Artist Profile: Cumulus Frisbee

Cumulus Frisbee, the Pennsylvania-based electronic jazz artist, is more than familiar with stretching the boundaries of his own creative approach, facing down new technical and artistic frontiers with a limitless joy and intentionality that renders each of his tracks deeply intriguing creations in and of themselves.

From the time he was a young child, he was interested in music in some way. His father was a guitarist, and throughout his childhood, he was continuously exposed to the classic rock of the ‘60s as a result. Bands like The Beach Boys and The Beatles soundtracked his childhood home, and his first tangible musical experiences involved shows that his father played with local bands.

“From a really young age, like six, seven or something I was always noodling around with stuff. I started picking up guitar when I was 10 or 11, and that was the first time I was taking something seriously, as opposed to just noodling around, being a little kid.”

For over a decade of his young life, guitar was his true obsession. He spent countless hours, under his father’s tutelage, learning the nuances of the instrument. He played in multiple bands, did live shows, and even had some experience recording in a live-band setting. His music taste, for the most part, followed suit through his adolescence.

But in his later teenage years, he became immersed in another musical niche entirely. Through artists like Flying Lotus, Aphex Twin, and Squarepusher, his interest in progressive and experimental rock gradually expanded into a more electronic sphere— in these artists, he saw a whole new musical frontier to explore, a multitude of sound and a sonic world that was entirely fresh to his ears.

“It was just an entirely new sound palette that was foreign to me as a guitarist, as someone who  was familiar with what things are like recording in that sort of setting, or just performing in that setting, and also the limitations of performing in that sort of setting. As opposed to seeing a Flying Lotus 3D [live] set, where it's just like, ‘He's one guy, wh*t the fuck is this [laughs]? This is  way more than one person should be able to do.’ Those sort of things I think really drew me in because I was kind of confused by it.”

As this interest expanded, so did his desire to attempt to create this type of expansive music. Although he had experience with FL Studio when he was younger, he quickly gravitated towards Ableton as his DAW of choice due to the functionality and power he felt it held. 

His initial compositions were very electronic in their leanings, taking many of the sounds, structures, and overall motifs that the artists he had grown to love utilized so often. But as he kept working, he began to see more and more parallels between what he was attempting to accomplish as a producer and the swing and human-ness of the sounds he had fallen in love with as a guitarist. As he developed his own creative approach, a tangible goal also crystallized for him.

“I always pictured hybridizing them. I didn't want to just abandon guitar and instrumentality, as much as I definitely did spend a lot of time just putting that down and going into piano or going to sound design stuff— things were new and exciting that definitely took control of my interest at one point… How can I bridge these things? How can I make them work together?”

While he released a smattering of singles in his early days as Cumulus Frisbee, it was his first full-length release, 2020’s Hyperion, that truly brought him to extend his growing sonic palette, and make intentional choices about the types of emotional responses he wanted invoke, over the course of more than one or two songs.

Brighter and more sonically brilliant in its approach than many of the other tracks in his discography, Hyperion serves as evidence of Cumulus Frisbee’s early growth and depth as a producer and electronic artist. From the scattering ear-candy of tracks like “Cellular Folklore” to the awash rhythms of tracks like “Motif Plot,” Hyperion is an incredibly engaging listen from start to finish.

But as he began to work on 2023’s The Only Way Out Is Through, he knew he wanted to refine the sound he had cultivated on his first project. In part because the themes of the album were born out of a set of personal struggles and triumphs he was experiencing at that time, he decided to approach the project with a more balanced emotional tone, mixing in some of the mellower and more subdued sounds that he had gravitated towards in recent releases.

From the first chords of “Keep Going”, this shift is abundantly clear, and as a result, the project takes on a deeper and more rich sonic outlook.

Now, as Cumulus Frisbee continues his work as both a producer and a visual artist (he designed the cover art for both of his projects to date) , he feels as though his work is more interconnected than it’s ever been before— and that his artistic headspace, although spread across his various pursuits, is more unified in intention than even a pair of projects as cohesive as his can truly indicate.

“Visual art and music aren't really separate to me in any way; they all happen concurrently both idea-wise and then also just pragmatically… There's not, you know, a whole lot of room for separation.”