Musician
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DOHMA | EHMN | AMHOD

Donnie Martin is an electronic music performer-composer, sound synthesist, and educator committed to exploring unique sonic experiences and perspectives. Much of his work exhibits expressive control and movement of organic timbres within a modular synthesizer. Martin combines elements of Avant-Garde, noise, techno, and ambient electronic music while traversing the outer edges of musical perception.

Martin’s work as DOHMA seeks to dismantle the core of typical underground club scenes with a sound that extracts order from madness and cohesion from contrast. His distinctive live sets deliver a powerful statement on the dancefloor exploring complex rhythms with layers of off-kilter sample loops, complex modular textures, and idiosyncratic percussion. While his previous livesets relied on meticulously designed Ableton Live templates and MIDI control, he shifted in 2020 to an improvised hardware setup. DOHMA represents the energy of natural discovery while emphasizing improvisation in both production and performance mediums. In 2021, he released his raucous single, Everything is Derivative, on the Boston-based label, PUZL Records.

Through the EHMN project, Martin explores complex concepts by drawing influence from the beauty and ugliness of the dichotomies and imperfections of nature and the human condition. In 2021, he composed a fixed-media piece, First Exhale, an expression of temporal reality of conscious existence from our first breath to our last. He delivered another short work later that year, Anxygdala, a conceptual piece inspired by the experience of internal coping during an anxiety attack. Based on the concept of “being honeyed” described in an excerpt from Merleau-Ponty’s 1945 book, Phenomenology of Perception, Honey is the Martin’s first multi-channel work composed for Max and modular synthesizer. Composed in 2022, the piece presents an aural experience that blurs the audience’s perception of the location of individual sound sources through in-air sound synthesis.

Conversely, Amhod is a return to Martin’s roots as a classically trained violinist of 30 years with a modern nuance. This minimal project strips the synthesizers and computers away from his primary toolkit and holds nature close to the heart while he creates vast soundscapes amid washed loops layers of violin. The result is an ambient collage of tonal and timbral exploration from a single instrument. The drastic vagaries and isolation during the peak of COVID-19 in 2020 prompted Martin to record The Great Empty EP, which was an improvised manifestation of rediscovering one’s purpose. All proceeds earned from the Bandcamp release were donated to the Boston chapter of the NAACP.

In 2023, he co-authored a paper with Paul Geluso and Lars Graugaard published to the AES International Conference on Spatial and Immersive Audio focusing on in-air sound synthesis and the creative applications of multi-channel sound systems in electronic music composition, performance, and installations. This mode of sound synthesis uses the three-dimensional interaction between polarity-inverted copies of sound waves within acoustic environments.

Martin currently teaches fundamental and advanced electronic music and sound synthesis courses at NYU Steinhardt to undergraduate and graduate students. In class, he promotes a guided freedom of exploration in his classes with goal-oriented assignments that encourage focused experimentation and discovery. His teaching philosophy and curriculum centers around his unwavering belief that progress is fueled by curiosity and hindered by perfection while the basic dimensions of sound can be individual tools to elevate his students’ sonic creations and expressions.

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