Fugue State

Bio

Dan Langa (aka Fugue State) is a Northampton, MA-based composer, producer, and co-founder of cmntx records primarily focused on writing electroacoustic music that explores vivid, bold textures.

Langa took home the recordings of his new project eager to splice takes, cut in surreptitious B-roll, and render the performances into something strange and new. This was the work – a graphic novel as inspiration, a killer’s row of studio pros, and a plan to aggressively stir the cauldron, something like contemporary chamber dub. But in reviewing the tape, he came across a voice he couldn’t place. Unintelligible yet distinct, caught at a distance in what seemed to be a room mic, an utterance he couldn’t recognize, otherworldly. That’s odd, he thought. But then, from another day entirely, the same five syllable sound, manifesting this time in the left channel of the piano. And when the same nearly human sound again appeared among peals of woodwinds, he dove deep into the DAW to find it.

Anomalous sounds, sure, okay, nothing unusual for Langa – he’s a working composer and a deep student of contemporary avant garde music, weird noises abound, having studied at Amherst and NYU with greats like Robert Honstein, Eric Wubbels, and Bang on a Can repetition gurus Julia Wolf & Michael Gordon. He’s taken cues from all the great, ghostly spectres of the 20th century, too, like John Cage’s otherworldly tape splicing or John Luther Adam’s uncanny ability to capture Earth spirit lamentations. And Langa is also interested in blurring distinctions and broadening our sometimes narrow ideas about how to imagine music – he’s notably one of the four composers behind CMNTX a by-artists-for-artists record label putting out really remarkably novel music. Through the effort, he’s both released and helped realize a smattering of fascinating, leftfield releases.

But here’s the thing about that eerie, unaccounted-for sound in these sessions: when Langa zoomed in on the track, the computer readout showed nothing out of the ordinary. And when he tried to play the sound back, it could not be replicated. It had disappeared. Was his computer glitching? Was he hallucinating? Was there something living in the walls? He ventured deeper, digital bit by bit, turning .WAVs inside out, slowing down, stretching out, and deleting, a process that rendered the remaining music nearly unrecognizable, more mangled and manipulated than he could have ever planned. Whatever spirit he sought had flown. And the process of hunting for it? Now also a mystery. He ran an audio gauntlet in search and could not retrace his steps. Up until that moment, the project lacked a name, so why not describe that to which he had succumbed? Fugue State, a method, a christening.

The project isn’t necessarily credited to Langa alone, nor is the project a traditional ensemble exactly, though he works with an impressive collection of New York City musicians, including the proliferous Shahzad Ismaily, noted vocalist in the gamelan tradition Peni Candra Rini, and New Music figure William Brittelle, whose work with Roomful of Teeth and with the New Amsterdam label make places him in a particular current-decade pantheon. Fugue State as an entity has more to do with the process, a tearing-apart-the-house, if you will. An aural Gordon Matta-Clark. The project’s first release is a spectral song cycle that lives in the Venn Diagram overlap of saxophone ambient, crumbling art song, and elegantly fried motherboard remixes. Named “After Nothing Comes” for the Aidan Koch graphic novel that is its original source material, the album will see release on Switch Hit Records – another artist collective – Spring 2026. The haunting, then the hunting, after nothing comes.

Langa has received recognition from the ASCAP Foundation, Ucross Foundation, Du Vert à L’Infini Festival, RED NOTE New Music Festival, Hot Air Music Festival, Fire Island National Seashore, I-Park Foundation, So Percussion Summer Institute, Bang On A Can Summer Festival, Fresh Inc Festival, The Ear Competition, Amherst College, New York University, and the University of South Carolina Spark Laboratory. He has held teaching positions at Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, and Smith College.

Photo credit: Alex S.K. Brown