Biography
My musical origin story is defined by a tension between the sacred and the disposable. It began in the middle school percussion pit, a place where we were relegated to the back, handling instruments that were either battered public property or terrifyingly expensive shrines. I developed a fascination with this dichotomy: the punk impulse to beat a drum into submission versus the trembling reverence required to approach the copper timpani, which felt like operating a sacred vessel in a temple. I was living a dual life: playing standard classical pieces in the school band while retreating into the dissociative, private world of headphones, absorbing the abrasive textures of industrial music and grunge on fragile, tangible cassette tapes.
By high school, this tension evolved into a battle between discipline and rebellion. Under a militaristic band director, I rose to lead percussion chair, obsessing over the physics of technique but loathing the metronomic regimentation of the institution. I found a temporary haven in jazz, channeling the drummer-as-conductor energy of legends like Max Roach. I fell in love with the architecture of syncopation, the ability to build and destroy worlds within a measure.
Around age 17, the floor dropped out. Frequent visits to the Showcase Theater in Corona, CA exposed me to the chaotic velocity of crust punk. The perfectionism of the orchestra shattered; I threw myself into the underground, applying my jazz chops to the sheer speed of thrash and metal. This era of raw aggression culminated in my first recording experience, a vegan gore metal album, and set the stage for a lifetime of sonic extremism.
In early college years, fueled by psychedelics and a ravenous consumption of art history, I began to trace the lineage of the musical avant-garde as a parallel shadow to the visual arts. I realized that sound could be as sculptural as clay and as conceptual as a canvas. This intellectual expansion was tested by physical endurance when I moved to Long Beach and immersed in the experimental art rock scene of that time. It was a period of over-caffeinated, sleep-deprived technical rigor.
The true flowering of my practice occurred in the Bay Area. My garage transformed into a laboratory for electro-acoustic experimentation, filled with reel-to-reel tape loops, custom-built instruments, and broken microphones. I began treating sound as a tactile object to be cut, spliced, and degraded. I was prolific, recording two to three albums a year, many of which are now lost. With Voices (alongside Alejandro Magana and Chris Hash), I explored the fluid dynamics of improvisation. With Perpetia (alongside Curtis Tam), I dug deep into the darker, subterranean frequencies of the underground. Through Sanity Muffin Tapes, my friendship with Billy Sprague (Galena) exposed me to the esoteric fringes of the “no audience underground.”
I was in Chicago for a brief period, where I observed the meta-ensembles of the post-rock windy city jazz scene formed by distinct musicians merged into massive, singular walls of sound. Then I returned to Los Angeles in 2011 with a desire to merge the solitary and the social. This birthed CTASSAULTS. What began as a shared practice space for individual musicians mutated into a hive-mind collective, a free-jazz-punk experiment where distinct egos dissolved into a unified, improvisational force.
Before leaving the US in 2013, the collective retreated to a rental house in Joshua Tree. We soundproofed the windows, filled the rooms with gear, and spent a month in a psychedelic haze of creation. The result was The Shape of Ohm to Come, a nod to both Ornette Coleman and Refused, capturing the apex of my music as a social contract. It was a document of telepathic communication, recorded just before the silence set in.
Moving to Sweden in 2013 marked a violent shift from the social to the solitary. Alienated by the dark winters and the stoic culture, I retreated into headphones. The social contract of the band dissolved; music ceased to be a negotiation with other players and became a direct confrontation with the landscape. The resulting solo album, Ö, is a sonic mirror of that isolation stripped of rhythm, relying on texture, drone, and the harsh resonance of electric guitar to dialogue with the sublime, horrific beauty of the Nordic winter.
This inward turn deepened in Iceland, where my practice expanded into the operatic. As I began constructing the conceptual framework for An Opera of/for Known and Unknowable Universes, the music became architectural and ghostly. I conducted experimental choirs and improvised orchestras, but also performed solo organ activations in local churches, using the building itself as a resonant chamber. Simultaneously, I stripped everything back to compose intimate traveling music on acoustic guitar, a quiet tether to comfort amidst the alienation.
Returning to the Bay Area while pursuing my PhD in Europe, I entered a phase of digital vulnerability. Using green screens and livestreams, I turned my interior life into a public performance chamber, improvising endlessly on the piano to soundtrack an opera that was writing itself out of existence.
In 2019, I moved to an earthship in the wilderness outside of Taos, New Mexico, at the base of a three eared mountain. Here, the traveling music birthed abroad matured into a dialogue with the vast sagebrush ocean. I codified a theory of using instruments to embody gravity and magnetism, resulting in the album Landscapes for New Mexico. Stripped of excessive effects, it is a straightforward, unadulterated communion with geological scale.
Today, my music is a space of synthesis. I am currently working on three distinct solo albums - for guitar, organ, and drums, respectively - while simultaneously preparing to release the backlog of Perpeteia recordings we have been accumulating. After years of solitary dialogue with the landscape, I am beginning to reach outward again, seeking to reintegrate the reciprocal joy of collaboration with the profound, alienated depth of the solo journey. The feedback loop continues.