Described by recent listeners as “a shredder”, New York-based cellist, composer, and improviser Athos Maelstrom (they/he) visualizes noise as a conduit through which performers can investigate a space of connection between themselves and the objects and observers that surround them. Athos believes that music is an inherently social undertaking, and should always blossom from a desire for better understanding and closeness in community.

Both Athos’s compositional and performance practices are prevailingly informed by physical memory and a desire to explore body, time, and place deliberately. Athos enjoys music that he describes, affectionately, as “long-suffering” – sounds that take their time in emergence and then overstay their welcome. Athos is interested in the holding and feeling of instruments (or the self), and in embracing the reactive, extraneous, and transitory noise that will inevitably follow this act.

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 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, 2022, commissioner – 2024) and the Dubuque Symphony (2022). In the summer of 2025, Athos will make their debut as a composer with Der Gestanke on a program of duos with the piece harbor me, bury me for voice, bass flute, and fixed media.

In December of 2024, Athos engaged 12 composers in the initiation of a solo project called OVERTRANSGRESSION, which will document Athos’s careful, methodical return to playing as a transmasculine individual in search of gender-affirming care. In describing what the project will represent, Athos states, “My experience as a transgender individual swings pretty evenly between destruction and creation. Many people in common society, I think, see only destruction – the altering of a body, the altering of a voice, which seemed to have been perfectly functional before. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. In many ways, this breaking down and restructuring – customizing – lives at the core of any transgender individual's life… It is a life born of dissatisfaction and discomfort that fester unnamed (and even unrecognized) for a very long time. It is a life of recognizing differences, feeling hurt by them, and eventually moving on. It is a life that has a foot outside and a foot in the door (whose house, we aren't quite sure). To be transgender in a binary world is to stand on the threshold of an invitation, and we would like to be welcomed inside, one day.”

Contact Athos for more information.