I’m a composer, producer, and percussionist creating electroacoustic music that considers the poetry of interconnected communities and landscapes, both real and imagined. My compositions draw inspiration from millennial esoterica, natural phenomena, and science fiction, resulting in hypnotic soundscapes and surreal sonic worlds. Combining a meticulous instrumental approach with imaginative digital processing, I craft a rhythmic, textural, collage music that’s been described as "hyperreal and phantasmal" (Wire Magazine), and "a form of chill complexity" (New York Times). I’ve presented this work at the Guggenheim, The Kitchen, Roulette, and 2220 Art + Archives and have released my music with New Amsterdam Records, Moon Glyph, Whatever’s Clever, Dinzu Artefacts, and NNA Tapes.

1) Soft Science / Touchless / New Topographics (2020-2023)

Music from 3 independently produced solo albums, performed with adaptable ensemble arrangements, and realized as “modular” compositions.

My largest collection of work synthesizes the musical aesthetics of post-minimalism, music concrete, environmental music, and free improvisation into a unique genre-fluid language that expresses a surreal and hopeful posthumanist millennial purview (transcendental transhumanism perhaps?). When realized as chamber ensemble performances, these pieces respond to the various contexts such as the performers, venue, and feeling in the moment. Because I love working with different groups of musicians, I frequently re-arrange the compositions to fit different ensembles while still preserving the essential elements that make the work it’s own. Below are 4 pieces realized with various ensembles, sometimes using loose poetic scores, and sometimes fully notated. They are light-hearted and brightly hued, reading like science-fiction while sounding like a band, with musicians and electronics interacting like species in an aquarium.

Drop your cursor at 3:00 in any of these videos and listen while perusing the scores to get a sense of this body of work.

An Infinite Cybernetic Meadow (2020) from New Topographics

Archival footage and board recording from 2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles — February 4, 2023

performed with Wild Up:
M.A. Tiesenga, alto saxophone
Sidney Hopson, vibraphone and percussion
Andrew Tholl, violin
Stephen Pfeifer, electric bass

Hyperbolic Time Chamber (2022) from Soft Science

Click to view full score — Click above to view full score

Full Squid (2020) from New Topographics

Live stream footage and board recording from Roulette, Brooklyn — March 21, 2021

performed with Big Spin:
Rob Rusli, violin and electronics
Amirtha Kidambi, voice and alto saxophone
Amy Garapic, percussion
Ben Seretan, guitar and synthesizer
Tristan Kasten-Krause, electric bass

Firn (2021) from Touchless

Archival footage and camera recording from IRL, Brooklyn — November 16, 2021

performed with:
Elori Saxl, violin
Tristan Kasten-Krause, upright bass

2) A Gardener: Music For Ayano Elson (2021)

Music for the dance “A Gardener” written and performed as a solo work for drums and electronics

The music from A Gardener represents the most ambitious electronic music in my catalogue. Composed using Ableton Live, Moog synthesizer, samples, electroacoustic snare drum, and specific signal processing this work slowly transforms every sound source as to be constantly uncovering and reveling the music hidden inside another. The feeling is fragile and austere, kept taught like a sonic balancing act, shapeshifting imperceptibly throughout. Composed in tight collaboration with choreographer Ayano Elson, the work parallels a similarly austere choreography that takes Ayano’s body to the brink of her physical ability. Composed without “counts”, this project used physical cues from the dance as demarcations of different points in the score, allowing Ayano’s physicality to “conduct” the tempo and pacing of the music. Simultaneously, my physicality is considered throughout, performed live on stage, to present my cyborg-like electroacoustic music practice as it’s own choreography. In these ways (and through the numerous conversations throughout the rehearsal process) Ayano and I have continued to use this collaboration to investigate the line between our mediums, questioning where one ends and the other begins.

Listen to the mastered audio at the soundcloud link below. Drop in at 1:50 to hear slow beating patterns produced by close proximity sine tones, and drop in at 8:30 to hear a collage of samples, synthesizers, and manipulated drum sounds that bounce in and out of sync.

A Gardener (2021) performance stream from Roulette Brooklyn, NY

A Gardener (2021) DAW “score” recording from Roulette

3) Sundogs (2019)

Commission for 2 violins and 2 violas with boombox

Sundogs was commissioned by andPlay duo and Aperture duo in 2019 for their 2020 performances of [ a place is a place ]. I wrote Sundogs as a composition to represent the title—a natural phenomenon where frozen water droplets refract the light of the sun to create mirage-like mock suns—while simultaneously using this phenomenon as a poetic expression of the refracted ways we experience a person after their death. The piece was the first I completed after the loss of my late partner Devra Freelander, whose sculptural and print practices often used optical phenomena like alpenglow and fata morgana as inspiration. The "writing" at the outset of the piece uses the Wikipedia definition of Sundogs as a kind of graphic score (by writing out letters on stopped strings) drawing the ear to subtleties of bowing. Drone material begins to shift around the instrument where timbre takes on a subjective roll, sonically tracing Devra’s sculptures up and down the instrument fingerboards. The core of the work is a melancholy chorale of shifting dissonances and consonances in and out of standard intonation that create a sunlike structure, eventually refracted by an amplification of ephemeral overtones and other resultant frequencies. Finally, the work recedes as it began, this time floating off into a stratosphere of whispering harmonics.

Listen to 8:10 (page 8 in the score) to hear rubbery dissonant harmonies that interlace with sparkling harmonics over an impending pulse, and listen to 15:45 to hear translucent whistling harmonies transcend into whispering refracted patterns.

Performed by andPlay and Aperture duo:
Maya Bennardo, violin, Hannah Levinson, viola, Adrianne Pope, violin and Linnea Powell, viola
at The Crypt, Manhattan, NY — January 2020