Steve Barsotti is an educator, audio post-production engineer, and sound artist with an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. For more than 30 years he has taught electronic music, sound art, and audio production at colleges and arts institutions across Chicago, Seattle, and San Diego. His teaching bridges the technical and the creative, pushing students to listen deeply, think critically, and experiment boldly with sound.

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As owner of Ragmatic Audio, Steve records, mixes, and masters sound for podcasts, films, music, documentaries, multimedia installations, and commercial work. He also leads audio post for Kazbar Media, the production company he co-owns with his wife, Laila Kazmi. For him, engineering is more than craft—it's a way to help people find their voice and tell their stories with clarity, working with artists, nonprofits, small businesses, and museums to bring forward perspectives that might otherwise go unheard.

 

Steve is also a sound artist working at the boundaries of sound, space, and perception. Composing and performing with amplified objects, field recordings, and electronics, he draws beauty and tension out of ordinary sound, releasing much of it through Mimeomeme, the experimental label he co-runs. His solo albums Along These Lines and Say "tin-tah-pee-mic" reflect this intimate, exploratory approach, while Rarebit, his collaboration with Eric Leonardson, builds improvisations on invented instruments. Critics have called the results "cinematic and unsettling," and a way of "ushering the listener across an ambient divide."