Aplete

I grew up the class artist. The kid drawing Goku for classmates, sketching landscapes, experimenting with plaster sculptures in middle school. The first thing I actually wanted to be was an actor, but the acting class handed me a script and gave me ten minutes to perform it. I was a foreign kid with dyslexia. I could not read fast enough to find the character, and I walked away thinking that class was not for me. It discouraged me from pursuing acting further. Cultivating creativity became the skill I nurtured with intention.

At fifteen I picked up the bass. I played my first six months without an amp, chin pressed to the body to feel and hear the notes. Years later a friend passed me a subpack he was getting rid of, a pack that turns music into vibration, and it opened my curiosity about how vibration moves through the body and the mood. Playing bass through it became my favorite way to write. The first bassline I taught myself was Longview by Green Day, learned with the tabs upside down before my older brother set me straight. The second and third were Schism and Money, difficult parts for a beginner, and the challenge is what hooked me, along with a lifelong love of odd time signatures.

At sixteen I played my first show, fourteen songs learned in three weeks. Then came almost twenty years of bands: experimental rock, heavy rock, garage rock, stages from the House of Blues to Whiskey a Go Go to Brooklyn Bowl. In 2017, days from finishing the album that was supposed to change everything, our studio was robbed at gunpoint. The producer was shot, I walked away with a broken nose, and the band fell apart in the aftermath. That was the night I stopped building my future on other people’s shoulders.

I turned toward large-scale art, joining crews that build and assemble installations for festivals and venues, and found a world where the work gets famous instead of the person. As a bass player I never wanted the spotlight anyway. I kept hosting the weekly jams I had run since I was sixteen, which grew into Playful Pastime, and kept recording on my own terms with Trust in the Sun.

Then I walked into the Temple at Burning Man carrying the loss of my cousin, and watched hundreds of people grieve together before the structure burned. That night planted the seed of FIOH: a glowing geometric heart that receives photos of the people and pets we love and gives them back as light and music. It began as a sketch in 2019, became a paper study, then a cardboard heart, then a public installation. When I was quoted more than I could ever pay for its software, I taught myself to build it with AI as my collaborator. It holds every outlet I love in one place: sculpture, music, video, and the gathering of people.

FIOH holds grief and celebration in the same frame. A way to grace your place with those forever in your heart.