Sound Off with Katy Henriksen
Sound Off with Katy Henriksen features in-depth conversations about music that challenges the status quo—hybrid sounds that fall through the cracks because they aren't easily labeled. Whether it's a classical flute-and-electronic music project that takes on police brutality and race, or a mix of poetry, pop and chamber music, Sound Off explores creativity at the intersection of art, music, and literature, and digs into what that work and the people making it tell us about art and life in the 21st century.
Episodes
August 21, 2025 • 20 mins
Sound Off explores creativity at the intersection of art, music, and literature, to dig into what that work and the people making it tell us about art and life in the 21st century. Today’s guest is Haley Fohr, who makes stunning music as Circuit des Yeux. Her new album “Halo on the Inside" came out on the Matador label this spring. It's a defiant beat heavy exploration of our own humanity. In this conversation between Fohr and Henr...
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July 3, 2025 • 25 mins
Today’s guest is composer Mary Kouyoumdjian who collaborated with the Kronos Quartet to release her first recording. An Armenian-American composer & Pulitzer prize finalist who deftly weaves field recordings to masterful compositions, Witness explores her own family history of surviving the Armenian genocide by moving to Lebanon, also impacted by the ravages of war. The exquisite sounds here are woven in with deeply personal storie...
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May 22, 2025 • 28 mins
Seun Kuti became the bandleader to Egypt 80 as a teenager after the original bandleader, his father, afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti, died. He was filling heavy shoes. Today's Sound Off features a discussion with Seun about the working class struggle, the power of music and his new album Heavier Yet (Lays The Crownless Head) deluxe edition with collaborations with De La Soul, Adi Oasis and Kamasi Washington. Listen in to hear tracks fro...
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May 21, 2025 • 24 mins
The joyfully D.I.Y. 90s band Tsunami recently received the box set treatment from Numero Group. Bandmates Jenny Toomey and Kristin Thomson join Sound Off to recall the “long welcoming shadow” of Discord Records, running their own label Simple Machines and the importance of communities created through music and a strong DIY ethos. We'll also hear some of their music.
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March 27, 2025 • 19 mins
Journalist Liz Pelly joins Sound Off to unpack her new book Mood Machine: On the Rise of Spotify and Costs of the Perfect Playlist. Beyond the fact that Spotify is a tech platform more dedicated to the advertising industry than music, Pelly joins Sound Off to discuss the incentivizing of passive over deep listening and the ways in which the platform itself can be a starting point to looking at systemic issues of hyper-individuality...
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October 26, 2023 • 29 mins
Today’s guest is multidisciplinary artist JJJJJerome Ellis. Through music, text, performance, video, and photography he researches relationships among blackness, disabled speech, divinity, nature, sound, and time. He has a remarkable new solo piano album out this December on NNA Tapes called Compline in Nine Movements. Recorded in one take back in 2017, it’s a longform improvisation on a theme Ellis developed with longtime collabor...
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October 12, 2023 • 24 mins
Today’s guest is harpist Bridget Kibbey, who’s been described as the Yo-Yo Ma of the harp. She has a new album out tomorrow on the wonderful label Pentatone called Crossing The Ocean. She commissioned contemporary composers who span the globe to write music specifically for her resulting in a mesmerizing kaleidoscope of sounds that meld the classical to folkloric traditions.
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September 28, 2023 • 28 mins
Today’s guest is cellist and arts leader Amanda Gookin. Her Forward Music Project, launched in 2015, commissions new multimedia works for solo cello that elevate stories of feminine empowerment through raw performances and educational initiatives. The new music site I Care If You Listen describe it as “a premier example of feminist advocacy done right.” Host Katy Henriksen talks to Gookin all about arts advocacy, trauma, and findin...
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September 14, 2023 • 31 mins
Today’s guest is composer/violist Jessica Pavone, a NYC based artist whose new album Clamor, is out in October. The album, which features string ensemble and bassoon, includes works that are inspired by women’s inventions created out of a desire to circumvent the limitations to their freedoms, including the See Saw, 17th century, Korean women invented the standing see-saw to help them see what lay outside. These women weren’t allow...
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August 31, 2023 • 22 mins
Today’s guest is the South African percussionist Tumi Mogorosi. His album Group Theory: Black Music, out on the label Mushroom Hour Half Hour was one of Katy's favorites in 2022.
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August 17, 2023 • 34 mins
Today's guest is Damon Locks, bandleader for the genre-shattering Black Monument Ensemble. The group released the critically acclaimed album NOW in April of 2021 on the International Anthem label. It’s a viscerally poignant, joyous album created outside in the swelter of Chicago summertime at the height of lockdown, a tumultuous moment that coincided with the national protest movement following the police murder of George Floyd. Fr...
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August 3, 2023 • 33 mins
Today’s guest is pipa virtuoso Wu Man. She’s carved out such an impressive career collaborating with orchestras worldwide and through performing as a founding member of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble and collaborating with the Kronos Quartet. She’s an inspiration in what cross-cultural musical collaborations can be.
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July 20, 2023 • 26 mins
Today's guest is guitarist Kaki King, who lands herself on those 100 top guitarist lists dominated by men. Rolling Stone has described her as “a genre unto herself.” I spoke to her when she released Modern Yesterdays, her 9th studio album, out now on Cantaloupe Records. I can’t wait to share our vibrant discussion on her earliest guitar memories, finding her distinct musical voice and what it’s like to be a female guitar virtuoso i...
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July 6, 2023 • 29 mins
Arooj Aftab discusses her Grammy-winning recording Vulture Prince. Born in Saudi Arabia, Aftab moved back to her parents’ native Pakistan when she was 11 and eventually made her way to Berklee College of Music in Boston, before moving to New York City to find her way as a genre-blurring composer, bandleader and musician. The track “Mohabbat” won Best Global Music Performance in 2022 and also landed on a playlist of Barack Obama’s.
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June 22, 2023 • 34 mins
Luminary Lonnie Holley released Broken Mirror: A Selfie Reflection with Matt White in 2022. The amalgam of afro-futurism and cosmic southern funk make for a rollicking time for a juxtaposition for two artists that make for surprising collaborators. Holley, born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1950, has dedicated his life to improvisational creativity in the form of both sound and visual art. White, a Virginia-based producer and musician...
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June 14, 2023 • 1 min
We're thrilled to bring you a new season, starting June 22nd!
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December 16, 2020 • 22 mins
Spend time with Caroline Shaw and some of her music in Sound Off's season finale. A composer and multi-instrumentalist, Shaw became the youngest person to ever receive a Pulitzer Prize for music for her "Partita for 8 Voices." She was only 30 at the time. Orange, an album with the Attacca Quartet, garnered a Grammy in 2020. A polymath collaborator, she's involved in creating music with so many notable musicians, including the unexp...
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December 3, 2020 • 28 mins
Join host Katy Henriksen for insight into the genre-bending world Oracle Hysterical, a music group whose tagline is part rock band part book club that occupies the fluid space between classically inclined song cycle and art rock concept album. Henriksen speaks with baroque bass/viola da gamba member Doug Balliet about the connection between Schumann's classical song cycle "Dichterliebe" to The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Cl...
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November 19, 2020 • 32 mins
In today's episode of Sound Off I talk with composer, singer and instrumentalist Nathalie Joachim. She's a Julliard-trained flutist, half of the flute & electronics duo Flutronix and creator of the Grammy-nominated Fanm d’Ayiti featuring the Spektral Quartet, an album described by WNYC’s New Sounds host John Schaefer as "a kind of chamber folk electronic celebration of the voices of Haiti.” Learn about how a listening station at To...
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November 5, 2020 • 26 mins
In this episode Katy talks to Anthony McGill, principal clarinetist of the New York Philharmonic. He's the first African-American to hold a principal chair in the orchestra's history. In response to the murder of George Floyd and the protests that erupted surrounding police violence against Black people he launched the #taketwoknees initiative on social media. He’s also in an incredible trio with his brother, flutist Demarre McGill...
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