Modern Composition L.A. is dublab’s cross-genre radio series examining the dynamic, new music emerging from Los Angeles. Each installment focuses on an individual composer’s contribution to the city’s fertile sonic landscape. Through in-depth interviews, illuminating recordings, and the premiere of a new work by the featured composer, we illustrate how these distinct artists are shaping Los Angeles and how the city has influenced them. Modern Composition L.A. surveys the wide-spectrum music endemic to Los Angeles—sketching a panoramic view of this ever-evolving creative climate.

This installment of Modern Composition L.A. brings us into the world of White Boy Scream. Through this recording and performance project, Micaela Tobin sings spells to shift us towards the light. She is dedicated to elevating marginalized voices and expanding experimental platforms through revolutionary modes of expression that challenge convention. Tobin’s White Boy Scream project merges her operatic background with a noise music practice honed to shatter stilted systems and reclaim sacred ground.

On White Boy Scream’s album Bakunawa, she engaged in an examination of pre-colonization mythologies from the Philippines in order to collapse stagnant narratives and transcend oppressive, cyclical histories through creative reimaginings of her cultural folklore. A mesmerizing performer, Tobin is the rare artist who when setting out to embody a moon-eating serpent leaves the listener with no doubt that this possession has come to pass. White Boy Scream’s vocal incantations can oscillate from soul-wrenching to seductive in a single phrase, bringing new realities into being through her highly intentional utterances. White Boy Scream appears on Modern Composition L.A. to activate our resonant bodies through her potent voice.

Modern Composition L.A. is made possible through a grant by the California Arts Council.

You can hear the entire series unfold at: moderncomposition.la.