out more about the duo and their music, visit their official homepage. They are also on Instagram. To keep reading, head over to our earlier feature with Milo Tamesz about healing with drums.   



What was your first drum set like and what are you using today? What, to you personally, are factors in terms of build and design that you appreciate in drums and percussion instruments?

Earliest kit was probably that silver metallic 4 piece Slingerland (probably a 1960's kit), then I jumped from one brand to another during my formative days. I play on a Yamaha Maple Custom today, a small 5 piece kit that I also can turn easily into an extended / prepared huge set.

There are as varied drums as there are drummers in the world. I appreciate good quality hardware and lightness, and definitively pay attention to little details in industrial design; BUT the real thing for me is about quality, wide range resonant woods and great metal blends on cymbals and bells.

When it comes to ethnic percussion I am always for the natural-original ones instead of the industrial ones, since I love dense quality craftsmanship and the tonal and sonic textures their instruments can produce, they are more organic and alive to me.

So today, I have really contrasting perspectives set together: my American industrial drum-set and cymbals, and a small world percussion orchestra with djembes, gongs, chinese cymbals, congas, african bells, güiros and maracas, to create a more planetary oriented sound.

Late Rush-drummer Neil Peart said: “The equipment is not an influence. It doesn't affect the way I play. It's an expression of the way I play.” What's your take on that?

Totally agree 50%. Billy Cobham said something similar, and so many of the great model drummers in XX Century Drumming History! But if we look at their history, they have plenty of high quality gear to chose from, and so they grow and so the instrument grows as a way of their natural expression.

I do believe that the quality of your equipment definitively influences the way you play, just like playing with quality musicians does. Certainly it adds a lot to the way we listen and sculpt our sound, it may not be our sound nor our expression, but it becomes a fundamental element in the equation of who we are as players.

Sound is in us so we can sculpt our sound on anything we have, but as a sculptor, if the artist works with a poor material it may not become as prefect as his vision is, the end piece may crack, or simply won't shine or resonate as powerfully as if it were sculpted with a great quality material. I can play on anything and I can work my sound on “almost everything”. But of course, good quality instruments become a better field of sonic expression of the ways in which I play.

I may add here that the instrument changes with us as us changes the instrument ways of expressing its own sound, and that is to me the most significant influence over the course of time. And yes, it is not the instrument which sounds and expresses who the drummer is, the instrument is us - it is our bodies, and we can take any instrument and turn it into our finest way of expression.

Drumming is an integral part of many cultures, and traditions. Which of these do you draw from in your playing – and why?

All of them. In every culture in each different era and within their geographies there has been development and evolution of the wide diversity of human visions, languages, sense meanings, living experiencing of the world, and in all of them we find the force of the Diaspora spirit voice and human transformation. And all of that has been accompanied by drumming.

I cannot afford to have all the instruments I would love to work with nor traveling around the planet to learn and play them all, nor can I learn the specific techniques needed in order to do justice to the cultures they belong to; but I have extracted different and subtle elements I find interesting and in resonance with my own vision and way of drumming.

I have nourished myself from so varied sources of drumming and percussion musics; really radical forms like White American Experimental Composers conception of percussion sound together with the raw percussive drive of Casamance bougarabou improvised drumming.

I can for example, perform some polyrhythmic patterns out of African forms and put them within a much more open non cyclic phrasing of a free style way of playing like lets say, Tony Oxley or Beaver Harris. It is all about the perspective and compositional process we have.



African drumming has been a major force since I have memory (even before I began drumming I was break dancing to those boogaloo beats and African rooted patterns) and its root-origin connection through the Diaspora in America percussive rhythm through the Afro-American / Black-American drumming history.

What were some of the main challenges in your development as a drummer / percussionist? Which practices, exercises, or experiences were most helpful in reaching your goals?

I was in trouble all the time to find good learning environments and apprenticeship experiences; at least in the way I wanted and felt I needed. I was always jumping from one environment to another looking and searching for what I wanted; and the main problem was of course to know what I really wanted!

Being an original-creative minded-spirit individual is not that fun in terms of finding our own ways and fulfilling our true needs, it takes longer sometimes than developing within the mainstream of your time. My natural need for change and moving forward, that was probably the hardest and the main challenge of all time. Somehow, it is still now.

I was very fortunate to grow up in an artistic family. The earliest percussion music I got to listen was "Zyklus" by German composer K. Stockhausen, along with E. Varèse and I. Xenakis, to name a few; so growing up with all those works of XX Century Percussion Musics in my head allowed me to have a more solid perspective on what I want because I hear it in my head. At the time I started studying classical orchestral percussion and American drum-set, I already had a clear idea of what I wanted to become.



I did as much diverse practices as I could (and I am still today) around my craft; always exploring, researching, creating stuff around musically, instrumentally and experientially. Traveling and getting exposed to the right experiences (not the easiest nor comfortable ones most of the time) has proven to be the most helpful in terms of developing challenges through my path. Still working on my goals!

What do you think you're doing different than other drummers?

I have aways cultivated a strong identity of myself; probably the construction of my way of thinking and sensing too, integrating and composing new perspectives and directions; building a more diverse pattern of language and a percussive syntax within the modes of performative operation and the established models.

I would not say I am doing anything different than others, but in the way I proceed and lead myself, I manifest differently through my drumming; utilizing those pattern languages (architecturally) already built in history and blending them together in my very own way of sensing and understanding. I trust my way of knowing things and keep trustfully to it as much as I can.

Detaching from the concept of “having a style” or “being from a school”  has been quite a thing. I never followed or fully imitated anyone 100% in order to learn a “style of playing in the same way that everybody does” or “being accepted”, nor much less copying someone else's way in order to “get the gig”; but I was always concerned with offering other ways of listening, different approach to playing techniques and perspectives of communicating musical thought; being always aware and self inquiring about the present, the past, and the future of drumming.

I love history and as such I am an ongoing eternal apprentice, I simply synthesize things I get caught and motivated by to study and develop them in my own way.  Then I blend together whatever results from that re-synthesis and my music is right there.

Different drums have a distinct sound and drums and percussion are also timbral instruments. What drum sound are you aiming for and how are you making use of the timbral potentials and possibilities of your instruments?

I am always in search of a rich and wide range of the multitimbral potentialities and complementarities within my instruments; the sonic qualities and the way I consciously and unconsciously respond to it, at the level of emotions, feelings, and kinetically. I want a sound that speaks on its own and tells its story. It informs my touch and my listening, and hopefully informs in a rich way the music I'm playing so I can communicate something unique to the audience.

I aim to create a sound that calls on people to listen to something beyond what they may be used to hearing, a call for a different perspective on the overused sonic ecology we have become familiar with. I want to create a timbral nuance and dynamism that stays in the auditory memory of people. Tuning in weird ways with full open range of harmonics, assembling a divergent set of instruments together, modulating my attacks in as many imaginable forms, etc.

All those are possibilities I explore to create my sound.  

In relation to drumming, Stewart Copeland said: “Listening is where the cool stuff comes from. And that listening thing, magically, turns all of your chops into gold.” What do you listen for?

That is the magic for sure; music exists because we listen, not just hear it like other mammals. I listen for the space-silence where sounds are put together; I listen to how sounds blend together and create something which escapes prefixed ideas of what I think I want to be heard. I listen for the place on which other people may be listening too but actively listening in a way that I may produce the magical moment.

I do listen and want to listen deeply beyond what it is sounding in my head so within that range of meaning I come closer to the actual sound produced; I listen to its content and its pure sense (of sound). I listen for how the experience is evolving and where it is taking me to, where it is taking (us) (me creating it and every possible listener who is going with me); are we going somewhere … together? And if so, Where are we really going?…

I listen for the energy (resonance sensory response) and motion-emotion (kinetic and emotional states) my drumming is moving within the musical space-situation-condition I am in; what it creates and how it may be perceived within the acoustics envelope the music is creating. I listen for the possible places that have not been visited yet and listen to what those places may be willing to offer me to take and use, so I get something unique to share.

I mostly listen to what the other is “saying” and trying to respond in a way that complements and expands the sense meaning of what it is that is being said. And so on …

Do you feel that honing your compositional / songwriting skills has an effect on your drumming skills?

Absolutely. It has always been a creative loop feeding me back, on and on, back and forth.

A new composition comes from experiences I have and is always manifesting through my drumming, and a new state of needs in my drumming becomes a new departure place from the place I am in the now with my composing. So a new story comes; a new poem rises.

I cannot conceive drumming without composing and vice versa. Drumming itself is composition. When I think of composing on the drums, some melody rises, and so a kind of harmony emerges from it.

The compositional process is a whole, a never ending path of researching into the unknown.