alone-a
alone-a, my solo sonic project, explores memory and moment through tapestries of voice, digital delays, and signal processing. Every sound comes from my voice, transformed through an ever-evolving Max/MSP instrument to surprising, chaotic, and ecstatic ends.
Liveness is at the heart of this project. The unique quirks of the instrument ensure that no two performances are ever the same.
I was honored to receive the 2022 Minnesota Music Creator Award from the American Composers Forum.
āShe creates choir-like harmonies with sinister undertones like a chamber of echoes... The echo takes the voice, repeats, and returns the voice to itself as different, as other.ā
ā Livy Snyder, Sixty Inches from Center
a veil, a prism
Releasing Friday, April 3, 2026 on Bumpy Records
a veil, a prism, the debut album from alone-a, foregrounds the human voice while digitally fracturing, refracting, and reshaping it in real time.
Built from live vocal improvisations recorded in Minneapolis and Chicago between 2023 and 2025, the album explores memory and transformation through layered delays, unstable loops, and intimate vocal textures.
These improvisations have been collaged into new forms with producer and mix engineer Christian Erickson (The Sevateem, Astronaut Wife).
The nine songs move between immersive ambient soundscapes and lyrical passages, inviting listeners into threshold statesāspaces of transition, change, and transformation.
EXP/VOX (2024)
EXP/VOX, organized by Anna Johnson at TriTriangle as an exploration of the voice, featured alone-a along with Anna Johnson, Paige Naylor, Maya Nguyen, and maoĻ“.
This improvised set included an experimentation with Neutone. Using real-time digital sound processing, I turn micro samples of my voice into other radically new sonic styles, preserving its core character.
Here, Iām using a model trained on the famous Amen Break, turning voice into drums. Like many aspects of my set up, itās a bit chaotic and unpredictable, but sometimes it works beautifully.
My performance starts at 8:04.
Recorded in Chicago, IL on April 19, 2024
Video: Anna Johnson
Memories Project (2023)
Throughout 2023 I collaborated with experimental filmmaker Michael Wellvang, who explores early internet-era aesthetics using found video as well as his own footage shot on first-generation digital cameras.
Over the course of several months, we crafted a video collage taken from videos uploaded to Youtube in 2006, its first year of existence.
Our collaboration culminated in a residency at Tamarack Land Co-op, where we installed CRT TVs throughout their chapel, and I improvised along to the visuals.
Recorded in Hovland, Minnesota on October 21, 2023
Video: Michael Wellvang
Envelop Deep Listening Series (2023)
This incredible series hosted by Jesse Whitney at Mirror Lab invites audience members into deep listening. I performed an improvised set inspired, in part, by Charles Bukowskiās poem Flophouse:
those men
were all
children
once
what has happened
to
them?
and what has
happened
to
me?
Recorded in Minneapolis, MN on December 21, 2023
Video: Charles Hainsworth
Landscape Stories: Helen Allison Savanna (2022)
I collaborated with landscape architect, artist, and writer Regina M Flanagan to score a 19-minute experimental documentary film about the Helen Allison Savanna, located near Bethel, Minnesota.
Landscape Stories: Helen Allison Savanna covers the human and non-human histories of the 80-acre area, including its namesake (a botanist who spent twenty years studying grasses), its inhabitants (old growth burr oaks), and its role bringing fire back to the prairie (it was the site of The Nature Conservancyās first prescribed burn in 1962).
Elapse (2022)
An improvised experiment using the arpeggiator function on my Arturia Keystep. The insistent beat of the arpeggiator can only exist when I am singing. My voice, and the limits of my breath support, become a parameter in themselves.
Recorded at home on December 16, 2022.
Untitled (2022)
Trio improvisation featuring alone-a.
A. Horton: Max/MSP, Voice
M. Stahlmann: ECB+, Osc., Sampler
W. Statler: Drum, FM, Voice
P. Marschke: Engineer
Recorded live to tape in my living room on May 19, 2022
Lament (2019)
An improvised excerpt from a longer improvised piece. Headphones recommended.
Recorded at home on June 17, 2019.
Press
āItās Music You Would Call āFar Outāāor as Minnesotans Would Say, āInterestingā: How Curators Are Keeping Local Experimental Music Alive (Macie Rasmussen for Racket, July 18, 2025)
Sonic Geography of Voice: A Review of EXP/VOX (Livy Snyder for Sixty Inches from Center, October 12, 2024)
I Attended a 28-Hour Drone Music Festival. (Should I Have Brought a Pillow?) (Dustin Nelson for SPIN, February 1, 2024)
About the Instrument
alone-a uses a custom Max/MSP instrument developed in collaboration with Patrick Marschke between 2018ā2025, and expanded since 2025 with Paul Christian.
At its core, the instrument is a live vocal looper built around five delay-based loop lines. Each loop runs at a different length and moves across the stereo field, creating shifting layers that resist gridded rhythm and emphasize drift, accumulation, and decay, allowing soundscapes to evolve organically over time.
The live voice is processed in real time through transposition, pitch correction, reversing, filtering, reverb, and modulation. A MIDI keyboard controls additional processes, including a vocoder, freeze functions, and a granular synthesizer that samples directly from the live signal and can feed back into the looping system.
The instrument also interfaces with Neutone, enabling the voice to be resynthesized in real time into entirely different textures, including percussive, drum-like sounds, while preserving the gesture and shape of the original performance.
Improvisation and liveness is central to this project, as the patchās internal variability makes replication of a previous performance nearly impossible.
Illustration by Christian Erickson