fezmaster
Salt Lake City musician and restless builder Jon Philpott currently focuses on generative ambient electronics, bamboo flute, trombone and field recordings, performed live and primarily improvised. He builds the instruments he plays: custom effects pedals, synthesizers built with PureData and Supercollider patches driven by cellular automata and other stochastic processes, machines that make decisions of their own. Threads of impermanence and emptiness — drawn from Buddhist philosophy — run through the work structurally and guide design decisions. The result is what Philpott calls "nostalgia for something you weren't there for, a feeling of deja vu for something you don't remember experiencing."
fezmaster is Salt Lake City-based musician, engineer and restless creator Jon Philpott — as comfortable soldering a circuit board as playing trombone. His performances sit at the intersection of improvisation and generative systems: custom-built effects pedals, PureData and Supercollider patches driven by cellular automata, field recordings from Utah riverbanks to the coastlines of Sri Lanka. No two performances are identical as each is an exploration of the tools and processes.
His music occupies an ambient, meditative space — bamboo flute, Roland Aerophone and trombone layered over slowly evolving tape-like loops and generative textures, built up and torn down in real time. Ideas of impermanence and emptiness — concepts drawn from Buddhist philosophy — thread through his work at its core: when a cellular automata generates a melody or drives a self-built granular texture sampler, no single hand chose each note or fragment. He is also a compulsive researcher and explorer — diving deep into unfamiliar traditions that tend to collide with each other, the friction producing something new. The Colour system is one such result: 32 pentatonic scales of his own construction, each treated as a palette of melodic relationships to explore. Since "raga" can translate as colour — it's nod to the tradition that shaped the system without claiming to be a practitioner of any of them.
That generative instinct produces what Philpott describes as "nostalgia for something you weren't there for, a feeling of deja vu for something you don't remember experiencing" — something Utah's SLUG Magazine noted when reviewing cassette release unfezed: "each sketch flows into the next so well that it truly feels like one long composition."
The building never stops: custom synthesizers, hand wired and designed effects pedals, a pen plotter producing one-of-a-kind generative artwork for tape covers and inserts — fezmaster's visual and sonic worlds grow from the same restless impulses, the visual and sonic always intertwined.
Recent releases include Colour #7 — an experiment with the Colour system, combining raga foundations, cellular automata-driven granular effects and bamboo flute improvisation — and Taperobane, field recordings from Sri Lanka where his heritage made the journey feel less like travel and more like reconnecting with a lost thread.
Philpott also hosts Sunday Drip, a monthly ambient music event in Salt Lake City, now in its third year.