Talk Show is a new duo collaboration featuring Steph Richards on trumpets and resonating surfaces and Qasim Naqvi on drums, almglocken bells and modular synthesizer. Having worked together on other projects for almost two decades, Miss America, to be released by We Jazz Records on 21st November, marks their first, pure duo collaboration – a space to engage with a sonic language they’ve been cultivating together for years.

The album was recorded live, with Qasim crafting real-time electronics and drum set work, and Steph using trumpets and resonating percussion to summon sympathetic vibrations and otherworldly sounds through timpani, snare and water. The trumpet sounds electronically processed, though every sound is acoustic. Both artists wanted to retain the live nature of their process, so what you hear is virtually untouched.

Sharing an appetite for experimentalism, theatricality and irreverent collisions of sound and image, Qasim and Steph met in 2008 at CalArts, which was a breeding ground for open creative thought and cross disciplinary collaboration. Often working with directors in the theater program, choreographers, or experimental and character animators, Steph and Qasim’s musical language has a rooting in visual performance art. From their first premiere, costumed together inside a giant two-person dress sculpture that consumed a drum set, to their most recent 2025 audio visual nightmare which explores the horrors of 80s daytime reality talk shows, this duo presents a voice of the grimy and the grotesque: a new beauty of questionable acts and character flaws in sound.