Andrew Tham, 31, is a composer and performer who grew up in Edgewater. He’s a founder of art-music cassette label Parlour Tapes, a member of performance collective Mocrep, and an occasional sound designer for the Neo-Futurists.
I was a music director at our college radio station and I booked this band called Volcano! from Chicago, and Sam Scranton—he’s a good friend of mine now and a composer—he was the drummer in the band. He told me about Access Contemporary Music (ACM), who do a lot of composer-advocacy stuff for contemporary classical music. That was my first gig that let me go back to Chicago. I moved back in with my parents and I started interning at ACM, and then I just started going to all these contemporary classical concerts.
We haven’t really released that much in the last couple of years. It’s slowed down to maybe one or two releases a year. Our Parlour Tapes project in 2021 is that four of us who also work with the Mocrep collective (me, Zach Moore, Deidre Huckabay, and Jenna Lyle) are all going to make our own record, and we hope to release it as a quadruple-tape set. Really go big.
The Sims soundtrack is in my desert island discs. I e-mailed the composer, Jerry Martin, to ask if he had sheet music I could borrow. And he responded, which is amazing. I’m on his personal newsletter now, so like once a month I get “Here’s an old demo I did for SimCity 2000” or something.
