In December of 2024, Athos Maelstrom engaged 12 composers in the initiation of a solo project intended to document their careful, methodical return to playing as a transmasculine individual in search of gender-affirming care. Some of the pieces commissioned capture a ferocious “before-times” in Athos’s performance practice (Enredado en mi propio eje and Intrinsic Fracturing), some are built for players on semi-hiatus (Hybrid Rose and Sermon 85), and many more hope to embrace post-healing, technical reconstruction, and ever-growth.

Over time, OVERTRANSGRESSION has expanded into a continuous, evolving assemblage of one-on-one, performer-composer partnerships centered in reclaiming interpersonal closeness between collaborators as such that all involved are prioritized humanly so that they are able to show up in their entirety as brave artists.

In describing what the project represents, 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… In many ways, this breaking down and restructuring – customizing – lives at the core of any transgender individual's life… 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.”