Paroxysm by Chris Pitsiokos and Philip White

Paroxysm. Available March 1 through Carrier Records and Bandcamp

Chris and I started working together in the summer of 2013. We immediately discovered a shared sense of form and mutual affinity for powerful and assertive sonic statements. Over the course of the next six months we honed our vocabulary into a language built organically from jazz, contemporary classical music and noise. In the winter of that year we entered the studio to document and distill our efforts into this work, Paroxysm.

-Philip White

“It’s very difficult to do justice, using words, to how enervating and annihilating this set was”

—Ray Cummings in the Village Voice


Composer, performer and improviser Philip White works with electronics at the intersection of noise, jazz and contemporary concert music. Current projects include R WE WHO R WE (with Ted Hearne), Colonic Youth (with James Ilgenfritz, Kevin Shea and Dan Blake) and duos with Chris Pitsiokos, Bob Bellerue and Taylor Levine.

His music has been released on New Focus Recordings, Infrequent Seams and Tape Drift Records. It has been described as "utterly gripping" (Time Out Chicago), “bona fide evocative music” (Brooklyn Rail), and a "vibrant textural tapestry" (Wall Street Journal).



Chris Pitsiokos (b. 1990) is a saxophonist, composer, and improviser. His music combines the intensity and immediacy of no wave and noise with the lyricism and forward propulsion of jazz and the abstract detail of contemporary classical composers Iannis Xenakis, Briany Ferneyhough, and Helmut Lachenmann. Recent/current collaborators include Lydia Lunch, Tyshawn Sorey, Peter Evans, Kevin Shea, Brian Chase, Elliott Sharp, Mick Barr, Marc Edwards, Philip White, and Weasel Walter. Chris has performed throughout Europe, Japan, Australia, and the US. In addition to performing and composing music, Chris runs his own record label, Eleatic records, curates the Gadfly Series at New York venue Spectrum, and programs a radio show at WKCR-FM.

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