Chris Schlarb

Chris Schlarb maintains an elusive professional path despite his primary focus on free-form explorations, free jazz, and experimental rock. A Southern California native, he works as a musician, writer, and producer while owning and operating Sounds Are Active, the label he established to champion progressive jazz, experimental music, and electronic works. His collaborations occur often, linking him to Sufjan Stevens, Ikie Owens, Lynn Johnston, Castanets, and additional artists. In 1999 he helped launch the free-form ensemble Create (!) alongside Orlando Greenhill and Steve Richardson. The project has since expanded into a collective exceeding fifty musicians that appears at jazz festivals and conducts Create (!) workshops across Los Angeles County. Four years afterward, Schlarb launched and programmed NOTICE, a sequence of improvisational events blending jazz, electronic music, classical forms, noise rock, hip-hop, and further contemporary styles.

Following the final NOTICE event in 2004, he shifted toward performances and partnerships with installation artists Megan and Murray McMillan for the project 27 Acknowledged and Sanctioned People. That same year he teamed with Tom Steck to establish the free jazz group I Heart Lung, which toured the United States in 2005 alongside Castanets and Wooden Wand & the Vanishing Voice. Also in 2005 Schlarb issued the solo recording Ideas Without Numbers under the alias Xn. His activities broadened further in 2006 when he produced and released the Sean Carnage-directed documentary 40 BANDS/80 MINUTES, which examined Los Angeles’ underground experimental rock community. I Heart Lung delivered its debut full-length album, Interoceans, in 2007; the same year Schlarb presented his second solo effort, Twilight & Ghost Stories, marking the first release under his given name. In 2010 he assembled a twenty-nine-musician ensemble for the expansive Psychic Temple album, drawing inspiration from Bill Laswell’s collective Material to unite disparate performers—including punk bassist Mike Watt and experimental vocalist Juliana Barwick—on extended compositions. Psychic Temple II followed in 2013 as a more pop-oriented successor that interspersed original material with covers of Joe Jackson, Frank Zappa, and Brian Wilson. The comparatively restrained Making the Saint surfaced in 2014, consisting of drony guitar meditations captured inside an isolated cabin.