“I am less interested in performance and more interested in…using the studio to extend the parameters of performance,” he says. “I make absolutely no distinction between composer or musician with that of sound engineer or producer.” While valuing improvisation’s “spontaneity and immediacy,” his intention in working with improvisers is to achieve “a level of control and finesse that is not normally possible in a strictly improvised recording situation.” Samartzis’ relationship to “musicians” is not exactly antagonistic, but an editorial impulse presides heavily over his method. But then maybe a little antagonism in measure is not a bad thing. “The thing I find interesting about musicians,” he nudges, “is that they seem compelled to always make sound,” disdaining “all the stuff that appear[s] to have very little purpose other than filling up space.” This is key. Spatial articulation and silence are sacred here, the syntactic pillars of his personal grammar. Samartzis is a composer of gesture, and the gut strength of his results advances the idea of transformation and spatialization as legitimate, under-recognized compositional devices. Derived in part from the cinema, he wonders at the way experience is shaped in complex transactions between seeing and hearing, and silence. “If I had the opportunity I would love to put the individual members of Slayer onstage in soundproofed glass boxes so that you could see them play but not hear them…a live mix that focused on various aspects of each performer, as well as merging them from time to time to create densities of space and discrete zones of aural experience. Silence would play a major part of the presentation.” Investing in un-programmed intuition and curiosity, Samartzis describes the largest obstacle confronting his students, particularly those with musical training or sound art backgrounds, as, “the assumptions that they have made about art and life. The thing I try and do is break down those assumptions so that each student can make an objective assessment…so that they can decide for themselves what is meaningful and what isn’t…”For Samartzis, sound culture is “a fragile thing” with boundaries beyond those derived from the requirements of traditional performance avenues. He created and curates the Immersion Festival as a forum for exploring “space as part of their compositional practice” and continues to underwrite alternative spatial sound works in an effort to keep fluid the understanding of what sound can do. Samartzis offers guidance for an interrogator perhaps overly mired in analytical reason. “The question you should have asked is ‘what is my favorite sound?’The answer is ‘a woman in high heels walking in an empty public square in Venice sometime after midnight in March.’”