toneDAMAGES’s story starts in the 1980s: a kid in South Florida who loved math, soldering and melody in equal measure, teaching himself guitar and then learning music theory from “an old jazz-head” who pulled him into jazz and fusion groups.
That early apprenticeship gave toneDAMAGE architecture – the harmonic know-how to bend modes and twist melodies – while the punk and hardcore scenes taught him how to break rules and make feeling matter more than polish. His brother’s DJ crew added another world: Miami-bass, trip-hop and techno, and a dozen warehouse raves where bass did the talking.
“All those cultures were about expressions of musicality unbounded by the rules,” he says. “That spirit motivates the music I create today.” He describes modded instruments, odd time signatures and the particular thrill of cutting and scratching as ingredients in his later sound: jazzy riffs over heavy subs, vocoded harmonies and melodies that wobble through Dorian and other off-kilter modes.
Then, in his late thirties, a vacation in Costa Rica ended in bacterial meningitis and a coma. He woke to a life remade: profound hearing loss, a wrecked sense of balance and significant cognitive impairment. Rehab became the daily work. For a while, music felt like something irretrievably taken. But he refused to stop trying.
“A friend reminded me of Dame Evelyn Glennie,” he says. “Watching her perform reminded me that rhythm isn’t just heard, it’s felt – very intimately.” That seed grew. He picked up his guitar and concentrated on vibration, relearning notes by the way they sat in his fingers. He spent hours at his drum kit learning the feel of each hit – the stick’s response, vibration in his arm, the thump in his chest. He compares the practice to striking tuning forks: feeling a 440Hz against a 2048Hz and teaching his body to map those differences.
His background in math and computing pushed him to study the physics of sound as waves and energy. He experimented with visualizers but found them musically unsatisfying. “Spectrograms and oscilloscopes are useful, but they’re not a good way to experience a piece of music,” he says. So he built a new way. The “Tone Tower” is a five-foot column of more than 4,000 LEDs that translates audio and voltage into harmonic colour and rhythmic motion. “It’s essentially a Deaf amplifier, a way to see and feel melody,” he explains. That, he says, is Deaf gain – turning loss into a new sensory language for sound.
Field recordings now sit at the heart of his practice. He carries a ZOOM Handy recorder and will stop on a walk if something vibrates his body. He tells a story about Hawaii: walking into a cove and feeling a low rumble as the waves tumbled rocks against each other. Back in the studio he deconstructed those minutes into “kicks (rocks), pads (water rushing), percussion (bird chirps).” The ordinary became the source material for a track.
In the studio he’s purposefully analog-obsessed. “Analog signals carry vibration more purely than digital,” he says. Everything runs through multiple channels: audio, visual and tactile. He begins in a “colouring phase,” routing tones through that lighting rig to sculpt the shape of sound – to see which overtones augment or detract, to isolate pulses that might yield a wavetable for a gritty neuro bass. From there he moves into a “sketch phase”: setting loops, jamming on the drum kit, mapping each drum hit to a colour pulse and a note – lower toms for lower notes – and playing until it both looks and feels groovy.
He uses off-the-shelf tools and bespoke setups. Melodyne helps him “see” and morph individual expressions; tactile transducers and sub-100Hz tones let him feel low-end in his chest. He experiments with unconventional percussive sources — “replacing hi-hats with rubber duck squeaks or car blinkers” – and loves when tracks feel a touch off, forcing the listener’s brain to recalibrate.
Tone and texture are inseparable from his medical reality. After surgery to install bilateral cochlear implants, he wears processors that send electromagnetic impulses to sixteen electrodes implanted in his cochleas. “They provide a very limited range of sound,” he says. “Everything I ‘hear’ through them is very noisy – drop-outs, clipping, over-compression.” Chronic tinnitus and the quirky artefacts of the implants inform his aesthetics: where others might seek pristine clarity, he leans into degradation. “Detuning, degrading and distorting tones in unconventional ways provides grit and intensity. Distortion, decay and damage – they’re not flaws. They’re reflections of being human.”
Live shows remain sacred. He loves the choreography of sound and bodies: subs that shake the floor, visuals that speak in colour, a dance floor’s motion. “I lean on my wife to stay balanced while dancing, literally grounding myself in her rhythm,” he says. With his cochlear implants he still finds artists that translate well into his sensory map: Athena (recently released on Deep, Dark & Dangerous), En:vy’s Austrian DnB, Rome’s Astrality, local PDX names like JVNITOR and other underground producers in Portland who prioritize subs and immersive textures.
Collaboration is practical and humane: his library is obsessively organised and cross-linked so partners can work in audio, stems or light data. “My sensory world is primarily visual and tactile; others thrive in sonic intuition. Together we meet in the middle,” he says. The workflow yields unexpected results and perspective, and the compromise often becomes the point of interest.
When asked what he wants future listeners – people who won’t know his story – to take from the work, he keeps it simple: “Damage isn’t necessarily destructive. It’s an opportunity for creativity outside the biases our brains become accustomed to. If someone smiles, nods or thumps their foot to a piece and feels the love vibrating within it, then I’ve done my job.”
