Ryan Gaston in his home workspace, May 2025.
Ryan Gaston (he/him, b. 1990) is a performer/composer, instrument designer, and writer who makes devices and music that combine sonic elements of noise, free improvisation, and electroacoustic music. In Gaston's work, the observer encounters sensitive and often volatile nonlinear and dynamical processes—navigating and negotiating them in real time as a listener and/or interactee. The sonic outcomes range from brash to serene, always audibly on the edge of change.
This musical trajectory started in the late '00s when, as a teenager in the Ozarks, Gaston stumbled more or less simultaneously across an array of ear-opening music: Curtis Roads, the Mars Volta, Edgard Varèse, Anthony Braxton, Naked City, Morton Subotnick, Mr. Bungle, the Olivia Tremor Control, and others. Simultaneously, he was experimenting with synthesizers (on an already well-worn Korg MicroKorg) and dabbling in electronic musical instrument maintenance and repair (restoring electric organs from school basements and garage sales).
While studying music composition at Hendrix College, he was encouraged to explore crossover between his musical interests/curiosities, writing music that combined orchestral and chamber music textures with electronics and rock band orchestration. Subsequently, he shifted his principal focus toward computer music, live performance, and free improvisation with modular synthesizer, often performing with other acoustic and electronic instrumentalists.
Eventually, a series of mentors California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) prompted him to consider how the process of instrument and software design could act as an extension of the compositional process—and that designing unique personal tools and workflows could be an avenue for deeper artistic exploration. Through working with Clay Chaplin, Scott Cazan, Mark Trayle, and Barry Schrader, Gaston began to question how he might use instrument and system design as a vehicle for exploring his personal concerns, rather than realizing music principally as recordings or performances.
Gaston's current work contemplates temporal perception and agency—memory, preconception, time travel, and human relationships with “systems”—by placing nonlinear and dynamical conceptual structures at the core of both electronic devices and compositions. Presently, Gaston is developing his newest series of instruments: a digital modular synthesizer system based on original, chaotic, self-organizing approaches to sound generation and user interaction. These instruments central processes are knotted and unpredictable, tapping into musicians' uniquely attuned sense of the passage of time to construct sonic interactions that expand the user's sense of the relationship between past/present/future while creating a dynamic and surprising experience for both the performer and the listener. They require the user to navigate volatile dynamical systems, which could stabilize or collapse with at the slightest sign of interaction. By developing an intuition about the system’s behavior, the user may refactor their interactions based on their preferred level of risk and their own desires for the ensuing sonic direction. Interacting with these devices requires a special sensitivity, and an ability to adjust one’s own sense of embodiment relative to the instrument’s interface and resulting sounds. These types of interactions mirror the organic and manufactured systems that surround the user, bringing interactive algorithms, evolution, and emergence into critical focus.
Gaston’s writing focuses on the history and techniques of experimental electronic music and electronic musical instrument design, with a special focus on American west coast trends in the second half of the 20th century—as well as propositional writing about the potential futures of electronic music.
Gaston holds an MFA in Music Composition and Experimental Sound Practices from the California Institute of the Arts (2016) as well as a BA in Music Composition from Hendrix College (2012). His writing and instruments have been featured at the New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference, the Canadian Electroacoustic Community's eContact!, the Southern California Institute of Architecture's Offramp, the CalArts Digital Arts Expo, and elsewhere. He is the editor of and frequent contributor to Signal, an online publication managed by California-based electronic musical instrument retailer Perfect Circuit. Since 2023, Gaston has also worked closely with The Buchla Archives, an organization dedicated to the preservation and documentation of the life and work of instrument designer, composer, and sound artist Donald F. Buchla.
Gaston collaborates frequently with performer-composer Sarah Belle Reid, having co-produced her albums MASS and Underneath & Sonder. Gaston and Reid are co-developers of MIGSI, an electronic hardware/software system designed to augment the acoustic trumpet.
Ryan Gaston with Buchla 700, March 2023; courtesy of the Buchla Archives.
Short Bio
Ryan Gaston (b. 1990) is a performer/composer, instrument designer, and writer who makes devices and music that combine sonic elements of noise, free improvisation, and experimental electroacoustic music.
Gaston's current work contemplates temporal perception and agency—memory, preconception, time travel, and human relationships with “systems”—by placing nonlinear and dynamical conceptual structures at the core of both electronic devices and compositions. His writing focuses on the history and techniques of experimental electronic music and electronic musical instrument design, with a special focus on American west coast trends in the second half of the 20th century.
Gaston holds an MFA in Music Composition and Experimental Sound Practices from the California Institute of the Arts (2016) as well as a BA in Music Composition from Hendrix College (2012). His writing and instruments have been featured at the New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference, the Canadian Electroacoustic Community's eContact!, the Southern California Institute of Architecture's Offramp, the CalArts Digital Arts Expo, and elsewhere. He is the editor of and frequent contributor to Signal, an online publication managed by California-based electronic musical instrument retailer Perfect Circuit. Since 2023, Gaston has also worked closely with The Buchla Archives, an organization dedicated to the preservation and documentation of the life and work of instrument designer, composer, and sound artist Donald F. Buchla.