The Hobbyist #3: Celia Hollander on Fonts, Chess, & Hikes
The brilliant composer joins the show to discuss secret languages and life as a professor
Graphic design by Thomas Euyang. Check out his work on LinkedIn and Instagram.
I first encountered Celia Hollander’s mysterious and enchanting music way back in 2017, when I interviewed her for Bandcamp Daily in support of DRAFT, a collection of experimental compositions under her $3.33 moniker. I was just a wee lad, green enough as a writer that I used phrases like “In today’s music industry…” and still expected people to take me seriously. Blech.
Scootch on up almost a decade, and Celia Hollander is still making curious, fascinating, beautiful, and delightful work — music fit for a museum, perhaps (More on that below; it’s called foreshadowing! Ever heard of it?). I’m trying to use less clichés. We’re both doing our respective things. Before I forget, take a moment to cue up her 2024 LP, Perfect Conditions (see below) when you’re done reading our conversation. I think it’s the best thing she’s ever done and one of my favorite records from last year. Also, peep that beautiful album art. More on that below, too. There’s a lot of good stuff below. You better keep reading.
I caught up with Celia during a uniquely horrible time in her life. The home she shares with her partner burned down in the Altadena fires, so she was Zooming from the California desert where she’s staying with a family member. We spoke a week ago, and she was getting ready to drive into LA to get her car smoke remediated and prepare for a duet show with her partner, who performs under the name Photay (also highly recommend!). Little things like finding input cables and tubes of chapstick became tasks she had to dedicate mental energy towards. These were things she had just a few weeks ago and now they’re gone. It would be surreal if it wasn’t so tragic. During our conversation she said, “Just procuring the necessities is still this epic scavenger hunt. When I start thinking too far ahead, my mind explodes.”
Despite the more pressing needs that were invading her life, Celia was extremely generous with her time and thoughts regarding her creative practice, her hobbies, and life as a professional musician. The entire conversation is illuminating, but there’s one thing I want to highlight, which I found incredibly important. She talked about fighting for her music and time to make her own work while teaching and taking on freelance work. These are words to live by for any artist in any medium. Print this out and paste it to your wall: “I fight to also make my own music…It’s like a protected thing. It’s like a national park. It’s not there by chance. There’s tons of legislation and people fighting for it and it’s cordoned off — protected.”
For those wanting to help with aid for fire recovery, here is the GoFundMe for Hollander and her partner, and here is a directory of GoFundMe pages for displaced Black families from Altadena.
Where do you teach and what’s the name of your course?
Celia Hollander: I teach at Cal Arts. I have one class, a lecture class called Acoustics for Musicians. I also have several private lessons, which range from composition to Ableton Digital audio production.
Did you study composition yourself?
CH: I went to Cal Arts for grad school and I was in a program called Composition and Experimental Sound Practices. I studied architecture as an undergrad at Wesleyan.
Do you enjoy teaching?
CH: Yeah, I really do. I like it because it’s so different from making music. A lot of my work occurs in different ways, like scoring versus making my own music versus performing. Teaching is so different from my computer process world of making music that it’s very social, it’s very verbal, it can be fun, it can be really challenging. It’s a way of sharing music and talking about it and helping people. I really enjoy it.
How do you balance teaching versus hired gigs versus your own music?
CH: I haven’t figured that out. I have this precarious trifecta of teaching as an adjunct professor. It’s a little different every semester. Some semesters I have tons of private lessons. Some semesters I also score. It’s freelancing, so sometimes there’s too much, sometimes there’s nothing. And then I fight to also make my own music.
It’s a fight, right?
CH: Yeah, it’s a protected thing. It’s like a national park. It’s not there by chance. There’s tons of legislation and people fighting for it and it’s cordoned off — protected. It’s like that.
What’s your writing process like?
CH: It’s playing and then editing. I’ve never written in the sense of notation. Very rarely am I even writing in MIDI or anything like that. It’s doing something and then reflecting on what sounded good and then editing that. It kind of takes the pressure off. Sitting down to write feels like it would be daunting.
How does your writing style, if it does, tie into what you teach at Cal Arts?
CH: I’m really interested in science. I’m really interested in how things work. Being a computer musician, you have to get into the nerdiness of how things work. Sometimes that’s part of the experimentation. In private lessons, what I teach is really dependent on what the student wants to work on or what their practice is. It can range, but I often realize that the advice I give to students is usually what I need.
When you have a moment to breathe, what do you like to do?
CH: Ten minutes before I jumped on this call I thought, “Wait, this is about hobbies. Let me think about that.” I’ve always felt like I’ve had way too many hobbies and then I’ve gone through this process of desperately trying to hone it down and focus. I’ve always admired people who are like, “I’ve been making music my whole life and this is everything that I have to show for it.” I have too many interests and get really spread out. I’ve always wished that I just had one singular funnel for everything. I’ve gotten to this place where I have reduced my hobbies. I’m also in this place where I’ve lost everything and I’m in the desert and my days look really different than they did at any other time. So right now in my free time, I like to walk in the desert.
Did you hike and walk in LA?
CH: The reason that I lived in Altadena is because I lived walking distance to hiking trails in the San Gabriel Mountains. I love backpacking and hiking. I like night hikes, I really love mountains specifically.
What else do you like to do?
CH: I go through really intense phases with hobbies. I really like learning how to do new things, especially if it’s an art technique. In 2019 I got really into dying clothing. All of my clothing was dyed. I was constantly buying only thrifted white clothing and then dyeing them. This past summer I got really into water marbling. The cover of Perfect Conditions is a result of that, actually.
How did you get into water marbling?
CH: At the end of the spring, I started watching YouTube videos of people water marbling to help me go to sleep. When the semester ended, I got all of the supplies to start water marbling and all summer I was just pulling paper all the time. It was a little factory. It feels weird talking about it because all of that stuff is gone now. It feels ephemeral, like, oh yeah, water marbling is a hobby of mine, except I don’t have any of that. It doesn’t feel present for me right now.
Is there anything you’ve embraced since the fires to keep your mind distracted?
CH: I bought paper and micron pens and have been drawing a lot. I don’t know if this is considered a hobby, but I have a font that I made. It’s an uppercase continuous cursive thing. I made it up so that I could write secretly in a journal and no one can read it.
That is definitely a hobby. Do you have a name for it?
CH: I don’t. I should name it. I’ve gotten really into using that as calligraphy or making graphic text with it, really exaggerating how it looks, or literally just writing pages in it.
Was there an impetus behind creating your own font besides having a secret language for yourself?
CH: No, that was it. I wanted to be able to write and not worry.
Has it progressed in its design, or is the form pretty much what it’s always been?
CH: I think it has progressed. I’ve streamlined some things. I lost all my journals, so I have no idea. I have no idea what it used to look like. But yeah, it’s definitely progressed. I’ve also gotten a little lazier in how I write.
Do you have desire to start building up these things again or are you still at the point where you're just so exhausted and heartbroken over everything that you haven't even gotten to that yet?
CH: I haven’t really gotten to that point. Today I’m going back to LA and bringing my car to a very sci-fi company called BioSweep to get it smoke remediated because the car actually survived. My partner and I are performing tomorrow in LA and I’m still focusing on trying to find chapstick and a hat that I can wear to hike in the desert. Just procuring the necessities is still this epic scavenger hunt. When I start thinking too far ahead, my mind explodes. My goal is to have a car. Once I have that, I will think about my next goal. People have been like, “We have vinyl to give you,” and I’m just like, “I don’t live anywhere right now.”
I know you mentioned you recently bought some pens. What do you like to draw besides your font?
CH: I'm always drawing things from my head. I feel like it’s hard for me to speak to anything beyond where I am right now, but I’ve been drawing a lot of ideas for houses, a lot of floor plans — imagining different spaces. I used to draw these chess diagrams, which leads into my other hobby, which I don’t do right now, but chess has been a big deal for me in my life.
I used to be really active in a chess club in LA and went every week. I’m still friends with all of them, but haven't gone so much in the last six months to a year. Chess is definitely a hobby. I hope to play in the clubs again when I get back to LA.
That seems like it takes a lot of focus. It seems strenuous.
CH: Not at all. I only play speed chess. I am not going to just sit and stare at a board for an hour. No way. Speed chess isn’t as intense as it sounds. It’s just putting limitations on time. In that way, it becomes really fun because you can’t overthink it too much and it’s like a fast conversation.
Tell me more about these chess diagrams.
CH: I draw the grid of a chessboard in pencil, and then I’ll take a recorded chess game and draw lines for each chess move. The first set pair of chess moves will be one line, the second chess moves, two lines, then three lines, and so on. Then I erase the grid so it's just all the lines of the chess movements.
Do you work in color or black pen?
CH: Black pen.
I’m a black pen devotee too.
CH: Definitely some color sometimes, but usually as a bold flare instead of an impressionist kind of thing.
Since you’ve been drawing homes, too, when the time comes, would you be interested in building a home?
CH: I feel like that will happen when the money comes. It would be really fun. It’s something that I haven’t thought about for 10 years and then something about all these houses burning down and thinking about where I’d like to live brought me back. I would love to work with an engineer and figure out a house.
Your music is an emotional release for you, I imagine. I’m also guessing your drawing is, to a certain extent, also an emotional release. Are they the same sort of exercise in catharsis, or do they satisfy different parts of your creativity and personality?
CH: I think they’re really different. I worked for artists for most of my twenties, and a lot of my relationship with visual art is more left-brained. Music is more elusive and mysterious and challenging to me. It might be an emotional release, but if I do that successfully, it feels like there is so much trial and error to get to that point, and I still don't exactly know how that’s harnessed. When it works versus when it doesn’t feels a little out of my control. That’s ultimately why I like it and why I’ve devoted myself to it. It does feel like the most emotional art form for me.
It’s unfortunately not viewed that way by many people these days.
CH: I believe that music is art and isn’t treated as such in the museum world, or even in the music world. It's more like entertainment or a commodity. Music should be in museums the same way that film is. My ideal is that museums would have a dedicated listening room with rotating DJs. It would be like a screening, but a place to listen to music that is archived or in the ownership of the museum. For some reason, music is art in performance only — and that’s only sometimes the case.
How do you balance music as both your source of income and your artistic practice?
CH: Well, that was a goal of mine. That was why I went to grad school for music because I was working for artists and then making music outside of that. I wanted to condense my work. I wanted to funnel everything. I wanted to be more focused and not be doing five different things every day. The goal was to have music be my income. Now that I’m here, I’m like, how do I balance it? I don’t know.
A little more about walking…Do you listen to music when you’re hiking?
CH: Never. That’s something I did when I was in high school and I think it’s dangerous. Running on the street and listening to music is dangerous. I listen to a lot of music. I’m listening to it when I drive, when I cook, when I’m making music, when I’m listening to students' music. The point of being out there is to not be here.
Are you a runner too?
CH: I used to be a really obsessive long distance runner. I do run sometimes. I really like endurance. I like long hikes. I like long walks. I like running too, but I’m not in the shape or habit of long distance running.
Is that a part of your life you're comfortable saying goodbye to?
CH: It’s complicated. I was a deeply obsessive long distance runner. I have a good capacity to push myself through lots of pain physically, which was good for long distance running. Now, though, my goal is to listen to my pain instead of running through it.