Ben Bloom

Chris Kallmyer is a musician who works in art and design. Hailed by the Los Angeles Times as “extraordinary,” Kallmyer creates multi-disciplinary musical works that the New Yorker describes as “surprisingly complex.” Kallmyer is an innovator whose projects telescope from the political to the poetic prompting X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal to share that his work “promotes hopefulness and aids in resistance.”

In 2021 he founded the R&D studio, Furniture Music, with the aim to redesign the sounds of the home and seed new sounding projects for architectural applications. Through FM, Kallmyer has designed a fountain to mark the home of a blind artist, a listening garden for a music school, and a new line of sounding home goods for the iconic California design studio, Commune. Furniture Music has been celebrated in the New York Times, New Yorker, and LA Times for contributions to both music and architectural design.

Kallmyer has performed and exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, STUDIO TeatrGaleria in Warsaw, and the National Gallery of Singapore among other spaces in America and Europe. He’s created interdisciplinary projects in collaboration with Mark Mothersbaugh, Moses Sumney, Julia Holter, and Justin Vernon & Aaron Dessner’s Eaux Claires Festival. His collaboration with the photographer David Maisel was acquired into the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2018.

Kallmyer completed his MFA in 2009 at California Institute of the Arts while studying with Wadada Leo Smith, Wolfgang von Schweinitz, Aashish Khan, and Sara Roberts. During this time, he worked closely with the storefront/collective Machine Project creating over 100 projects with founder Mark Allen between 2009 and 2018 at institutions like LACMA, Hammer Museum, the Walker, Tang Teaching Museum, and the Berkeley Art Museum. Kallmyer is a longtime collaborator with the modern music collective Wild Up, with whom he is nominated for a 2023 Grammy Award for Julius Eastman’s “Stay On It.”