Preston Swirnoff is a multidisciplinary artist, musician, and writer based in San Diego, California. Over the past 25 years he has worked in a wide range of genres and mediums to create an extensive discography, with a long history of performances and exhibitions worldwide. Working with live music performance, sound art, installations using light, natural materials, and textiles, Swirnoff creates immersive environments that center on the primacy of ritual and the intimacy of physical presence. The common thread that runs through the work is the unbroken chain between our forgotten history and the challenge of being present today. His music engages the phenomenological aspects of sound in ritual, an exploration of sonority on different instruments, and the practice of structured improvisation cycles, sustained tones, and rhythmic repetition found in traditional cultures. Preston’s solo and collaborative projects have toured across North America, South America, Europe, and Asia. He has composed music for film, art installations, and dance.

Preston’s solo album debut Maariv: Four Electroacoustic Compositions was released by Last Visible Dog in 2008. His long-running collaboration with Ilya Monosov has included a 4 LP set on as Monosov Swirnoff on Eclipse Records (2003-2007) and releases as their rock duo The Shining Path on Holy Mountain, Trensmat, and others. His performances and arrangement of music by Brazilian composer Dorival Caymmi were released as a limited series of 7” singles ‘Haunted Sea Songs of Bahia’. His latest solo LP Crossing the Steppe (Set Spaces, 2021) is a meditation on radical geography and forgotten history, using an array of acoustic instruments and sonic character of a large warehouse near the train tracks. Elements of musique concrète, dark folk, and oneiric melodies create the sonority of an unmappable locale. In 2024, Swirnoff composed two collections of new piano works planned for upcoming recordings: Galut/Exile and Three Drops in the Mother’s Ocean were performed live at concert installations in Sofia, Bulgaria and Agrigento, Sicily. Preston’s music and text collaboration D I S T A N S with cellist Charles Curtis, is slated for release in 2025 as LP and book.

Preston has performed, created sound and visual art installations, and collaborated with other artists at Tate Modern, LACMA, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, DWARS Amsterdam, MACBA Barcelona, MCA San Diego, MOMA PS1 Queens, UCLA Schoenberg Music Building, UC San Diego, Niterói Contemporary Art Museum Rio, Le CentQuatre Paris, Indonesian Institute of the Arts Denpasar, Kunstencentrum Belgium. An ongoing series of site-specific installations, intimate performances, and temporary structures for gathering began in 2021 as a ‘quest to build little temples of connection and perspective’. Recent works in 2024 have been shown in Thessaloniki, Sicily, Sofia, and Oaxaca.

He is the founder and director of INTERVALS Arts, curating and producing events for contemporary art, music, film, and literature in San Diego and beyond. He has served on the Board of Directors as Chair of Events for Center for World Music, co-directing its concert series at Mingei International Museum.