Described by recent listeners as “a real badass” and “a shredder”, New York-based composer, cellist, and improviser Athos Maelstrom is a fierce advocate of creativity in the present. They believe that music is social in nature and deeply respect the personal tenets that have always thrived in human sound. Athos works to utilize narratives of place and identity as building blocks of community between composer, performer, and listener.

Athos is a founding member of Mosaic Composers Collective in New York, with whom they curate concerts of music focused on issues of social justice, and Ensemble Der Gestanke in Boston, with whom they present new and old repertoire post-1900. By far the youngest member of Der Gestanke, Athos’s performance in the ensemble’s inaugural concert was remarked upon affectionately by a surprised audience member, “Why does it feel like you’ve just shown me a 5-year-old playing [Morton Feldman’s] ‘King of Denmark’?”

In November of 2023, Athos appeared alongside fellow cellist Thea Mesirow in a double recital of music composed by doctoral candidates at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. The recital was an expansion of two solo works that Athos commissioned from composers Nicholas Tran (Intrinsic Fracturing) and Julio Quiñones Santiago (Enredado en mi propio eje), both of which center the urgency that many queer individuals are made to feel in protecting themselves and their community from unwelcoming social and political environments.

Athos frequently performs alongside violinist Sathvi Ramaseshan as Duo Indigo – a collaboration centered on music of the last 50 years, and especially upon graphic scores and other forms of guided improvisation. In April of 2024, Duo Indigo unveiled a brand new program of graphic scores by young, queer composers as an extension of Raven Chacon’s retrospective A Worm’s Eye View from a Bird’s Beak at the Swiss Institute gallery.

Music written by Athos has been heard at National Sawdust and the Tenri Institute (November 2023 and February 2024 respectively, with Mosaic Composers Collective), and has been championed by ensembles such as the Cheyenne Symphony (2021 and 2022) and the Dubuque Symphony (2022). In June of 2024, the Cheyenne Symphony premiered Athos’s most recent work for orchestra, titled Pronghorn, which was written especially for the ensemble.

Athos’s compositional practice swings between “hyper-free” and “hyper-notated”, sometimes featuring elements of graphic notation, and sometimes requiring instruction pages for specific extended techniques. Athos enjoys sounds that could be described as disruptive or even abrasive, and is fascinated with the experience of sitting inside of unusual, uncomfortable sounds. They believe that silence and sound live peacefully and parallel to one another, that meditative spaces can be discovered or created in any noise-filled environment, and that no single category of sound is any more or less “beautiful” than another.

Contact Athos for more information.