I was born in 1981 in Cleveland OH, to working class parents. My father was an electrical engineer, my mother a secretary. An older, prototype millennial in "the cultural turn", from a young age I was groomed in various fine arts, fostered by a modernist architect uncle. I always had a facility for drawing, winning competitions & the envy of my classmates. I also played piano until teenage years, when I discovered electronic music & rebelled. Like many young artists in the late 90s, I was swept up into the DJ craze, but by the time I was 19 I was already keen to learn the deeper history of electronic & art music. In fact, DJ'ing for me was a highly educational experience, educating myself on diverse music forms on an active, experiential level.
My interests still nebulous around Y2K, I skipped college to study at Arcosanti; An Urban Laboratory. For two years I lived & worked in Paolo Soleri's "school of thought", teaching myself the history of avant-garde music by night. At this time I discovered Maryanne Amacher's Third Ear Music, & La Monte Young's Dream House, naturally appealing to a young mind interested in both music & architecture. Even in my youthful naivete, I already knew that I wanted to pursue the alienated beauty latent in this visionary music, & proceeded my studies in acoustics. At this time were my first computer music experiments, at the cutting edge of granular & spectral synthesis, for example the Pulsar Zips, All-Over, & the psychoacoustic perceptual experiments of the Selected Spectral Works series. Due to my experience with sustainability, I was hired by the new Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture in NY in 2004. For the first two years of its existence I managed the smart greenhouse, while, again, worked on music by night. I had already decided to model my practice on Kafka's — working a dayjob to support free creativity nocturnally. With my childhood friend & collaborator Adam Menzies, I started a music label – MoSo — & amongst other releases, published my first true album Division; Blossom (now deauthorized). By this time I had become totally preoccupied with Amacher's Third Ear music & Young's sine wave compositions, & enrolled at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago to study this work formally.
By this time an older student with clarified interests & lived experience, I was able to take graduate level courses. I discovered a latent interest in conceptual art, which led to philosophy & poetry, which ultimately led to Adorno's Critical Theory. This reawakened a longstanding interest in Nietzsche's philosophy as well, having read The Birth of Tragedy as an adolescent. As one of Chris Cutrone's early students, I learned the deeper art & political history behind the mid-century avant-garde, & started writing my first serious essays. Initially the goal was to clarify my own artistic practice via the novel Visual & Critical Studies curriculum — for instance in the Groundwork For A Study of Maryanne Amacher, or On Drone Music — but I soon learned that my essays were valuable in their own right. This led to a brief but galvanizing post as the Editor-In-Chief of the short-lived Chicago Art Criticism, as well as being an Associate Editor of The Platypus Review. For this productive final year in Chicago, I operated an apartment gallery — Mvsevm — while writing critiques of the artistic trends of the moment, book reviews, interviews, & essays. I was very early on a critic of 'socially engaged art', writing essays about the split in artistic sensibilities between purely formal art pour l'art, & social artworks, from a Critical Theory perspective, for instance in my Trotsky’s Theory of Art.
In 2011 I moved back to NY, this time in Brooklyn. I found that my new media experience, paired with my critical theory education were of interest to the bourgeoning net art, & what would become "post-internet" art movement. Again I started a short-lived publication — 491 — & wrote many essays, now mostly abandoned. (Always valuing prolificness, & ever restless to recreate myself, I have not been particularly sentimental about documentation!) We published some of Post-Internet Art's earliest writing, & I became the first real critic of Jon Rafman's work. However, as I was involved in the Platypus Marxist Reading Group, & still an editor for the Platypus Review, this took up most of my time. As such, I co-organized panel discussions, transcribed interviews, & edited articles. Partly due to this activity, I was hired by SVA to be the Art History Chair's Assistant, helping with the management of daily operations, organizing artist talks, & so forth. I took this job as a trial to see if I wanted to pursue a PhD — I quickly rediscovered that I didn't want to be an academic, but rather a public intellectual & practicing artist. I have remained steadfast in this commitment ever since.
While in NYC I also wrote — again by night — the contents of what has become a voluminous, 4-part poetry book, The Irreveries. At the time, & retrospectively, my essay writing had become more poetry than art criticism. I made the conscious decision to distill the scattered ideas of my critical writing into philosophical fragments, prose poems, & lyric poetry. Included also in this major work is the earlier conceptual poetry & textual scores.
Having abandoned an academic career & growing dissatisfied with the insincere careerism of the NYC art world, I eloped & moved to St Louis in 2015 ... after a trip to Bali to informally study gamelan. This was to be yet another fresh start. Perhaps I would prematurely retire from art altogether? I honed my carpentry skills, took a coding bootcamp, & tried other things. But ever the nocturne artist, I still wrote by night. Indeed, some of my best music started flourishing. I spent a great deal of time honing my symbolic composition program; after nearly 20 years of struggling with Max/Msp, it finally started clicking & I was able to pursue the Third Ear & Sine Wave music I had abandoned due to technical incompetence years prior. Much of this creative watershed had to do with being socially isolated & so thrust into solitude — which I rediscovered a love for. My aesthetic comportment has always valued introspection, & I have always supported intimate, lyrical art as an important aesthetic sensibility that is threatened by bombast & spectacle. By the end of 2016 I had published three new albums on excellent sound art labels, begat a new publication — Caesura, & had my first child.
Feeling a dire lack of criticism in general, but mostly locally in St Louis, Caesura was an attempt to write proper art criticism, the kind I tried & perhaps failed to do earlier. Short music & exhibition reviews were to be priority, but we quickly became valued for our longer thoughtful essays. Much of my interest at this time was further clarifying the necessity of aesthetic experience in the 21st century, as well as some meta-criticism clarifying why criticism is important. Our roundtable after the 2016 election remains an important document of the era. Around this time I was also hired by The Pulitzer Arts Foundation to assist with the curation of Glenn Ligon's exhibition Blue Black, & the critical research that went into that exhibit was ultimately published in Caesura. Also from this time, & ahead of its time, was my essay on Art In The Age of AI, somewhat followed up by The Art of Gas. In 2020, when Caesura was flooded by a younger generation of artist-critics, I finally started publishing allegories, which I've always thought of as an exemplary form of criticism, such as the splendid Echo & Narcissus, & started teaching public courses online, for instance the successful Nietzsche's Aesthetics. With Caesura, I have also been co-curating one-day multimedia art exhibitions in St Louis with Janet Xmas, each of which features a dream house installation as well as paintings, sculptures, & performances by other regional artists.
All the while I have been extremely prolific as a composer — you guessed it, by night! My interests for the past few years have been synthesizing the outer limits of Third Ear acoustic experimentation with modern beauty. This has, since my earliest days, been what I regard as the holy grail of all music in the 21st century. To this end I have been trying to followup on Amacher's piano composition Petra, & Young's Well-Tuned Piano by writing augmented, just-intoned piano works that explore entirely new interval relations. In 2023 I was awarded a grant to retrofit a piano with smart player piano technology to which I can live-compose from my laptop. A longstanding dream of mine, this stunning Meta-Piano — what Midwest Arts Quarterly called "The best artwork by a St Louis artist I've seen" — advances Conlon Nancarrow's player piano studies as well as Young's Well-Tuned Piano.
My goals for the foreseeable future are the construction of a Music House — my own interpretation & original composition for the "dream house" form, finally integrating music & architecture — & the publication of The Irreveries. Regarding the Music House, my interpretation would implement innovative loudspeaker technologies based on recent waveguide acoustic research, as well as Distributed Mode Loudspeaker experiments, which I call painterly soundboards. Looking back over a quarter of a century of prolific creation, I feel the time is right to pursue more ambitious projects, such as the publication of what may be my only book (a la Leaves of Grass), & something equivalent to an artist's chapel. I am also at a point where I don't feel the need to make art for the public at large, but rather for other artists. In other words, I am realizing I've always been an "artist's artist", & am keen to embark on building my own school of thought. Strange as it might sound, for all my experience, I feel my best work is still ahead of me.