Here you will find a listing of my projects and collaborations that are primarily aural or sonic in practice. While they may have performative or visual elements, their true axis is through the beauty and forms of absolute ephemerality.
BORBS active since December 2019
BORBS is dedicated to the birds in their awe inspiring nature, their terror, their beauty. This band utilizes sound schemas, gesture-codes, and light compositional thoughts as an organizing operandi. The sonic world is a mythical transduction of our ever-depleting/degrading/transforming natural spaces. While we never play compositions per say, nor do we ever stay in a particular mood for a long time, it seems very clear that sunset has a certain sound to it, the blistering afternoon heat, the deep winter morning. There are characters. We may be constantly redefining ourselves but we are most distinctly stars in the sky. If you trapped us in an elevator you would hear the words "Kabuki Theater meets the Art Ensemble meets Jurassic Park"
Motivic Consciousness, our first album (recorded live)
Wish Fulfillment Records released April 25th, 2024
Performance at PONDora's Fish Sauce Bottle 5.
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First performance after lockdown, the night of Kyle Rittenhouse's acquittal.
Max Englemen- Guitar, Melodica, Bassoon, Gong
Gabe Preston- All the Reeds
Jessica Brown- Horn, Flutes, Percussion, Voice, Artistic Direction
Rotating +1
(Manuel Joe Perez III, Carlos Santiago, Pete Dennis and Thomas Patteson)
Argyle Torah active since July 2019
Thomas is my musical other half, instrumental in my moving to Philadelphia, and an essential part of my growth and the growth of the scene. We have a partnership which goes beyond performing into scholarship, curation, music technology, friendship, and the everyday joy of being alive.
Our shared interests run the gamut of world musics (particularly southeast asia and southern africa), new age, early electronic works, free-musics (funk, jazz, improvisation), and creative music of all stripes. Our work together as performers unites these interests and passions.
Our first release (Mixed Multitude) is a 40 minute cut of a 3 hour long live performance. It is archival quality, but still captures a break-through moment in time for us. Thomas and I also have a collaboration on Off-Ramps from Reality.
Formal bio
Aaron Pond and Thomas Patteson perform improvisations of man and machine utilizing a combination of voices, horns, and synthesizers.
We are gnarled oaks spiraling through metal mesh borders as we reach towards the heavens. Each of our branches a shelter. Every leaf a delicate procedure to be cast off in mass. Resplendent for a time before returning to bareness.
Thomas Patteson- Keys, Modular Synthesizer, Alto Sax, Harmonium, Percussion,
Toro Bravo active since February 2023
First meeting for a gig with live wrestlers, my collaborations with Tracy have been amongst my most challenging and rewarding. It is without question that the horn is an instrument built for comfort, not for speed, but playing alongside this incredible percussionist has opened me up to new possibilities for the instrument. Learning how to dance melodically and with rhythmic flow through free time and rubato meters has sharpened my skills as an improviser. However, we are not all bluster, often our performances feature homages to our shared love of early 20th century classical music, South American party tunes, and the art ensemble. From the beginning this duo has been a space that is meant to be shared.
Tracy Lisk- Drums
+ Special Guests (Abram Mamet, Irman Peck, Rebecca Waleski, Jack Braunstein)
Boldt Fog active since March 2023
This a strain of free-improvisation which feels truly open to the moment. Some gigs are emotionally laden and very dramatic, some have comedic elements, others have been on a verge of abstraction bordering incomprehensibility. But there is coherence, even as each performance contains new ideas, forms, modalities, timbres, moods. Every moment is precious and strange, but to me, this music just makes sense.
Formal bio
Boldt Fog is an experimental free improvised music trio based in Philadelphia. It is deft mountaineering, a meeting at the summit of interiors, reaching through the billiow to give offerings. In the space is Toshi Makihara (percussionist), Carlos Santiago (Violinist), and Aaron Pond (Hornist). The music, the outflowing and in-passing, is of the moment, non-idiomatic. But rest assured there is chroma; there is bile, there is balance, there is a power greater than ourselves. Stronger than itself?
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Toshi Makihara- Percussion
Carlos Santiago- Violin
fishsauce active since July 2022
My duo with Sonali Singh emerged from my Friday open sessions for dancers that ran from July 2022 to May 2023. Since then we’ve played a number of gigs together, opening for sinonó, 99 Futures, Alex Tartarsky, and touring along the Mid-Atlantic with Emmett Wilson. At heart of our duo is a driving but intricate counterpoint combined with intense genre-variant emotional catharsis. We met through my first series Sonic Sunsets which Sonali attended. Sometimes when you recruit from the audience you find a highly-trained but lapsed classical bassoonist. Sometimes you find the friend of a lifetime.
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Sonali Singh- Bassoon, Voice, Drum
Inverse and Obverse active since November 2023
This quartet is inspired by the notions of perceptual and self-recognition within the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It is creative music rooted in tenderness.
Bert Harris- Contrabass, Voice
Matteo McDonnell- Accordion, Voice
Max Glazier- Percussion
A non-exhaustive list of other musical collaborators and performance mates in no particular order includes
DM Hotep, Sylvia Winch, Melinda Rice, Pete Dennis, Matt Lavelle, Levi Lu
Camila Alverez, Tessa Ellis, Ihba Baskette, Anjali Shinde, Erica Dicker, Ryoko Ohara, Dan Blacksberg, Max Glazier, Kevin Obatala, Ann Adachi, Rat Bastard, Tom Kraines, Will Fredendall, Michnari Robinson, Jack Braunstein, Olivia Martinez, Mekhi Gladden, Mark Brown,
Other projects I've performed in
The 12 Houses Orchestra, GirlHeaven, Green Plum Ensemble, Kevin Diehl's Airlift, Nakatani Gong Orchestra