Charlie Kirchen is a music theorist who uses tools drawn from actor network theory, critical race theory, gender studies, and media studies—along with a constantly evolving set of ad-hoc analytic approaches—to study (roughly) popular, jazz, classical, contemporary, and improvised musics in their various manifestations from the turn of the 20th century up until the present day. He has recently written on genre and race in the production of Ornette Coleman’s Skies of America, masculinist discourse in the music of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, ideologies of “the blues” in the musical practice of W.C. Handy, and the various logics of temporality evident in the music of Brian Ferneyhough and Evan Parker.