Sam Pluta - Composer/Improviser

News and such :


sum and difference, a set of duo improvisations with Peter Evans and Jim Altieri is now available on Carrier Records

Interpretations – Sept 22, 2011 8:00pm - Roulette, Brooklyn
Wet Ink Ensemble performs the music of George Lewis at Roulette, include a duo between George and myself!

The Peter Evans Quintet – Nov 4, 2011 8:00pm - Roulette, Brooklyn
The Peter Evans Quintet premeires our new material at Roulette in Brooklyn.

Totally Intense Fractal Mindgaze Hut – November 8, 2011 8:00pm - Oakland, California
Trio show with Alex Christie and Drew Ceccato.

Wet Ink Ensemble – November 9-16, 2011 - California
Wet Ink will be on a tour of California with stops at Santa Clara University, Sacramento State, and Davis.

The Smith College Festival of Sound and Space – Dec 1, 9:00pm - Helen Hills Chapel at Smith College.
Jim Altieri and I will perform at duo concert in Northampton, MA.

The Outpost – Dec 2, 8:00pm - Boston, MA
Jim Altieri and I will perform at duo concert in Boston, MA.

Austin New Music Coop – Jan 28, 2012 - Austin, TX
Line Upon Line Percussion will be performing Matrices in a concert of new music in Austin.

The Peter Evans Quintet – Mar 1-13, 2012 - Austria
The Peter Evans Quintet will be on tour in Austria for two weeks in March.

Wet Ink Ensemble and TimeTable Percussion – March 30, 2012 8:00pm - DiMenna Center for Classical Music, Manhattan
Wet Ink and TimeTable join forces to perform my new work Machine Language plus percussion sextets by Alex Mincek and Victor Adan, and Morton Feldman's classic Bass Clarinet and Percussion.

Wet Ink Ensemble – May 22 and 23, 2012 - Brooklyn
Wet Ink presents our second biennial of New American Music.

The Walden School Creative Musicians Retreat – June, 2012 - Smith College, Northampton, MA

The Walden School Young Musicians Program – June-July, 2012 - The Dublin School, Dublin, NH
This is my 12h year teaching at the Walden School. I can't wait!

New Releases:


sum and difference and Ghosts were both released in March 2011




"The future of computer music is naturally wide open, and it will be interesting to see where it takes us. For now, Sam Pluta and his cohorts are among many musicians who have fired up our senses and fermented our imaginations."
--Nicholas Catalano, All About Jazz

"Pluta does just that, turning the snappy bop of "Chorales" into a Moebius strip of shuddering loops which stops the piece dead in its tracks and sends it scurrying into a minimalist cul-de-sac."
--Dan Warburton, The Wire

"[The Peter Evans Quintet] can swing like crazy, but there's often an implosion around the corner, triggered either by Mr. Evans or by Sam Pluta, whose live electronics, involving transmogrified samples of his band mates, plays a pervasive but elusive role."
--Nate Chinen, The New York Times

"there were certainly some fascinating things going on that helped to put this on repeat. Improvised music, a meeting of a laptop and two instruments, doesn't always come this loud and full of aggression. Excellent!"
--Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly

"The ghost in this jazz machine is Sam Pluta's real-time sound processing, which sucks in the live material and scatters and bumps and drizzles it around the sound environment like sonic poltergeist activity."
--Philip Clark, The Wire

"Gulps, kisses and shrieks abet and oppose digital fuzz and clicks until they become a whorl of action, origin indeterminate. Altieri's whining, bent glisses and flurries are likewise an interesting foil to Pluta's glitchy patchwork"
--Clifford Allen, New York City Jazz Record

About Me:


When people ask what I do, I usually answer either that I am a composer or an electronic musician. In fact, I am both. I split my creative time between writing notes on the page and improvising on the laptop. I have been lucky to compose for some of the finest performers in New York City, including Wet Ink Ensemble, Yarn/Wire, Timetable Percussion, MIVOS Quartet, ICE, Dave Eggars, and So Percussion.

I am the Technical Director for Wet Ink Ensemble, an amazing New York group dedicated to playing new music by young composers. Wet Ink has commissioned and premeired nearly 100 works in its 12 year history, including sixteen premieres in our 2010-2011 season alone. Recently we have begun touring, and have projects next season at the Sacramento Festival of New American Music, UC Davis, Santa Clara University, and Duke University.

I recently recorded and released an album of duos, entitled sum and difference with trumpeter Peter Evans and violinist Jim Altieri. This album uses my custom live-processing software that I have been working on for the past 8 years, and I can't imagine having made it with any other performers. These guys are just amazing to work with in the electro-acoustic setting. A comment I often get is, "Well, I can't really hear the instruments!" A closer listen reveals that you can always hear the instruments, they just sound so electronic that it is hard to differentiate them from the laptop sounds.

Performing over the last year with the Peter Evans Quintet has done wonders for my improv skills. These guys are just incredible performers, and our combination of jazz, noise, and electronics is, as far as I can tell, fairly unique and special. Our album Ghosts has just been released on More is More Records

Sadly my awesome improv quartet GBL is beginning to disperse around the country. These guys are not only amazing musicians, but also some of my best friends, so hopefully we will be playing together again soon. Our album, Drone Level Orange was one of the first albums released on Carrier Records. It is still one of my favorite projects. My duo with Jeff Synder, exclusiveOr, who make music on vintage 1960's and 70's synths, including one of the original Buchla 100/200's. Our self-titled album was released on quiet design records in Austin, TX. Also on that label is the language of, a killer compilation including works by Alex Mincek, Alex Ness, Clara Latham, Jeff Snyder, Kate Soper, Eric Wubbels, Jim Altieri, and myself.

I've studied music in a lot of great places. I am currently a DMA student at Columbia University. I received my Masters degree at the University of Texas at Austin and then got another at BEAST in the UK. I did my undergrad work at Santa Clara University in California. Probably the best education of all, though, has been teaching for the last 10 years at The Walden School, which is my favorite place in the world. They recently named me the John Plude Chair of Computer Musicianship, which is very exciting.

If you like my stuff and want to contact me, please email me at spluta at gmail dot com.

©2011 Sam Pluta