Bio
Short bio
ALLONYM (known to his friends and family as Justin Alley) is a classical guitarist who explores the farthest reaches of electronic sound manipulation. He is active in developing new techniques and technologies for dramatically expanding the sonic potential of his instrument. In his music, he strives to bridge the organic and the synthetic, the classical and the contemporary, the mystical and the melodious.
Long bio
ALLONYM (known to his friends and family as Justin Alley) is a multiinstrumentalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. As a kid, whenever he had any free time, Justin would often spend it reading every kind of music he could get his hands on, and he soon began making his own attempts at composition. Some of his greatest musical influences have been Bach, Mahler, Messiaen, Ryuichi Sakamato, Leo Brouwer, Lenny Breau, Nguyên Lê, Autechre, and Matmos. His first instruments were the clarinet and the tenor sax—the latter of which he studied at the Crestmont Conservatory of Music. However, his real passion ended up being for guitar instruments of all types—from the classical to the electric guitar, the mandolin to the fretless bass.
From an early age, Justin also began tinkering with cheap consumer-grade electronics to get new sounds into his music. Little did he know that a huge eruption in music technology would occur in the ensuing years and carry him along with it. In particular, he has a keen interest in modular synthesis and has created several prototype modules of his own. Likewise, he has worked on developing a software package known as ALLEA to codify some of his compositional practices.
Though music has remained Justin's one true calling, his life has taken several detours along the way. He studied literature and philosophy at UC, Berkeley and the University of Cambridge. Toward the end of his academic studies, a debilitating neuromuscular impairment forced him to step back from his musical pursuits and reevaluate what was possible for him in life. In the intervening years, he co-founded an affordable housing nonprofit—an area where he remains very active. He also did a 10-year stint in publishing. Even in that field, he remained engaged with music, both as an editor and as a writer. A project of particular significance was a hybrid literary work around the life and music of Gustav Mahler. Said work consisted of essays, short stories, poetry, plays, and music. An experimental oratorio from that project, Kind[er]tot[en]lied[er], was created to commemorate the 5-year anniversary of the Sandy Hook mass shooting. It combined music from Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, treated through guitar pedals, with recitative scrupulously derived from the lives of the Sandy Hook families. At a performance of the work, numerous attendees were visibly in tears, and one mother later wrote to say that she was so shaken by the work that she could not sleep that night. It is perhaps fair to say that this experience reconfirmed for Justin that music is where his heart is.
