Anytime someone carves a pathway for people to access education and create art, the world changes. Educator and Composer Max Alper (Peretsky) has created Klang Academy, an affordable way for musicians and the music community to access music education and build community. In the era of Spotify rip-offs, music magazine layoffs, and a massive education gap, Klang Academy is a pop-up/ online school that offers everything from music technology courses to DIY PR experience and effective press releases. He sat down with IINAG to chat about it.
Kendra Brea Cooper: Can you tell me a bit about yourself and your background?
Max Alper: My name is Max, and I make music under the name Peretsky. I amassed a bit of a following over the last decade for my music education-related hot takes, originally under the Instagram handle La Meme Young, a take on Le Monte Young, the minimalist composer. It basically started when I was an adjunct instructor in grad school teaching undergrads in music tech classes. I started making some slideshows for those classes with some really stupid millennial shit-posts to break the ice on some dry experimental music academic topics. At the end of that semester of teaching, I had a bunch of stuff that I didn’t know what to do with that was really funny, and I just posted them on Instagram and that somehow became the most successful professional development choice I’ve ever made. That made me relatively known as this goofy music teacher. I would have loved it to be my music personally, but my thoughts on music, music tech, music criticism, politics and all that- I’m happy that could take off in that way. I’ve been teaching electronic music professionally at this point for about thirteen years, in various capacities like K through 12, higher education, independent, special education, and social services-related stuff. In the most recent years, I’ve been a self-employed independent instructor and tutor- alternative academic, we could call it. That is really, among all the other things I’ve done as a teacher, that was really the seed that was planted and has now turned into this new thing called Klang Academy.
KBC: For Klang Academy, was there a specific moment you felt like this was really needed in the world?
MA: First, it started as this thing my friend Tyler and I did from 2022-2024 as this thing called Klang Magazine. Which felt even at that time very necessary as a journal, semi-academic, semi-blog related to things that aren’t really being discussed, more specifically music tech journalism but in general just experimental music journalism. And none of us are journalists; we just write music-non-fiction prose at various capacities. The mission of that was really to provide something beyond an ivory tower knowledge hoard.
What I learned from school wasn’t just learning through formal training, but also the interactions you have with people, mentors, and others. Sometimes being a musician is like a singular process, and then they only bring it out into the world when it is ready to gig or ready to premiere a full record, and I think that we need to be more social in the work-in-progress stage with each other. So that was kinda like, additionally with the magazine and now with the academy. I don’t know if there was like an “aha” moment; there was more of a continuous trajectory in my life that was contending with the conservatory as both one foot in and one foot out, socially and through my own training.
I wouldn’t have gone to college if I wasn’t able to get into weird composition programs; there was nothing else I was going to do. I knew I wasn’t going to do a performance track, and I knew that I was going to go in for writing. I knew that I was going to go in for writing music in one way or another.
I come from Boston and chose to go to a public college, CUNY in New York City. I loved working with other twenty-something musicians in the city with different backgrounds. The school system in Boston where I grew up was incredible; in high school we had a music production lab and recording studio. So I was very spoiled, and then going to a public university and realizing, like, oh shit, I got a lot of real knowledge privilege because I’ve had exposure and mentor privilege, and so started this whole realization that is still being realized as a student and now as a teacher: the various degrees of people’s training, experience, and exposure to even just a one-on-one mentor that encourages you and validates the idea that you have. My whole mission with this stuff is just to break down those bricks of the ivory tower because it is exclusive, even in public universities, and it is incredibly difficult to get in. It is financially hard to get in, and access to a mentor is limited. Even just giving people access to that process, even as a casual, every week or once a month you just check in with someone or a group of people to make sure that muscle is getting used and not isolated and rather staying loose through the act of learning through some sort of group of peers and mentor.
There is a term, critical pedagogy: when you teach, you are consistently in a back-and-forth with the student body and constantly revising your own thought and teaching processes and a pedagogue, so to speak. I’m not an academic or critical theorist, but I do jive with that. I want this to be a continuously changing thing too, throughout my life, and I feel like this is what I’m meant to do.
KBC: I first came across Klang Academy on Instagram when I saw a post about putting on shows, producing records, and working with the media by writing press conferences, which are also key skills for political organizing. Can you elaborate on that?
MA: I have this podcast with a journalist, Liz Pelly, called Critical Listening, and we take deep dives and headlines related to music tech and politics, and, like I said, she is kicking my ass at being more journalistic in the questioning of things and all that, and I’m a better man for it. But what we say on the show all the time is that music is social; it just inherently is so, and that is why it feels sacrilegious for me to turn it into data. It is like the idea of content being like the flow-state of passive consumption. We’re all addicted to our phones in one way or another. You know TikTok has behaviour psychologists in the same way casinos do. We talk about music being social, and if you talk to anybody, not just in the music community, but the music community, anything from journalism to tweeting about it, to people who work at venues, to bartending, to people who make merch. We all know that these are inherently our friend groups and a way to break the ice. If I’m wearing a band shirt and someone notices it and recognizes it, we’ve found our people. I have never felt weird moving to a new place; despite having online friends already, I immediately know to just go to the show. You go out back to bum a smoke (I don’t condone smoking, on the record) at the show that you’re both there for, and you both like, and you immediately have one thing to talk about, and that can lead to talking about many things.
I think that when people have one thing to meet with, they can collectively work on something. Let’s talk about how we feel about this band and that can move toward something materially to like a higher stake. And especially people who work in DIY, you know how to do communications, you know how to logistically organize a space. There are just physical organizing skills that could be used for any number of other things, like political spaces. Even just talking to people because you are used to talking to people at shows could be translated very easily into door-knocking campaigns.
But it is like, I think musicians are some of the most normal, regular people. Ironically, it’s like the more extreme music you get, the more normal people. We always joke about metal and harsh noise people, and it is just like a lot of dads. The extreme music crowd usually has the most upstanding citizens. These are the types of things that, if you can develop social skills, we keep hearing about: the crisis in literacy and the loneliness epidemic. I mostly hang out with musicians and music people in the physical world, and I don’t see those things out there in those places.
This is why I think Hardcore is the most peak community-building and mass mobilizing scene. I’m a lurker of hardcore, a voyeur guy, but I’m too scared to go into the pit. I’ll stand at the bar doing the breakdown and think, “pretty good”. As long as there is political struggle and a lost youth culture in a backwards-ass town in middle America, there will be a Hardcore scene. And it is very necessary to have a pressure release valve. I see an affinity across noise music, extreme music, and heavy music that is like church for some people; it is spiritual and fun. It requires being social. Music is social, so be social.
KBC: What is next and what are you most excited about?
MA: Next is the official launch of Klang Academy. Primarily, it will be online as well as some in-person stuff. Starting in November, we are going to be offering an annual membership fee and folding the Group Critique Fight Club into that as a weekly program. Liz and I, as Critical Listening, will be running a reading club. It is not a book club but an essay or article club as a monthly offering in which we bring in the author of something which we’ve assigned people to read for a live Q and A and group discussions.
We’re going to be having DJs and Journalists and all the selectors and curator types coming in every month for like a five-song appreciation seminar. They pick five songs or things that really mean something to them. We will also have a monthly project that everyone can participate in. Everyone will bring in some sounds or a sample pack, and the prompt is to use these and recompose them and do whatever you want. So those will be the membership programs. Then we have some awesome faculty lined up to do some one-on-one masterclasses and then four- to six-week proper courses. I’ll be teaching one on the DIY album pipeline. I’m not going to tell you how to write your album but I’ll show you how to master it properly and how to pitch yourself to an independent label or to the press. It’s a constantly changing thing. This is something I teach in my private lessons. How to make a one-pager to send off to a label. Writing good emails is a social thing. Things that can be materially good for you as a musician.
We’ll have an annual symposium in New York City where we are collaborating with Montez Press Radio, which is a fantastic online radio station as well as a brick-and-mortar venue and broadcasting studio in Chinatown, Manhattan. And we will be doing stuff with them in 2027, at the tail end of the winter, with some in-person NY-centric programming. Then wherever else people want us, we will do the same thing. We hope to be an annual thing in New York.
