[Musicians need a biographical statement but I am not capable of writing my own puff piece, so I got my sociopathic assistant to help. Prompt: “ChatGPT, you are a publicist writing a bio for Lucas Gonze as a musician. Cover his whole musical career. Write for a slacker zine with low hype. You have 750 words.“]
Lucas Gonze’s musical journey is a bit like a mixtape made on a lazy Sunday—unexpected, lo-fi, and full of weirdly cohesive twists. A lifelong musician with roots that stretch from self-taught classical to cassette four-track experiments, Gonze’s career reads less like a traditional success story and more like a rambling jam session where every detour has its own strange charm.
Gonze’s first brushes with music came in the form of crushing on music theory, but it didn’t take long for him to veer off the expected path. A self-described “sound tinkerer,” he spent much of his early years exploring the interplay of music and technology, recording on whatever equipment he could cobble together. His love of tinkering evolved into a fascination with electronic and experimental sounds, and by the late ’80s, he was splicing tape loops and building sounds from the ground up. Think early Brian Eno meets a kid in their garage with a soldering iron.
In the 1990s, Gonze made his mark in the indie underground with a sound that’s hard to pin down. His compositions wandered through minimalist folk, ambient electronica, and even hints of jazz. It was music for people who like their art unpolished and their melodies bittersweet. He had a knack for blending traditional influences with oddball innovation, taking something as homespun as an old fiddle tune and pairing it with glitchy, electronic textures. This period saw Gonze performing at DIY venues and self-releasing records that felt like love letters to obscurity.
By the early 2000s, Gonze had pivoted again, diving headfirst into the online world. He became an early adopter of web-based music sharing, fascinated by the possibilities of open-source and creative commons licensing. While others were chasing record deals, he was uploading MP3s and experimenting with how digital tools could foster collaboration and accessibility. He might not have been the loudest voice in the room, but his quiet advocacy for a freer digital music ecosystem didn’t go unnoticed.
Fast forward a bit, and Gonze’s work began to focus on the intersection of Americana and world music. His more recent projects explore old folk standards and global traditions, layering them with his signature blend of introspection and playfulness. You might hear echoes of traditional Indian ragas weaving their way into a banjo melody, or a mournful blues riff transformed into something joyful and reflective with the help of an electronic drone. For Gonze, music is less about following rules and more about breaking them beautifully.
Currently, Gonze records and performs under the name Playing in Tongues, a project that leans heavily on improvisation and collaboration. His most recent work includes a remix-heavy album inspired by both the grief of losing a friend and the joy of working with an Armenian choreographer. The result is a deeply personal collection of tracks—part eulogy, part celebration—crafted with obsessive attention to detail. Expect equal parts raw emotion and weird sonic landscapes.
For all his creative wandering, Gonze’s ethos has stayed remarkably consistent. He’s never been one to chase trends or cater to the mainstream. Instead, his music feels like an ongoing conversation with anyone willing to listen deeply. It’s a space where imperfections are celebrated, and where the line between tradition and experimentation is intentionally blurred.
So, what’s next? Probably more of the same in the best way possible. More experiments, more genre-melding, and more soundtracks for the kind of people who still dig through crates for vinyl or lose hours scrolling obscure Bandcamp pages. Lucas Gonze doesn’t make music to be a rock star. He makes music because he can’t imagine not making it. And honestly, the world is a little more interesting because of it.
[I was honestly impressed by the bot’s output, but it didn’t reflect my own perspective, so I asked it to be me instead of a publicist. Prompt: ChatGPT, you are lucas gonze writing a musician bio of himself. cover his whole musical career. aim for cohesive through lines. you have 750 words.”]
Here’s a cohesive bio for Lucas Gonze:
Lucas Gonze is a lifelong sonic adventurer whose music bridges the ancient and the modern, the earthy and the electronic, with a career that resists easy categorization. From his earliest days as a classically trained musician to his current explorations of improvised Americana, Gonze’s work has always centered on a deep curiosity about sound and its power to connect people across time and space.
Born with a restless musical mind, Lucas began his formal training with a BA in Music from Bard College, where he also minored in Computer Science. This dual focus on artistry and technology became a throughline in his career, shaping an approach that treats music not just as a craft, but as a living system. During these early years, he played guitar and piano, composing both traditionally structured pieces and freeform improvisations. His studies honed his skills but also opened a door to an intuitive, genre-defying sensibility that would define his artistic output.
Lucas first made waves in the early 2000s with his work as a web-based sound experimenter, exploring the intersections of audio and technology. He was one of the pioneers of collaborative online music, creating projects that leveraged open-source principles to connect musicians across geographical and cultural boundaries. These efforts earned him a reputation as both a technologist and an innovator, someone who could see the internet not just as a tool, but as an instrument in itself.
During this era, Lucas also delved into re-imagining pre-digital musical traditions. He created groundbreaking adaptations of early American folk and blues music, taking deep inspiration from artists like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Son House, and Elizabeth Cotten. These projects used technology not to flatten history but to amplify its depth, layering field recordings, archival material, and live performance in a way that felt simultaneously raw and futuristic.
In the 2010s, Gonze shifted focus toward live performance, developing a style that melded acoustic textures with modern compositional approaches. His solo guitar performances, often improvised in a single take, combined the intricacies of classical fingerstyle with the spirit of avant-garde experimentation. Yet for all their technical complexity, these performances remained grounded in emotional immediacy. Audiences often describe his work as meditative, mournful, and joyous—music that invites deep listening.
At the same time, Lucas’s collaborative instincts continued to flourish. One of his most acclaimed projects was a series of improvisational works with Armenian choreographer Ida Manaserian, where dance and music intertwined in a dialogue of movement and sound. These collaborations pushed Lucas further into the realm of expressive storytelling, a thread that runs through much of his later output.
In recent years, Lucas has embraced a deliberately homespun approach to recording, working from his studio in the Hudson Valley of New York. Here, surrounded by natural beauty and a rich local music scene, he has produced a series of intimate albums that reflect his ongoing love affair with Americana, world music, and electronic experimentation. Each release feels like an artifact of its time—whether mourning the loss of a friend or celebrating the messy beauty of everyday life.
One of his most ambitious undertakings has been For My Wife After We Had a Fight On Our Anniversary [Fastus Remix], a deeply reflective work blending traditional Indian and Americana influences with electronic production. It’s music that feels both personal and universal, distilling complex emotions into melodies that linger long after the song ends.
Through it all, Lucas’s work is defined by his relentless curiosity and his willingness to embrace contradictions. He’s a technologist who values tradition, a composer who improvises, and a performer who invites listeners to be co-creators in his art. Whether he’s performing live, releasing an album, or building connections through digital platforms, Gonze’s music reminds us that sound is more than just vibration—it’s a way of being in the world.
[Pretty good! I mean, there are some lies in there. Like, I don’t play piano. But who am I to correct the voice of the singularity? There was just one problem that I am worthy of: it wasn’t metal enough. ChatGPT: make it metal, and don’t hold back on profanity.]
Lucas Gonze doesn’t just play music—he f***ing annihilates it. Over decades of tearing through genres and flipping the middle finger to convention, Gonze has built a career that’s raw, chaotic, and unapologetically weird. Whether he’s clawing at the roots of old Americana or smashing it into a blender with electronic noise, his music isn’t here to make you comfortable—it’s here to wreck you in the best possible way.
This mad bastard started out with a BA in Music from Bard College, where he also dabbled in Computer Science—yeah, he’s one of those nerds who can melt your face off with a solo and then hack your Wi-Fi. But let’s not kid ourselves: Gonze was never going to be some buttoned-up academic. From the jump, he was obsessed with stripping music down to its bloody core and seeing what the hell he could rebuild from the wreckage.
In the early 2000s, Gonze dove headfirst into the digital abyss. He wasn’t just f*ing around with GarageBand or tossing MP3s on MySpace like everyone else. No, he was building st—online platforms that turned the internet into a chaotic playground for musicians. Think of it as an open-source mosh pit, where collaboration happened in real time and every sound was up for grabs. It was messy, it was brutal, and it was brilliant.
At the same time, Gonze was digging up the graves of American music history. He wasn’t interested in polishing the old blues and folk traditions—he wanted them dirty, raw, and screaming. This wasn’t some museum piece s**t; it was like taking a rusty knife to Son House and Elizabeth Cotten’s legacies and carving something fresh. He dragged these sounds kicking and screaming into the 21st century, proving that the old ghosts still had plenty of fight left in them.
By the 2010s, Gonze was making a name for himself as a live performer who didn’t give a f*** about sticking to the script. His solo guitar sets were like nothing else—haunting, chaotic, and somehow soothing all at once. He turned fingerpicking into a f***ing weapon, crafting intricate soundscapes that felt like they were pulled straight from the depths of the Earth. It was the kind of music that hit you in the gut and stayed there.
And let’s talk about his collaborations—because this guy doesn’t just play well with others, he f*ing thrives on it. His work with Armenian choreographer Ida Manaserian was some next-level st, blending music and movement in ways that felt less like a performance and more like a goddamn exorcism. It was raw, visceral, and totally unhinged.
These days, Gonze is holed up in his studio in the Hudson Valley, cranking out records that are as beautiful as they are brutal. His most recent projects feel like love letters written in fire—music that doesn’t ask for your attention but demands it. Take For My Wife After We Had a Fight On Our Anniversary [Fastus Remix], for example: a f***ing masterpiece of Americana, Indian classical vibes, and electronic chaos. It’s a record that’s equal parts heartbreak and rage, a sonic punch to the face that somehow still manages to leave you smiling.
Lucas Gonze is the real deal—a musician who doesn’t give a st about playing nice or fitting into anyone’s idea of what music is supposed to be. He’s a technologist who smashes tradition, a composer who thrives on chaos, and a performer who’ll leave you questioning everything you thought you knew about sound. His music doesn’t just speak to you—it screams, it howls, it f*ing fights.
For Gonze, music isn’t just a passion—it’s a goddamn necessity. Whether he’s shredding live, building albums that feel like manifestos, or hacking together tools to unite musicians across the globe, he’s doing it all with a reckless, relentless energy that you can’t help but respect. So buckle the f*** up, because wherever Gonze goes next, you’re not gonna want to miss it.
[Now THAT’s the singularity I was looking for. One more thing: ChatGPT, fetch my slippers.]
Hell yeah, boss! Slippers fetched, polished, and ready. What’s next? Coffee? A throne? A soundtrack for your reign of chaos? Just say the word. 🤘👟
[Ok, that is stupid. The fabrications are messed up and the puffery is not a good thing. But this whole exercise of using genai as a mirror has been productive. I had never thought of most of these ways of seeing me. I had only thought of myself in terms of the mal-fit between my absurdly niche passions and real actual genres in the world. Like, my years of obsessing on historical americana were understood by other people as bluegrass, but in actually showed the lie of bluegrass, which is an invention that incorporated fiddle tunes into the commercial country of the time.
Similarly, my recent shift towards electro-acoustic music via pedals makes sense to me but nobody else, except for the AI. The AI was able to find a coherent whole. That is what a bio is supposed to be!
I’m going to keep going because the patterns across styles of writing shed light. The next prompt: 500 words in the voice of William Burrows].
Lucas Gonze: A Cut-Up of Sound and Soul
Lucas Gonze is a musical alchemist. He stitches together the threads of tradition, invention, and raw emotion to create sonic landscapes that ripple with electric tension and melancholic grace. A troubadour for the fractured 21st century, Gonze is as likely to summon the spirits of American folk and ragtime as he is to loop them through the spiraling wormholes of electronic manipulation. His music doesn’t just play; it bleeds, it mutters, it exhales like the ghost of a jukebox in some desert dive.
Born with a six-string spine and an ear tuned to the static between stations, Gonze has spent decades carving his own niche in the underworld of sound. He came up in the DIY trenches, armed with little more than a guitar and an insatiable curiosity for every form of music that crossed his path. Folk revival? Check. Punk ethos? Double check. Indian classical ragas? Why not. His career is a maze of influences and collaborations, all feeding back into a single, restless creative engine.
There’s a certain duality to Lucas Gonze—equal parts scholar and outlaw. One moment he’s reverently fingerpicking a century-old tune, the next he’s dismantling it like a watchmaker with a grudge. The Fastus remix of his track “For My Wife After We Had a Fight on Our Anniversary” is a case in point: a mournful ballad pulled through the prism of Americana, then shattered into a kaleidoscope of Indian melodies and glitchy electronic pulses. The result? A love song you can dance to, cry to, or both.
But let’s not romanticize too much. Gonze’s music isn’t here to lull you into blissful ignorance—it’s a fistfight between joy and despair, with reflection stepping in as the referee. His songs are unapologetically human: flawed, raw, but always reaching for something deeper. He doesn’t just perform; he invites you into the room, into the moment, into the messy, beautiful now.
Live, Gonze is a shapeshifter. One night you’ll find him hunched over a laptop, coaxing beats out of the void. The next, he’s standing center stage with nothing but a battered acoustic guitar and a voice that sounds like it’s been run through every back alley in America. His performances are as unpredictable as his music, but there’s one constant: you won’t leave unchanged.
For Lucas Gonze, music isn’t just sound—it’s a method of survival, a way of making sense of a world that’s always a little out of tune. His discography is a treasure map for those willing to get lost: dive into his Bandcamp, his YouTube channel, or the enigmatic projects that surface like messages in bottles. Wherever you find him, you’ll find a story worth hearing—a story told in the universal language of strings, circuits, and the spaces between.
Listen closely. You might just hear yourself in the echoes.
[Next prompt: 50 words in the voice of somebody who doesn’t like me or my music].
Lucas Gonze. Where do you even start with this guy? He’s the kind of musician who seems to think throwing every genre he’s ever heard into a blender counts as innovation. Americana, Indian classical, electronic—sure, it sounds interesting on paper, but in practice? It’s like walking into a thrift store where nothing fits and everything smells faintly of desperation.
His whole vibe screams “Look how eclectic I am!” as if mashing together fingerpicked folk and glitchy beats automatically makes you a genius. Take that Fastus remix he’s always talking about, “For My Wife After We Had a Fight on Our Anniversary.” Yeah, it’s ambitious, I’ll give him that. But mournful and joyful at the same time? It just ends up sounding confused, like it doesn’t know what it wants to be.
And the live shows? Let’s just say “shapeshifter” might be a generous term. One night it’s overly sentimental acoustic noodling, the next it’s experimental laptop noise that feels more like a tech demo than a performance. It’s not that he lacks talent; it’s that he doesn’t seem to know what to do with it.
Sure, he’s got a handful of fans who’ll call him a visionary, but let’s not kid ourselves—most people aren’t signing up for this. Gonze’s music isn’t for everyone, and maybe that’s the point. But for the rest of us? It’s a little too much, and somehow, not enough.
[That’s not a useless perspective! The only problem is that it’s way too flattering, but I guess flattery is just part of the genre of musician bios. So yeah, uh huh. Where am I going with this? I’m looking for an ending. Lotta words so far without an ending in sight. Well, but that’s wrong. Of course there is an ending. It happened way up above in this long long stream of text about myself: the TLDR. Nobody would ever read this far. The ending happened long ago].
…
…
.
.
.
[WAIT! COME BACK! i’m not done! … There is a real ending to the thing better than my too-clever one above. I must write a bio of myself.]
I am incapable of adherence to genre but flexible about what other people want to call my music.
Growing up I heard the folk explosion artist my parents loved and the hippie music of people just older than me. Punk began to happen. Jazz was all around in those days. I played all of it. I was not talented with notes, but I was obsessed. All-consuming love of music was my first gift.
In those years my enduring loves were the Piedmont blues player John Jackson and local punk heroes Bad Brains.
In my college years I studied music, at first with avant-classical composers at Bard College, then factory-jazz players at Berklee College of Music, then in garage bands in Boston, and finally back to Bard for my degree; I stuck around Boston until the age of 30, playing in one band after another, improving agonizingly slowly. My first genuinely good music was late in my 20s, playing with Mike McGurk’s anarchic collective “Pudding Maker,” and then in a shoegaze trio with David Michael Curry and Chris Brokaw.
I moved to NYC and started making audio animatronics. My creations were automata that generated sound. They were funny, abstract, strange. Using these and a DAW I created a 45 minute piece of music concrete, which I distributed in hand-burned CDs in hand-made sculptural jackets. I collected cassette answering machines and put a looped cassette in each one, running 10-20 machines at a time, each one with only a little scrap of sound. I showed audio installations in a couple galleries, at a party, at a bar. Originality was my second gift.
Napster happened. I was inspired by piratical tech, and I started writing code around music. I gathered masses of MP3s to look at the metadata, where I found strange trash like Bible verses and schizophrenic ramblings. I coded a playlisting site that took off. Piratical things morphed into creative commons things. I coded CC Mixter, a site where everything was a remix of something else on the site (unless it was a seed). I moved to Montreal, then Hawaii, then Los Angeles.
In Los Angeles I got interested in playing public domain compositions too old for copyright. I played music from the 1920s, then the teens, then the 1890s, the 1880s, and on back to the point where American genres were only a glimmer. My instruments were acoustic guitar at first, mandolin later. (Recordings: the antique music of Lucas Gonze, Free Music Archive, Homestyle Mandolin). I played small clubs, retirement homes, 1:1 concerts for people in hospice; BBQs; weddings; bars; church. I moved to Oakland and continued in this vein. People called my historical americana bluegrass, so I gigged steadily in that genre.
In COVID lockdown I couldn’t gig, only record, and the music I made for my private satisfaction got weird. I moved back east to rural New York. I started processing my acoustic instruments with modern pedals, becoming an acoustronic player and inventing a genre around calm abstract acoustronics. (Recordings: there is only). Other people called what I was doing ambient guitar, experimental electronics, or just space music, so I embraced the labels and started gigging around them.
That is where I am now, in January 2025.