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Interview
Casual Decay is the primary alias for Portland-based Jon Nasrallah. Although originally from Nashville, Jon has laid deep roots in the PNW.
As a facilitator with Portland's nonprofit Synth Library, Jon provides access to an array of hardware synthesizers and shares his skills as an educator with the community by leading workshops on modular synthesis.
Through the alias Casual Decay, Jon explores organically evolving sonic textures inspired by ecological and cellular processes, just as comfortable improvising beneath tress in public parks as they are carefully scoring for film.
Although mainly focused on Casual Decay, Jon can also be found conjuring gritty and abrasive new wave and electro inspired music as Thinking Spell, and when DJing rather than live performing, it's DJ Tropical Goth.
Each of these identities represents a different facet of an adept musician, whose expressions knows few limits. It's a pleasure to share Jon's work, and catch up with them here.
Can share how your move, essentially from coast to coast, influenced you creatively?
I've lived in quite a few places! I grew up in Jacksonville, FL and went to FSU in Tallahassee for college. Tallahassee had a really great punk / indie rock scene that I was heavily involved with during college. I wasn't performing original music at the time but it's where I discovered the DIY ethos that I still carry with me to this day. I cut my teeth booking my first shows, making CDs and merch for local bands and even organizing a couple of multi-day festivals.
After graduating college I spent a few years in upstate New York working at an industrial research facility. I was living in Troy, NY which wasn't exactly a cultural hub although Lord knows we tried! I had quite a lot of free time and a not particularly huge social circle so it ended up being a great place to dive deep into my own composition work with Casual Decay. Given my punk background I was pretty fearless about the early Casual Decay shows. I started performing live less than a year after first picking up a synthesizer and figuring out how to write some of my own music. I’m glad those shows aren’t archived particularly well because I firmly believe that the only way to be good at an art form is to allow yourself to be bad at it first!
Nashville was really where I came into my own as a live performer. Nashville is the kind of city where you can throw a rock and hit a classically trained musician. I'm so fortunate that I got to play with so many extremely talented musicians while living there. At one point before COVID I was juggling 3 bands at the same time while also still playing solo shows as Casual Decay. Nashville has always been a really solid city for rock bands of just about any kind. And of course if you want to write pop music or mainstream country it's a great industry town. For electronic music though, particularly experimental stuff it was a scarcer scene. I went to a lot of rock shows but I never really went out dancing when I lived in Nashville. The punk band I played in called Distend was really the only band that had any sort of "fan base" or foothold in Nashville. We did a couple of decently successful DIY tours and put out a few EPs and singles.
Moving to Portland was such a wonderful shot in the arm for my creativity. In a lot of ways it really felt like the first time I had an engaged audience for my work! A particularly memorable early show for me in the post-COVID era was a local ambient show at The Old Church with Amulets and Moss Wand. I was totally floored that a local ambient show could even *happen* in a room that size, much less happen for a full room and an enthusiastic audience. It was really a moment that gave me permission to swing for the fences with my work. I’ve since been lucky enough to perform twice at the Old Church as Casual Decay and those are two of my favorite shows I’ve ever played. I also have started to find my footing as a DJ and have found myself appreciating club culture on the west coast in a way that I never did back east.
I taught myself how to DJ in Upstate New York but it was never much of a priority in New York or Tennessee. Portland has such a welcoming community of dancers and adventurous / experimental listeners though and it feels like a much better fit for my tastes. I love the way dancers in this town are really willing to lock-in and engage with long-form sets from DJs. I want to shout out a few of my favorite spaces to play and attend shows: Process PDX, Mississippi Studios, Holocene, Azoth, The Old Church, The Coffin Club, Turn Turn Turn! We have no shortage of wonderful venues in town.
Do you have a favorite part of working with the Synth Library?
Oh god, this is such a selfish answer but I think if I'm being honest my favorite part is just how much access I have to extremely fun and inspiring gear. There's 3 pretty sizable modular synths that are permanent fixtures at the library and two of them I know quite well and have made lots of lovely sounds on. That third case is waiting for me one day but so far I haven't had the brain capacity to learn it yet. There's also an entire video synthesis section where I can easily spend hours hypnotizing myself.
My less selfish answer would be that I just love the community that has formed around the library. Everyone who spends time at the library is so intelligent and thoughtful and creative! I’m glad I’ve found a good crossover of STEM / Art people over there! Just the other day I was working on an ambient patch on one of the large modular systems and I overheard a fascinating conversation on the nature of electromagnetism and charged electrons, I felt like I was back in college again!
As an educator, what is your teaching philosophy, and what does teaching offer you?
Julia Cameron (author of the Artist's Way) has this lovely affirmation: "My creativity heals myself in others" and I so firmly believe that to be true. Additionally I think it's true for everyone! Your creativity heals yourself and others. I try to approach all of my arts education through this lens. Anything I can do to help unlock my student's innate creativity truly is a healing act and a net positive for the world.
Additionally, something I learned pretty quickly while studying for my biochemistry degree was that teaching someone else is the best way to master a subject. I've seen my own musical skills advance much faster in the areas where I get to teach others.
Can you describe your process for imitating nature through synthesis?
I am fascinated with understanding the underlying mathematical and physical processes that result in order and harmony emerging from chaos in nature. I often use random sequences and noise to approximate the chaos of the natural world and then use delays, filters and resonance to emphasize the naturally underlying harmonic order. I also find mixing multiple unsync’d LFOs to modulate the same parameter can frequently lead to really organic and unpredictable results. And of course sampling and processing field recordings as a starting point also leads to plenty of rich sound design experiments.
I'm curious how this compares or contrasts to your film scoring projects?
Film scoring often starts with the same raw materials and compositional processes but I am reacting to the emotional narrative of the media. In many ways I feel similarly to DJing in front of an audience of dancers as I do about a film score. It becomes very intuitive and "obvious" what my next move should be based on the environment I am reacting to and the emotions I am trying to invoke. My music leans pretty expressionistic and can hit some ambiguous melodic territory while I'm much more focused on harmony than melody. I've found that I can be nudged back into more traditional structure and melodic resolution when I’m given something to react to. I actually found creating this mix somewhat difficult because of the lack of external feedback to react to, but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out!
With the launch of your event series HARDWARE, I'm curious what your priorities are with community organizing at this moment in time?
I have two main missions with Hardware. First and foremost Hardware is an outlet that I can use to encourage the typical "lone wolf" electronic producer types to get out of their shell and collaborate with others. I really want to destroy the myth of the electronic music producer as a single artist with a laptop and maybe some outboard gear. We can learn so much from each other! I also think that some solo electronic producers have unfortunately lost the art of listening and reacting in real time and are more or less playing their live sets “on rails.” An improvisational jam forces us to spend just as much energy listening as our audience does!
The other goal of course is to throw a banging party! We are hoping to keep doing the party quarterly, with a different lineup of collaborators every time we do it. I want Hardware to be a space where people come knowing they are going to hear music that they’ve never heard before and will never hear again. Like all good improvisational events, it really is about listening to the journey unfold in real time. It's a place for those adventurous Portland listeners and dancers that I keep talking about :)
What role is music playing for you in the context of the world today?
It doesn't feel like an exaggeration to say that music is one of the few things providing any sort of hope for me these days. I've had a pretty tough winter for my mental health and of course watching the fascist destruction of our country in real time has played a large part in that. Continuing to stay disciplined with my artistic practice has been a huge act of faith in a pretty trying time and I'm proud of myself for the work I've been able to accomplish this year during a pretty harsh season of life.
I've been splitting my listening mostly between ambient, Latin club music and old school emo / indie rock stuff that I've been listening to since I was 15 years old or so. Something about the Trump era has been getting back in touch with my inner emo teenager and that's been a fun journey. I've got Dear You by Jawbreaker in my CD player in my car right now and Accident Prone in particular has been on repeat. Outside of my emo car rides DJ Python, Nick León and Sofia Kourtesis have been getting a lot of plays.
Is there anything else that you would like to share?
Community is everything.
Don't let the bastards get you down :)
For more from Casual Decay and their associate projects, follow them here:
Tune in to the broadcast of this episode on March 27th at 8pm PST via our host station Samewave Radio.