Kevin Sims is a percussionist, multi-instrumentalist, composer, and sometimes filmmaker living in Aaronsburg, Pennsylvania. He is the founder, artistic director of, and regular performer with, Open Music, an open-instrumentation experimental music ensemble and concert series. Since 2023, Kevin has been on the faculty of The Pennsylvania State University School of Music where, in addition to teaching various courses, he directs two contemporary music ensembles (Other Arts Ensemble and Contemporary Music Ensemble).
Kevin’s recent work includes two forthcoming studio recording projects from Open Music; several ensemble pieces written for Open Music including The Barrens (2023), Word Piece (2024), and For Agnes Martin (2025); the percussion album Yarrow Canon (Orb Tapes 2023); a film for violin duo Du.0’s piece O Most Noble Greenness; the multimedia documentary projects Battle Hymn of the Public (Orb Tapes 2020) and Our Sense of the Real; a collaboration with composer Scott Wollschleger and poet Abby Minor on a percussion monodrama titled We Have Taken and Eaten; and many recordings and performance as one half, along with James Searfoss, of the improvisation duo Moth Bucket.
Since leaving New York for Pennsylvania in 2011, Kevin has been studying the intersections between avant-garde music and small ‘p’ politics. This study has revealed music, art making, and politics to be wide-spread and everyday social practices rather than professional specialties. Each of these practices lives as much from caring for the social situation in which it brews as for the development of its material. Kevin has been led on this study by the work of many artists and thinkers, most notably the visual artist and founding Situationist Asger Jorn; pianist, composer and band leader Sun Ra; philosopher Bernard Stiegler; the polyrhythmic political theorizing of Hannah Arendt; and the notational-relational experimentations of Christian Wolff, Pauline Oliveros, Anthony Braxton, Cornelius Cardew, and many others.
Kevin studied percussion at Manhattan School of Music in New York and on a DAAD fellowship at the Musikhochschule Freiburg in Germany. He was a founding member of the contemporary music ensemble Red Light New Music in New York, and of the international percussion group Ensemble XII.
kevindsims@gmail.com
eight one four
nine three three
seven eight two one
(no texts)
kevin sims 