What’s the state of experimental music today?

“California,” composer Charles Amirkhanian says, laughing. “It’s happening here. Occasionally we’ll let in someone from New York — or Norway. But we don’t have any problems finding material.”

Amirkhanian has long mastered the art of creating a home for the avant-garde. 

As the co-founder of Other Minds, a leading nonprofit and record label dedicated to noncommercial music, and as the former music director of KPFA, he’s spent decades championing composers who push beyond conventional boundaries. He also has cultivated an audience willing to follow them there through Other Minds’ annual festival, which brings freewheeling musicians and sound poets from around the world to San Francisco.

“We’re trying to make sure that there’s a home for out-there music, the stuff that’s not commercially viable, but is exciting and experimental and pushes things forward,” Bohigian says. “We want to serve that small but dedicated audience.”

“And the composers who make the music,” Amirkhanian adds.   

Other Minds Executive and Artistic Director Charles Amirkhanian and Associate Director Joseph Bohigian chat at their offices in the David Brower Center in Berkeley on Sept. 17, 2026.  (Beth LaBerge/KQED)

Two kindred spirits, born half a century apart

On a cloudy Thursday, Amirkhanian and Bohigian sit together in Other Minds’ downtown Berkeley office, surrounded by stacks of CDs and a bust of legendary 20th-century Bay Area new music composer Henry Cowell (“the godfather,” Amirkhanian says). Through the glass windows, cars and passersby screech and blare from below, making their own kind of experimental music.

It’s a fitting soundtrack for an organization whose mission is, in part, to listen differently.   

Despite a nearly half-century age gap, Amirkhanian and Bohigian are kindred spirits. Both of them are percussionists, steeped in a tradition that includes iconoclastic musicians like Cowell, Lou Harrison and others. And both are Armenians from Fresno, the agricultural city in California’s heartland which is home to one of the oldest and most vibrant Armenian diasporas in the U.S. Both have drawn on their heritage in their work in forward-thinking ways.

The two first met in 2011 when Bohigian was a freshman at Fresno State University. Amirkhanian was doing a guest performance at the Fresno New Music Festival, and guest-lectured in one of Bohigian’s music classes. At the festival, the students performed an octet Amirkhanian had written as part of a career-long fascination with the noisiest percussion instrument: the ratchet. 

Other Minds Associate Director Joseph Bohigian holds a program for the Other Minds Festival at the organization’s offices in the David Brower Center in Berkeley on Sept. 17, 2026. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)

Reviving the legacy of an Armenian auteur

Bohigian’s latest work will premiere Thursday on the opening night of this year’s Other Minds festival. He will debut I Am He Whose Life and Soul Are Torment, an evening-length multimedia performance inspired by the life of Soviet-Armenian auteur Sergei Parajanov.

Bohigian’s composition draws from Parajanov’s abstract 1969 film, The Color of Pomegranates, about the 18th-century bard Sayat-Nova, who sang in Armenian, Georgian and Azeri — the languages of the region. The film was released four years before the director was jailed by the USSR for homosexuality and sentenced to hard labor. 

The piece brings together Sayat-Nova’s folk music  — performed by Bay Area wind instrumentalist and vocalist Khatchadour Khatchadourian — with the electronic music tradition that Bohigian is immersed in, to illustrate scenes from Parajanov’s life. 

Bohigian describes the piece as theatrical, involving staged visual elements and costumes in addition to the electronics and vocals.

On Sunday, Amirkhanian will also be performing a song he composed when he was 18: “Sonatina for Four Bass Drums, Op. 4.”

“I thought it’d be fun to dredge something up from the past,” he muses.

Other Minds Executive and Artistic Director Charles Amirkhanian at the organization’s offices in the David Brower Center in Berkeley on Sept. 17, 2026.  (Beth LaBerge/KQED)

Finding the ‘other minds’

Amirkhanian also grew up in Fresno, in a household steeped in classical music.

His mother and her three sisters were all classical pianists. Because Fresno sits roughly halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, musicians traveling between the two cities would sometimes stop there, giving Amirkhanian opportunities to encounter performers and music that might otherwise have passed him by.

One day his father brought home a 78 rpm record with an Armenian rug pictured on the cover and two Armenian names: Alan Hovhaness and Maro Ajemian. Thinking it was an Armenian folk album, he bought it for the family. It turned out to be one of John Cage’s early commercial releases.

Cage’s approach to sound opened another world for Amirkhanian. He remembered a piano altered with screws, erasers and other objects inserted among its strings.

“My mother told him to take it back to the shop,” Amirkhanian recalls. “But the shop would not take it back.”

The record stayed, and set Amirkhanian on a lifelong path toward “all the sounds that you could incorporate into music.”

Cage, who died in 1992, also inspired the festival’s name, thanks to a dismissive New Yorker obituary of the artist that says: “His epitaph might read that he composed music in other peoples’ minds.” 

Other Minds Executive and Artistic Director Charles Amirkhanian (left) and Associate Director Joseph Bohigian chat at their offices in the David Brower Center in Berkeley on Sept. 17, 2026.  (Beth LaBerge/KQED)

Other Minds’ electronic futures

Today, Other Minds’ Berkeley office houses an archive of roughly 4,000 audio tapes from the earliest days of KPFA. The record label releases music that might struggle to find a home elsewhere, particularly work that is too experimental or noncommercial for larger labels. The organization also has a two-hour program on KALW.

Other Minds now also has a holiday in San Francisco. Mayor Daniel Lurie last week proclaimed Oct. 2, 2026 as Other Minds Day, in recognition of its 30th anniversary and the festival’s enduring contribution to San Francisco’s cultural life.

Both men are surprisingly optimistic about the future, even as artificial intelligence begins to reshape the way music is made and consumed. Amirkhanian notes that we’re already “surrounded by dangers: politically, culturally — and we’re going to get through it.”

Other Minds Festival takes place Oct. 8–11 at Brava Theater in San Francisco.