Preston Swirnoff is a multidisciplinary artist, composer, musician, and writer based in San Diego, California. Over the past 25 years he has worked in a wide range of genres and mediums to create an extensive discography, with a long history of performances and exhibitions worldwide. Working with music performance, sound art, installations using light, sculpture, and textiles, Swirnoff often creates site-specific works that explore the acoustic and visual qualities of physical spaces, engaging the intimacy of primary experience. This focus on radical presence with sound was formed by singing religious music as a child and training in classical piano, all to be shaken up vigorously with the punk, free jazz, literature, and art-music that shaped his path growing up.

The common thread that runs through his work is the unbroken chain between our forgotten history and the challenge of being present today. Swirnoff’s music engages the phenomenological aspects of sound in space through an exploration of sonority on different instruments, using open compositions and graphic scores. Structured improvisation, sustained tones, durational works, and spectral techniques are regular features of his music. Preston’s solo and collaborative projects have toured across North America, South America, Europe, and Asia. He has composed music for choir, small ensembles, film, art installations, and dance.

Preston’s solo album debut Maariv: Four Electroacoustic Compositions was released by Last Visible Dog in 2008. His long-running collaboration with Ilya Monosov has included a 4 LP set on as Monosov Swirnoff on Eclipse Records (2003-2007) and releases as their rock duo The Shining Path on Holy Mountain, Trensmat, and others. His performances and intrerpretations of music by Brazilian composer Dorival Caymmi were released as a limited series of 7” singles ‘Haunted Sea Songs of Bahia’. His latest solo LP Crossing the Steppe (Set Spaces, 2021) is a meditation on radical geography and forgotten history, using an array of acoustic instruments and the sonic character of a large warehouse near the train tracks. Elements of musique concrète, dark folk, and oneiric melodies create the sonority of a disorienting, unmappable locale. In 2024, Swirnoff performed several new works planned for upcoming recordings: Galut/Exile and Three Drops in the Mother’s Ocean were performed live at concert installations in Sofia, Bulgaria and Agrigento, Sicily. Preston’s music and text collaboration D I S T A N S with cellist Charles Curtis, is slated for release in early 2026 as LP and book.

Preston’s recent musical output has centered on composing innovative and immersive pieces for voice and electronics in site-specific environments. He has been commissioned to compose new choral works for an upcoming festival of visual art in Corsica, France, lead an installation performance with a small choir in Paris, and to conduct his own piece for choir at nature sites in Northern California. Swirnoff’s compositions for choir work with physical acoustics, voice timbre, and synthetic chords to evoke expansive listening experiences.

He has performed, created sound and visual art installations, and collaborated with other artists at Tate Modern, LACMA, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, DWARS Amsterdam, MACBA Barcelona, MCA San Diego, MOMA PS1 Queens, UCLA Schoenberg Music Building, UC San Diego, Niterói Contemporary Art Museum Rio, Le CentQuatre Paris, Indonesian Institute of the Arts Denpasar, Momus Experimental Center for the Arts, Castello Maniace, Kunstencentrum Belgium, and others. Recent visual art works in 2024 were shown in Thessaloniki, Sicily, Sofia, Oaxaca, and Rio.

Preston is the founder and director of INTERVALS Arts, curating and producing events for contemporary art, music, film, and literature in San Diego and beyond. He serves on the Board of Directors for Center for World Music (founded 1963) helping to direct its concert series at Mingei International Museum.