peytonpleninger

Peyton Pleninger is a saxophonist, improviser, bandleader, astrologer and guerilla contractor, forging a personal path that challenges the boundaries of what it means to be a musician. His experience involves a variety of disciplines centered around music, which also include astrology, painting and sculpture, botany, construction, massage and medical inquiry.

Pleninger worked as a mentee of Milford Graves from spring 2019 until Graves’ passing in early 2021, assisting daily in multidisciplinary efforts. Summer 2019 focused on botany and garden work, which evolved into constructing a greenhouse that winter. 2020 began with conducting and documenting scientific experiments around sound, vibration and cardiology, which led to sculptures demonstrating some of the concepts discovered. Pleninger played an integral role in helping Graves prepare artwork and archival materials for his retrospective Milford Graves: A Mind Body Deal at the ICA Philadelphia, as well as for the posthumous exhibitions Heart Harmonics: Sound, Energy and Natural Healing Phenomena at Fridman Gallery and Milford Graves: Fundamental Frequency at Artists Space.

Born on April 7, 1996, just outside of Philadelphia, Pleninger began playing piano at age 4. A hand-me-down tenor saxophone, along with hearing recordings of John Coltrane, set him on a lifelong journey to improvise at the highest level. In his last two years of high school he studied with Anthony Tidd through the Kimmel Center Creative Music Program. During this time he also met Steve Coleman, whom he followed relentlessly, attending performances and workshops in Philadelphia, New York and Detroit.

Upon arriving in New York City in 2015, Pleninger formed the first iteration of his band Biotonic. In its infancy, Biotonic explored the relationship of sound to human experience and physiology through original compositions, and later evolved to explore moment music by juggling spontaneous and predetermined material. Biotonic has performed throughout New York at venues such as The 55 Bar, The Jazz Gallery and Seeds Brooklyn, and has released a live album, alive (2019), and two EPs, intro::extro (2016) and Heartbeat Music (2017). In summer 2026, Biotonic recorded a new studio album, UltraReality, plus a live album at The Tavern, both to be released in spring 2027.

In 2021, Pleninger traveled to Long Beach, Washington, to record his first solo album, Post Human Folk Dances. Recorded on location around Long Beach, the album explores imagined dance styles through his signature setup of saxophone augmented with bells. He continued his solo saxophone explorations while living in Long Beach, New York, practicing at the ocean and developing new techniques inspired by the sound of the wind, and recorded Wind Music in the winter of 2021–22 to document the new sounds. Back in Stone Ridge, the winter of 2025–26 produced TUNDRA (2026), a set of improvisations for tenor saxophone and drums cobbled together from junk-shop pots, pans and scrap metal, released on Tavern Recordings.

In early 2022, Pleninger purchased The Tavern, a defunct roadhouse in upstate New York, which he is rebuilding into an arts research center. The Tavern presents concerts, music theory and improvisation workshops, astrology forecasts, sound baths and artist residencies. It is the original test space for Anatomy Avant Garde, a performance Pleninger developed that involves improvising in response to a participant’s heartbeat, along with a live painting element.

In 2025, Pleninger teamed up with multidisciplinary artist Nina Isabelle to create Weirdos in the Woods, an annual Labor Day weekend art festival featuring music, performance art and open studios. In 2026, their collaboration grew to include a weekly practice of creating videos exploring mysteries of sound, movement, crystals, light and psychic perception.

Pleninger also works as a dedicated sideperson with multiple projects. He performed with Henry Threadgill in the multimedia works One and The Other One, and performs regularly with master drummers Tani Tabbal and Phil Haynes. Between 2023 and 2025, Haynes and Pleninger recorded seven albums, including TERRA (2025) with Ben Monder, Earth Song (2023), and Bassics (2025) with Tony Moreno and Ken Filiano.

Transits and Tones is a journal of improvisations that start from the current sky.

Some pieces map planets, signs, houses and aspects onto pitch, mode, key and rhythm. Others take an intuitive route, trying to catch the feeling of whichever archetypes are active that day.

Below are some selections from the project.

• 2021.12.25
  venus retrograde conjunct pluto, saturn square uranus

  View on Instagram
• 2021.12.21
  winter solstice, sun ingress into capricorn

  View on Instagram
• 2021.10.29
  mars at 29° libra

  View on Instagram

New entries appear on Instagram.

In early 2022 Pleninger bought The Tavern, a 1930s roadhouse in Stone Ridge, New York, and has been rebuilding it by hand ever since as a performance and music research space.

From 1934 to 1984 the building ran as Brown’s Hilltop Tavern. It later became a private home, slipped into disrepair, and was trashed by squatters during the pandemic. The rehab is ongoing, utilizing natural building techniques, with adobe as the material of choice so artists can literally sculpt the walls. The original mahogany bar still stands behind the front door, and the old dance-hall is now the main performance room.

The Tavern is home to The Center for Sonic and Psychospiritual Research, a nonprofit that presents new and improvised music, documents experiments in sound, and is building a residency program for Meta-Artists working where music, the healing arts and metaphysics meet. Concerts, improvisation workshops, astrology forecasts, sound baths and the Anatomy Avant Garde series all happen here, and many performances are released on the Tavern Recordings label.

• tavernstoneridge.org
• Tavern Recordings
• Pleninger’s shows at The Tavern

Anatomy Avant Garde is an experimental performance in which the body becomes part of the piece. A participant lies on the floor with an amplified stethoscope, so the room hears their heartbeat through the speakers, while musicians improvise in response and a painter works on a clear acrylic sheet hung above them. Everyone can hear, in real time, how the music changes the pattern and speed of the heart.

Pleninger developed the format at The Tavern in March 2024, drawing on his work with Milford Graves, whose research tied musical rhythm to the human heartbeat. The aim is to bridge sound performance, medical inquiry and energy work. It ran as The Tavern’s Thursday night series through May 2024, and has since returned as a marathon of half-hour sessions, with one heart after another, as a fundraiser for Weirdos in the Woods in 2025 and 2026.

The first recording from the series, with Phil Haynes on drums, Jim Yanda’s heartbeat and painting by John Ackerman, is out on Tavern Recordings.

• Hear the album

Art with Neighbors is a video collaboration between Pleninger and the multidisciplinary artist Nina Isabelle, his neighbor and co-founder of Weirdos in the Woods.

Between December 16, 2025 and March 31, 2026, the two met about once a week and made 18 videos, each three to five minutes long. The structure never changed: arrive at the studio in the evening, land on an idea, shoot new footage, record and mix the sound, edit, and post the finished video to Instagram before leaving, no later than 4 a.m. Other artists often joined, sometimes as many as three at once, for the whole process.

It began as “working on sound mysteries” and quickly became a way to capture the things the two talk about constantly: crystals, lasers, energetic vibration, the body’s energy field, an embodied relationship to sound. Isabelle came to it from years of extreme training and athletics, curious how the fast, intuitive creative impulse that shows up in dangerous situations could be made available in a group making art together. For Pleninger, the craft of the videos themselves took over: new ways of shooting, like the “stereophonic video” developed for Fractal Entropy; a growing focus on sound design starting with QUADRACARPLE; and a practice of layering separate improvisations made one after another, rather than at the same time, which comes to full form in SAUCERS and BEING PHIL.

• See them all on Instagram

A running list of performance pieces.

1. HAPPY to BE HERE

   June 19, 2026 · Three Phase Center

   A performance that grew out of experiments with a giant metal wheel in Nina Isabelle’s studio: climbing on it, amplifying it, playing it and trying to decipher it. Music by Peyton Pleninger, Dan Schwartz and Adam Siegel; movement by Nina Isabelle, Clara Diamond, Ernest Goodmaw and Dee Dee Maucher; lighting by Nikolas van Egten.

2. almighty pretzel

   May 25, 2026 · Disorient festival, Shandaken, New York · with Nina Isabelle and Jana Astanov

   The pretzel started as a drawing: Isabelle, a Reiki master trained in the Usui lineage, which encourages cultural translations of its symbols, sketched it as a possible Americanized Reiki symbol. It also suited a fun body gesture, and she once worked in a pretzel factory. Astanov invited Isabelle to perform with her at Disorient. Pleninger and Isabelle built a track around Astanov’s spoken text the night before, and Pleninger manipulated it live, looping sections and adding a live sub synth, while Isabelle pushed for it to be as loud, huge and gritty as possible. It was cold and raining, Pleninger set up under a small shelter while Isabelle and Astanov performed out in the weather, and the only light came from a parked car.

3. Rope Performance

   May 16, 2026 · Mt. Ida, Troy, New York · with Nina Isabelle

   Made for Troy All Nite Soul, at Patricia Coleman’s invitation, and developed in about a week. Isabelle wanted to hear how Pleninger’s saxophone would change under physical duress. The piece unfolds in three vignettes: Pleninger plays on his back while Isabelle balances against his feet, eventually fully aerial; Isabelle turns the tuning pegs of Gretchen, a resonator guitar, trying to match his saxophone, a technique from an Art with Neighbors video; and finally the two stand back to back as Isabelle wraps them together in rope, lifts Pleninger off the ground again and again, and finally carries him out of the space.

   “There were many moments where I was physically unable to produce ‘my sound.’ It ended up being an exploration of what does this pose or activity sound like?” — Peyton

   

4. Aries Headbash

   May 15, 2026 · Three Phase Center, Stone Ridge, New York · with Dan Schwartz, Nina Isabelle, Ernest Goodmaw and Dee Dee Maucher

   The inaugural Aries Headbash, a Weirdos in the Woods gathering. Planned as a duo set for saxophone, drums and electronics with Dan Schwartz, it grew into a multi-hour electro-acoustic performance as Nina Isabelle, Ernest Goodmaw and Dee Dee Maucher climbed on the giant metal wheel and a fabric sling, lit by colored light behind the silk to throw their shapes. Pleninger and Schwartz chose a harsh palette of sounds to match the harsh metal of the wheel, making music that fed the movers and fed off them, while Isabelle kept watch over everyone’s safety on a set-up with a small amount of controlled risk.

   “Most of my performances have been entirely sound based, so having such a rich visual activity to incorporate into the sound making opens up new possibilities.” — Peyton

5. Q: Entity Rewind

   April 25, 2026 · Shirt Factory, Kingston, New York · with Nina Isabelle and Clara Diamond

   A chapter in a performance Isabelle and Diamond have been developing together for ten years. Projected video documentation from a decade of past performances layered the earlier versions over the present one, collapsing time into a single moment, and the performers switched to all white so the projection would show on them. Pleninger mixed and live-manipulated Isabelle’s audio tracks in Ableton and played saxophone as the voice of Q, with a strand of the entity attached directly to his horn. It was the first performance where the collaborators explored staying energetically connected with little or no visual contact, feeling rather than seeing what the others were doing.

Pleninger works in old-school lime plaster, related to Moroccan tadelakt but with a few twists of his own. His built-in seating is framed in wood underneath, so the benches double as storage. And because he is self-taught, having learned on inexpensive, readily available materials, he can make a piece from high-end plaster or from much more affordable, easy-to-find materials, depending on the project and the budget.

At The Tavern he has been sculpting built-ins directly into the building, shaping each one by hand to fit its room: a curving window bench with a planter, a wall niche of flowing shelves, a shower and a bathroom vanity.

He is available for hire to make custom plaster built-ins.

Inquire about a built-in →

Nina Isabelle pointed out that we aren't doing a great job of putting things for sale right in front of people. So, in the spirit of Weirdos in the Woods, here is everything in one place.

For bookings, collaborations, astrology readings and plaster built-ins, send a message here.

Or find me here:

• Bandcamp
• Instagram
• YouTube