Rafiq Bhatia: Environments

Presented by Liquid Music and 2220 Arts
Wed, Jun 10, 8 pm PDT
2220 Arts + Archives
Los Angeles, CA

Liquid Music and 2220 present the LA premiere of Environments from celebrated composer, guitarist, and sound artist Rafiq Bhatia, accompanied by Ian Chang and Riley Mulherkar.

In the past year, Bhatia released his EP Each Dream, A Melting Door, a collaboration with pianist Chris Pattishall, and the full-length release Environments, his first solo release since co-scoring 2023’s Academy Award-winning Best Picture, Everything Everywhere All At Once. A collaboration with trumpeter Riley Mulherkar and Bhatia’s Son Lux-bandmate, drummer Ian Chang, Environments finds the trio improvising to conjure worlds of sound that bloom, melt, crackle and combust.

About the Artists

The New York Times  proclaims “Rafiq Bhatia is writing his own musical language,” heralding him as “one of the most intriguing figures in music today.” A guitarist, producer, and Academy Award-nominated composer “who refuses to be pinned to one genre, culture or instrument,” Bhatia makes sculptural, meticulously crafted music that finds common ground among ecstatic avant-garde jazz, mournful soul, fractured beats and building-shaking electronics. “He treats his guitar, synthesizers, drum machines and electronic effects as architectural elements,” the Times writes. “Sound becomes contour; music becomes something to step into rather than merely follow.” 
 
Bhatia’s first LP for Anti- Records, 2018’s Breaking English, has been described as “stunningly focused...a vibrant new instrumental sound world where crushing beats, nimble guitar licks, and shifting electronic textures coalesce with a visceral bite” (Chicago Reader). His subsequent release, 2020’s Standards Vol. 1 EP, renders repertoire from the American songbook “completely deconstructed, infused with brand new textures and electronic effects, dreamlike and beautiful” (BBC). In 2025 he presents EP Each Dream, A Melting Door, a collaboration with pianist Chris Pattishall, and the full-length release Environments, his first solo release since co-scoring 2023’s Academy Award-winning Best Picture, Everything Everywhere All At Once. A collaboration with trumpeter Riley Mulherkar and Bhatia’s Son Lux-bandmate, drummer Ian Chang, Environments finds the trio improvising to conjure worlds of sound that bloom, melt, crackle and combust.
 
In the five years since his last solo release, Bhatia has collaborated with a beguiling breadth of artists with little in common other than their iconoclastic outputs. As a member of the experimental pop outfit Son Lux, together with whom he earned Oscar and BAFTA nominations for their head-spinning Everything Everywhere  score, Bhatia has worked with David Byrne, André Benjamin, and Mitski. On Blue, Bhatia’s collaboration with Thai master director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, was recently performed live by Alarm Will Sound during back-to-back nights at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House, while the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater internationally toured a twenty minute work set to selections from Bhatia’s 2020 EP, Standards Vol. I. Since its release, Bhatia has continued to deepen his engagement with jazz, appearing alongside Ambrose Akinmusire, Dave Douglas, Ganavya, James Brandon Lewis, and Samora Pinderhughes in addition to producing arresting debut records for Pattishall and trumpeter Riley Mulherkar. 
 
As a composer, Bhatia has been commissioned by the Kronos Quartet, Walker Art Center, Public Records, the Kennedy Center, Jennifer Koh, Liquid Music Series, National Sawdust, Newfields, The Jazz Gallery, Toledo Museum of Art, and more. A voracious collaborator working across musical communities and artistic disciplines, Bhatia has also created with Arooj Aftab, Holland Andrews, Michael Cina, Teju Cole, Sam Dew, Billy Hart, Marcus Gilmore, Shahzad Ismaily, Vijay Iyer, Glenn Kotche, Okkyung Lee, Qasim Naqvi, Helado Negro, Kassa Overall, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Valgeir Sigurðsson, Alex Somers, Moses Sumney, Rajna Swaminathan, Kiah Victoria, David Virelles and others. He has contributed to recordings on Brownswood, City Slang, ECM, Glassnote, Greenleaf Music, Joyful Noise, New Amsterdam, RCA and Temporary Residence Ltd. 
 
Bhatia is a Jerome Foundation Composer/Sound Artist Fellow, and a former artist-in-residence at Duke Performances. He has been invited to speak by the National Gallery of Art, Big Ears Festival, Berklee College of Music, Melbourne International Jazz Festival and IUPUI, and is currently adjunct faculty of the New School’s Performer-Composer Master of Music program. His music is published in association with Domino Publishing Company. 
 
A native of North Carolina, Bhatia lives in Brooklyn, New York. 

When Academy Award and BAFTA-nominated musician, composer, and producer Ian Chang describes his creative process, the phrase "third culture” keeps coming up. Born in the colony of Hong Kong in 1988, Chang has lived a nomadic life. Stationed out of New York for 10 years and since relocated to Mexico City, he built an impressive roster of progressive pop collaborators such as Moses Sumney, Joan As Policewoman, and Matthew Dear, among others, all while performing internationally and recording as a member of Landlady and experimental trio Son Lux. Having scored A24’s Best Picture winner Everything Everywhere All at Once for which they were nominated for two Academy Awards and a BAFTA, Son Lux's latest film venture is for Marvel Studios, scoring 2025’s Thunderbolts* and the upcoming thriller Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother. In addition to his work as a solo musician, Chang’s solo scoring ventures include Forge (a SXSW 2025 premiere), Good Boy, and and work with EA.

Chang’s debut full-length record 属 Belonging was released in April 2020 via City Slang. Chang's magic starts with his method: from an improvised foundation of sampled percussion, he follows the innate logic of a musical conversation, allowing his compositional forms to reveal themselves. The album's three vocal features - Kazu (Blonde Redhead), Kiah Victoria and Hanna Benn - weren’t anticipated at the project's outset; they arose like friendships, unpredictably complex and increasingly rare, a consequence of Chang's ubiquitous receptivity. Whereas on his EP Spiritual Leader (2017) Chang limited himself to capturing unedited performances without overdubs, on this release the percussionist expands his palate, burrowing deeper into a layered, symphonic subconscious. Consequently, Chang's formidable growth as a producer is on display. Reflecting the album's bottom-up, performance-as-composition construction, his music conveys an intuitive sense of wholeness, carrying its experimental ethos without pretense. The resulting album unfolds like a confessional exploration, complicating the lines between rhythm and melody, modernity and antiquity, exuberance and meditation.

On 属 Belonging, the sense that nothing is planned yet all falls into place allows us to reconsider what we really need in order to belong. In his willingness to start over again and again, to let the music guide him (instead of the other way around), Chang reveals a home without boundary. 属 Belonging introduces a musical contradiction: complete yet ever-evolving, neighborly yet global, precise yet instinctive, familiar yet innovative.

Chang lives and works in Mexico City.

Riley Mulherkar is a founding member of The Westerlies and in 2024 released his debut album Riley, hailed as “über hip, modern yet timeless…one of the best debut records to come out in a long, long time” (DownBeat).

The GRAMMY-nominated trumpeter has had audiences on their feet since he was in middle school, a prodigious and disciplined player soaking up everything he could from Seattle's unexpectedly rich and rooted jazz community. Playing under legendary band directors Robert Knatt and Clarence Acox prepared him for The Juilliard School, where he quickly found a musical home with Jazz at Lincoln Center and its leader, Wynton Marsalis. 

Since, he has played with everyone from Kenny Barron and Dee Dee Bridgewater to Anna Deavere Smith and Alan Cumming, and in 2020 received Lincoln Center’s prestigious Emerging Artist Award for his work as “an original bandleader, composer, arranger, educator, community activist and advocate for jazz and the arts.”

Riley, his opening recorded salvo as a soloist, is the sonically modern setting for Mulherkar’s vulnerable, melodious interpretation of the rich tradition with sound design shaped by producers Rafiq Bhatia and Chris Pattishall. Enveloping Mulherkar within a series of textured, intricately-crafted spaces, Bhatia and Pattishall train a cinematographer’s lens on the continuum of great old songs, as well as new Mulherkar pieces which fit right into a radically bold audio framework for the emotional pronouncements of Riley’s horn.

Riley is an Edwards Artist and performs on Edwards trumpets.