Charles Amirkhanian’s “Ratchet Attach It” on Other Minds Records
Charles Amirkhanian: Ratchet Attach It
December 12, 2025 as an LP, CD, and digital download
RIYL: George Antheil, Conlon Nancarrow, John Oswald, John Cage, William Russell
SAN FRANCISCO—December 9, 2025—Other Minds is pleased to present Ratchet Attach It by the Bay Area composer and impresario Charles Amirkhanian.
Commissioned by Errollyn Wallen, the UK’s Royal Composer, for the 2021 Spitalfields Festival in London, Ratchet Attach It continues—and crowns—Amirkhanian’s career-long fascination with the noisiest of percussion instruments: the ratchet. “The sound up close of a concert orchestral ratchet can be hair-raising,” Amirkhanian writes in his composer’s notes. “Also, full of bird-chirping-like overtones. I learned this early on by accident while sitting in the enclosed cab of my Volkswagen Bug and turning the handle of this ear-splitting instrument.”
Through eleven movements, Amirkhanian dresses up—and dresses down—the ratchet to explore how percussive noise acts in support of, and in opposition to, melodic accoutrement. “The act of playing this mechanical instrument somehow relates,” says Amirkhanian, “to the mechanism of the player piano, with its constant rotating of the paper roll on which music has been encoded.” Besides percussive support from Dominic Murcott and the Trinity Laban Percussion Ensemble, the work also features prepared piano rolls from Rex Lawson. If you only hear one ratchet-focused composition this year, make it this one!
Ratchet Attach It is out December 12 as an LP, CD, and digital download and is available for pre-order now. The album is available directly from Other Minds, our Bandcamp page, all major digital music outlets, and through our distributors The Business (USA) and SoundOhm (EU).
Charles Amirkhanian, co-founder with Jim Newman in 1992 of Other Minds, is its Executive & Artistic Director. As a composer, he is renowned for his text-sound compositions that employ speech sounds in rhythmic patterns resembling percussion music, with influences from Ernst Toch, Gertrude Stein, Steve Reich, and Clark Coolidge. He also composes electroacoustic essays incorporating acoustic ambient sounds alongside more traditional instrumental music sources to create disjunct, trance-like dreamscapes and hörspiels.
In addition to programming and directing the Other Minds Festival since 1993, Amirkhanian has led the organization in producing many additional concerts devoted to the work of the American experimental tradition (Cage, Cowell, Rudhyar, Nancarrow, Hovhaness, Antheil, and others), establishing a record label, a weekly radio program, and commissioning new work annually from composers around the world.
Amirkhanian also established the ambitious Other Minds Archives of audio recordings as well as scanned photos and rare documents that provides access to new music information for listeners in 165 countries and territories. Beginning with a collection of 4000 reel-to-reel studio and aircheck tapes from the KPFA archives transferred in 1999 to Other Minds, an ongoing project of digitizing unique analog audio files has blossomed into one of the most impressive online reference libraries of experimental classical music. This rich preservation site, with universal free streaming access, may be found at archives.otherminds.org.
Amirkhanian served as Music Director of KPFA Radio in Berkeley (1969–1992) andExecutive Director of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program (1993–1997). From 1977–1980 he was a full-time instructor in the Interdisciplinary Creative Arts Department at San Francisco State University. In San Francisco, Amirkhanian hosted and programmed the Exploratorium’s highly regarded Speaking of Music series (1983–1991), bringing live audiences together for intimate conversations in person with pathbreaking composers. And from 1988–1991 he co-directed, with John Lifton, the Composer-to-Composer Festival in Telluride, Colorado, which served as a model for the Other Minds Festival.
In addition to his work as a composer, percussionist, and poet, Amirkhanian has produced several pivotal commercial recordings, including the complete works for player piano of Conlon Nancarrow, the first compilation of American text-sound composition, the first compilation of electronic music by American women composers, the only compilation of George Antheil performing his own piano music, and first recordings of unpublished music by Marc Blitzstein.
As a radio producer, Amirkhanian pioneered the broadcasting of minimalist music, sound poetry, radio happenings, and, with Richard Friedman, the World Ear Project, bringing continuous recordings of ambient sounds to the airwaves, beginning in 1970. Many of his hundreds of interviews with composers, performers, poets, and intermedia artists are available for listening free on the Other Minds Archives, the second website of Other Minds, designed to preserve the voices and work of cutting edge artists.
Amirkhanian resides in El Cerrito, California with his wife, visual artist Carol Law.
Works for Ratchets by Charles Amirkhanian
Composition No. 1 for Solo Ratchet, Op. 14 (1965)
Composition No. 2 for Solo Ratchet, Op. 24 (1966)
Duet for Ratchets I, Op. 30 (1966)
Composition No. 3 for Solo Ratchet, Op. 31 (1966)
Composition No. 4 for Solo Ratchet, Op. 37 (1967)
Composition No. 5 for Solo Ratchet (1967)
Octet for Ratchets (1998)
Ratchet Attach It, for drumline ensemble and fixed media (2021)
Noose Ratchet, for two ratchets, two maracas & electronics (2025)
