Embracing the Grittiness: A Conversation with Steph Richards and Qasim Naqvi on ‘Talk Show’

Where would the world be without such television “classics” as “I Married a Horse” or “You Left Me for a Hooker”? Or without audiences discovering the paternity of strangers they had met only minutes before? 1980s and 1990s daytime talk programming was junk food in visual form, providing no sustenance for the human mind or spirit. At first glance, these talk shows seem an unusual inspiration for improvised music. But as presented by Talk Show, the duo of trumpeter Steph Richards and synthesizerist/drummer Qasim Naqvi, there is more than meets the eye.

In their live performances, the Richards-Naqvi duo explores the cheap absurdity that is undeniably at the surface of many daytime talk shows. But they also tap deep into the violent undercurrent underneath them all. Sometimes, this violence would bubble to the surface in the program itself. The brawling guests. The familial destruction. And even some of the topics – for instance, putting Klansmen and Black Panthers in the same room – were practically designed to incite riot. In one case, a white supremacist even broke host Geraldo Rivera’s nose with a chair. Even episodes sending a rebellious teen to boot camp instead of counseling were arguably emotionally abusive. But the most gruesome moments were saved for when the cameras were turned off. An unrequited crush on the Jenny Jones Show led to a fatal shooting. And a love triangle on the Jerry Springer Show led to a brutal beating and strangulation.

And, of course, this side of daytime television raises questions of group morality. What kind of society finds entertainment in the pain of others? To some extent, those sickening impulses are ancient. The Roman gladiators come to mind. But the daytime programs at issue should also be contextualized within the era during which they were produced. They rose primarily around the birth of cable news, in which people could view shocking events from around the globe whenever desired. With the Cold War burning out, much of the violence was also compartmentalized as being “over there,” far away from the viewer. The otherness of violence perhaps makes it subconsciously seem not as real and of lesser concern. And, so, when structured programming shows violence, it too is not taken as seriously. It is also telling  that these shows collapsed with the rise of the internet, a technology that makes it now inescapable to ever truly avoid the consequences of the world’s horrors. They began to disappear not long after 9/11, and its aftermath brought the fear more directly home. Additionally, one must truly ask – while these shows are gone, are TikTok reels and reality TV really much better? Talk Show explores all of this, too.

Richards and Naqvi skillfully channel the complexity of these programs through their shared interest in defying the convention of form. Sight and sound are often part of a singular presentation. Any lines between music and visual art blurred; senses scrambled. Their live shows sometimes use light, video manipulation, puppetry, and acting to get the point across. However, there is also a transmutability of sound that allows their fully improvised works to get to both the humor and discomfort inherent in these television programs. Both artists are chameleonic in their sound. In the case of Naqvi, this can be seen well in his role as the drummer for Dawn of Midi, an electronic-sounding band that somehow doesn’t use electronics. And for Richards, her projects continually muddy spaces between hearing, touch, and smell. And, together, they are able to build upon their two decades of friendship to craft a unified message that is equal parts entertainment and social commentary while deeply questioning the meaning of both. Their most recent duo record, Miss America (WE Jazz, 2025), stripped the pomp and pageantry of beauty contests to explore their true homogenous superficiality.  And Talk Show does similarly, to expose how the Reagan-Clinton era landscape of “trash tv” callously served as a contemporary freak show.  

We sat down with Richards and Naqvi ahead of their performance on February 26, 2026, to discuss the origins of their project and what it says about both society and ourselves.

PostGenre: You both met around 2008. How did that happen?

Steph Richards: Whoa, that’s a long time ago. We met while we were both at CalArts.

Qasim Naqvi: Yeah, we were both grad students at CalArts and met through the music department.

PG: And then your first premiere together was inside some two-person dress sculpture thing. What was that about?

SR: [Laughing]

QN: [Laughing] It was my graduate recital. We opened the evening with a performance art work. Somebody – I don’t entirely remember who; maybe someone from the costume department –  designed a dress that fit two people. It basically covered my entire drum set. Steph was on one side, where the bass drum was, with just her head peeping out of a hole in the fabric.

SR: No, no. It was just my high heels. I had these hot pink high heels on and had my legs straddling the bass drum. You couldn’t see anything else. [laughing].

QN: Yes, that’s true. You were in this almost gynecological exam type of position in front of the bass drum and using the drum as a resonator. While I played the rest of the drum set, you put the bell of your trumpet on the bass drum head and we were surrounded by this crazy fabric.

SR: It almost looked like there were these legs birthing on a drum set, right? [laughing] It was so freaking out.

QN: Yeah, pretty weird in hindsight.

PG: Was that particular project the origin of the visual components of your live works, which one can now see with Talk Show?

SR: Well, I feel like Qas, and I have always connected over a shared interest in exploring the space of sound as not simply a sonic element, but also as something in the sound of space and theatricality. I think we’ve always been excited and interested in those additional elements of sound, and that is a special thing about working with Qas. I know that whenever we work together, visual aspects are always up for grabs if we want to go there.

QN: Right. When we were at CalArts together, we befriended a couple of directors who were graduate students in the theater program. We did some collaborations with them, which I think also opened up that language to us.

PG: Those visual components carry into Talk Show, where you have puppets and video. Where do both fit into the overall project?

SR: I think that there’s an absurdity to performance that I like. One thing I love about working with Qas is that we can embrace the absurdity of the seriousness that performance sometimes takes on. But we do so while also fully recognizing the depths of where this music can dig so deeply. And when I say this music, I mean improvised music, experimental music, or creative music. The music can be so funny, but there’s also blood on the floor at the same time, right? That duality is something we’re interested in working with and acknowledging. I also think Qas and I are both very down-to-earth people, and presenting both sides of the music is the most authentic way to share what we do.

QN: Our performance at Roulette will be the first time Steph and I collaborate with a friend of ours from CalArts, Steven Wendt. He is an actor and director who was in the Blue Man Group for many years. He will be doing very interesting stuff with analog video projection feedback, and all this really beautiful shit.

To add to that, however, there is also the garishness of Talk Show’s subject matter, these 80s and 90s talk shows, where people were clearly exploited. Their fears and inadequacies were used by an audience and a host. Juxtaposing abstract music against that background is a somewhat humorous thing. The project can also get pretty deep. We can go fully into that dark side of what’s going on with these shows. Even as we make light of it. The shows are an interesting reflective surface with which to work.

PG: Those 1980s and 1990s talk shows are ridiculous but also very dark. People were even murdered over things that happened on those shows. Where did the idea of using them as inspiration for this project come from?

QN: I don’t know who first came up with the idea between Steph and I, but I think it just flew out of one of our minds. And then we started immediately riffing on the idea and figuring out how to draw as much abstraction out of this weird 80s and 90s phenomenon; how to bring it into the world of what we do sonically. And the more we talked about it, the more the idea made sense.

SR: I think part of those shows being our inspiration also comes from the analog feeling of them. I think the idea of using these shows as inspiration began as a joke between us, but as we looked further into those shows –  their ridiculous guests and topics but also a real darkness – it clicked perfectly for our project. The shows couldn’t hide how horrific and grotesque a lot of what they were doing was. The way that the shows talked about people, their families, and their lovers was so extreme at the time.

And since then, to look at it now with today’s modern-tinted eyes is very important. I feel that with exposure of those things, we can better contextualize how our society is now. It’s easy to think those shows reflect a time when bad things happened, but things are so much worse now. We’re just pointing people to look at this thing that happened and to fully consider how things are now, too.

QN: But those shows were also totally and completely ridiculous. The subjects on those shows are off the wall. For one, there was a woman who was deathly afraid of olives. One of the show’s producers walked out on stage with a giant jar of olives, and this woman had a total nervous breakdown and ran off the stage. We showed a clip of this during one of our performances, showing the full thing, then slowing it down twenty times. Her yelling, when slowed down, becomes a low, monstrous guttural sound. There is also a clip of a show about a boy who was dating a woman three times his age and who wanted to introduce her to his mother. Just crazy stuff.  

SR: Yeah, they are often those things where at first you laugh but then the more you look, it stops being funny and you start to get a pit in your stomach. That is a pretty powerful thing.

QN: And, in some ways, our music is the lubricant.

SR: Yeah. But I remember that after the particular show where we played those clips, things felt a lot heavier than I thought they would. The clips landed heavily, even though there’s such kitsch, hilariousness, and absurdity to them. And then, of course, you can’t escape the context of today within that.

PG: But as far as the humorous side, Talk Show’s world premiere was at the University of Washington, where you had someone playing the role of “sandwich guy.” That is pretty random.

QN: [laughing] Yeah, it was some guy eating a sandwich. These giant jumbo jet airplane hangar doors opened onto the stage, and there was a guy sitting there eating a sandwich.

SR: That was the other thing; we were trying to subvert a lot of things in that particular show because we were booked in this opulent, huge theater, and we were really trying to work with that space in the most extreme way. One of the ideas we had was to have a huge reveal where we open up the entire back of the stage to show a loading dock with someone back there eating a sandwich. We were really trying to push against the formality of what is expected in that type of environment. Even as we were also relishing in the opportunity given to us by that space because we had lighting, staging, a smoke machine, or whatever else. There were so many things we could play with in a space so opulent and formalized.

We both greatly value authenticity and want to expose some of the gritty underbelly of things. That is an aesthetic we’re attracted to, especially when so many things out there today in our creative scene are very polished. Far too often, things are presented and delivered in the safest way imaginable. We’re pushing against that with humor, while acknowledging the hidden grittiness. We are trying to push against the cleanliness and polishedness of the status quo right now.

QN: Absolutely. There is some anarchy in embracing that grittiness.

PG: So, is some of that lost when you record an album together, as on Miss America, where there are no visual elements in the way you would have in a live performance?

QN: No, I don’t think so. For me, a record can paint its own image without the need for supplied imagery. There is a visual nature to the sound on the record, like a strange atmosphere of some kind.

SR: Also, with the record, we still subverted the form. The record is a pretty slow burn. And that was also intentional. It provides the music captured in that moment, but I think to put it out on a record was not as if to say, “Hey, here jazz hands, track two is our single.” It was a lot more like, “Here is a hot tub that you’re just going to sink into.” I think it is still very visual music when you hear it. It has these saturated feelings. And I would also add that not every show we put on has pyrotechnics or anything like that. Sometimes we just play with nothing else added, and that’s enough. But we also don’t need to define our music that way. We have the ability to stretch into the theatrical realm, too, and I really appreciate that.

QN: Totally. And that theatrical space is one we like to inhabit.

PG: Steph, last time we spoke was on your album, Power Vibe (Northern Spy, 2024), which incorporated sensory electronics. Much of your work has emphasized the connection between hearing and other senses. Do you see Talk Show as a continuation of that thought, too, because it has a more visual component?

SR: Definitely. I think I’m always trying to expand sonic definitions into color, feeling, scent, and texture. More and more, the music I work on is starting to feel like a blend of expression. I’m also trying very hard to get past those boundaries put upon me as a student, like identifying something as music or not music. I’m trying to lean into those gray areas, like, what is sound? Is this painting actually sound? If it’s all vibration; what does that mean? And how can we live inside these forms of expressive beings and do something meaningful? Those are the questions.

QN: As you’re sitting in the parking lot at Carl’s Jr., evaluating your entire life. [laughing]

SR: [laughing] Exactly. In-N-Out, like animal style, everywhere. [laughing]

PG: As far as Talk Show’s music itself, how do you translate the scenes from tv into something musical?

QN: We create the music on the spot, in the moment. Nothing is pre-composed. We do react, you to the footage and have absorbed it, but  everything is very spontaneous.

SR: Yeah, but we do have a structure, a theatrical structure too. We know where we want to go in terms of orchestration.

QN: Moving from concert percussion in one part to modular synthesizer in another part, then to the drums. There are certain theatrical things and instrument changes that are timed. But as far as musical substance, it is all in the moment.  

PG: Qas, as far as the synthesizer, do you feel anything you learned from studying with Morton Subotnick has shaped your approach to this project?

QN: Not really, no. I took one of his last classes, an introductory course on how to use the Serge Modular synthesizer, right before he retired from teaching. The Serge Modular was designed by Serge Alexandrovich Tcherepnin, who also taught at CalArts, and designed that synthesizer when he was there. I believe one of the first ever made is still at CalArts.

I took the course almost eight years before I got into modular synthesis. I wasn’t really studying any of that when I was at CalArts. My focus was mostly on composition and performance. My use of modular synths came much later. But I did learn a lot about Subotnick’s music while I was at CalArts. And then I got even deeper into it later on.

PG: As a concluding thought, we started our conversation with how the two of you started working together back in 2008. How do you feel the way you communicate with each other has changed the most over the last twenty years?

SR: Oh, that’s so nice. I love that.

Because we’ve spent such great time together, know each other, and trust each other, there’s no person I love to play with more than Qas. When we play together, there’s never an instant of needing to prove that we hear each other. We simply go. When we play together, we’re dreaming together. There’s no need to acknowledge that we are acknowledging each other. And that’s something very special to me. I think that’s so important and rare. That’s what I love most when we play.

QN: And a lot of that is also due to our friendship. We’ve been separated by distance for many years, with me in New York and Steph on the West Coast for quite some time. A lot of our musical growth is tied to our friendship and how we’ve grown as friends and as human beings. There’s something very special to that as well.

It’ll be exciting to see where this iteration of the Talk Show project goes. Hopefully, it can even grow further into some new ideas and some new projects.

SR: I’m on board with that. We should keep stretching and pushing who and what types of collaborations we’re making, including those beyond collaborating with only musicians. Being open, that is the key.

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Talk Show will be making its New York City debut at Roulette Intermedium on February 26, 2026. More information can be found through Roulette’s website. It will also be available on Youtube. You can learn more about Qasim Naqvi and Steph Richards on their respective websites.