Ninety-five percent of the music Mike Vargas made was performed once and never heard again. Since he first turned a Chopin prelude into a bossa nova in the late ’60s, Vargas has been pursuing new and challenging situations in which to improvise, putting together sounds to suit the circumstance, gathering a wide range of styles, strategies and instruments along the way. (overview 1998-2016)
The guiding principles in his pursuits have been exploration and adventure. Choosing from the beginning to deliberately resist the commodification of his music, he has preferred to operate more or less invisibly, making the best music possible for relatively modest events around the world while striving to put into action the most exciting musical developments of the last hundred years.
Since around 2001, Vargas has found himself most often in rooms full of improvising dancers, collectively deciding on the nature of the dance in real time.
After forty-five years of inventing music on the spot, of investigating context-specific composition in diverse settings, he is currently looking into composing the situations themselves. He is currently retired.
