Expanded Bio:

Preston Swirnoff is a multidisciplinary artist, musician, and composer. Over the past 30 years he has worked across music performance, sound art, and installation to explore the acoustic and visual qualities of physical spaces, with particular attention to the immediacy of live and time-based performance. This focus on sound as an active, demanding inquiry was formed by singing Jewish liturgical music as a child and training in classical piano, all to be shaken up vigorously with the punk, free jazz, literature, and visual art that shaped his path growing up.

Swirnoff’s music works through experimental compositions, graphic scores, and structured improvisation, drawing on electroacoustics, avant rock, choral and chamber writing, folk song forms, sustained tones, and spectral techniques. His approach to music has become less concerned with traditional performances in concert venues and more centered on an interdisciplinary site-specific practice that traces how sound and space intersect with cultural memory and presence. The event becomes a dialogue that centers on process, materials, perception, and attention, often using multiple sensory stimuli simultaneously.

Swirnoff’s debut solo album, Maariv: Four Electroacoustic Compositions, was released by Last Visible Dog in 2008. His long-running collaboration with Ilya Monosov includes a four-LP set as Monosov Swirnoff on Eclipse Records (2003–2007) and releases as the rock duo The Shining Path on Holy Mountain, Trensmat, and others. His interpretations of music by Brazilian composer Dorival Caymmi were released as a limited series of 7” singles, Haunted Sea Songs of Bahia — an attempt to find out what those songs still carry when sung far from Bahia. His most recent 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 premiered two new works — Galut/Exile and Three Drops in the Mother’s Ocean — at concert installations in Sofia, Bulgaria, and Agrigento, Sicily. In 2025, solo performances and installations with electric guitar, light, and electronics took him to Corsica, Paris, Zagreb, and Athens. A music-and-text collaboration with cellist Charles Curtis, D I S T A N S, is slated for release in late 2026 as an LP and book.

Swirnoff’s collaborative cross-border project NEW TONGUES, founded in 2023 with sound artist Xareni Lizárraga and violist Kathia Rudametkin, with a rotating cast of guests, plays with experimental song forms within art happenings, using field recordings, homemade instruments, sound sculptures, open compositions, and group interplay. NEW TONGUES has performed at Jacumba Hot Springs, Bread and Salt in San Diego, Quint Gallery in La Jolla, and various music and art festivals.

Preston’s recent work has centered on composing for voice, chamber ensembles, solo instruments, and electronics in both architectural and natural settings, including commissions from the Plein Soleil Festival in Corsica, the Singapore Biennale, and the Scent +u Art Festival in Riga, Latvia. He has led installation performances with small choirs in Paris and San Diego, and a commissioned choral piece on the banks of the Smith River in Northern California, written to hang over the water like a static fog: weather the audience could sit inside of, watching from boats. Upcoming work includes a six-channel sound installation at the Singapore Biennale, Odophonics for Choir and Scent with artist Brian Goeltzenleuchter, and a multi-version chamber and cassette work for the Islands of Conviviality festival on the Adriatic islands of Croatia.

Swirnoff has performed, exhibited, and collaborated at Tate Modern, LACMA, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, DWARS Amsterdam, MACBA Barcelona, MCASD, MoMA PS1, UCLA, UC San Diego, the Niterói Contemporary Art Museum in Rio, Le CENTQUATRE in Paris, the Indonesian Institute of the Arts in Denpasar, Momus Experimental Center for the Arts, Castello Maniace in Sicily, and Kunstencentrum in Belgium, among others. Recent visual art has been shown in Thessaloniki, Sicily, Sofia, Oaxaca, Corsica, and Rio.

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