Kai West is an interdisciplinary music scholar and multi-instrumentalist with research and teaching interests in popular music, organology, cultural studies and media studies. His dissertation and current research examine electric guitar culture in the 21st century through networks of technology, performance and sociality. From an immersed perspective, he details a decades-long struggle between regression and reinvention that shapes the instrument’s social politics and its shifting identity in the sphere of popular culture. West's published research can be found in the Journal of the American Musicological Society and he has presented numerous papers at meetings of the American Musicological Society, Society for American Music, and International Association for the Study of Popular Music.

A former professional musician, he holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in classical double bass performance from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and the University of Michigan, where he later earned his Ph.D. in musicology. He also creates and releases experimental ambient music using guitars, effects pedals, synthesizers, and tape machines.