Brett Austin Eastman

Brett Austin Eastman is a composer, performing musician, software engineer, and recording engineer whose music has been performed by Yarn/Wire and Del Sol String Quartet. He has recently been commissioned by Tingyuan Luo, Slow Wave, Keyed Kontraptions and Siroko Duo. He was a semifinalist in the NYC Contemporary Music Symposium competition of 2021.

As a concert curator, he recently co-produced a concert series with professional flutist, Jessie Nucho, featuring music for flute and electronics inspired by different forms of feedback. The first concert “In Response” was presented January 2020 and focused on the physical and emotional effects of feedback in dialog, in communication. In July 2021, they presented the second concert “Self vs. Other” which explored anxiety and feelings of isolation in the shelter-in-place life. The third and final concert of the series, "Reality", focused on feedback loops which harm our natural world. In 2019, Brett composed for a concert he co-curated with the ensemble Slow Wave, featuring new music for viola, clarinet, and piano. In 2018, he curated and produced a concert for the quartet, End Times Ensemble, titled “Punk in Times of War”, which featured Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du Temps, Nick Vasallo’s When the War Began, and the premiere of Eastman’s MISMA.

As a performing musician, he cofounded, coproduced and played bass in sci-fi punk band Andy Human and the Reptoids, and he currently plays drums for The Aerosols. He has toured throughout the United States and Europe in various groups. As a recording engineer, he has produced records by Bay Area underground bands including Preening, The World, AH & the Reps, Pang, Lenz, and Baus, among others. He did sound design for and co-wrote (with Jon Raskin) the score for the feature-length film, “The Murder of Hi Good”, by filmmaker Lee Lorenzo Lynch.

Photo by Travis Woodland

Brett was born in Redmond, WA on April 13, 1980. He grew up in Redding, CA before moving to San Francisco to study at San Francisco State University. He studied classical percussion with David Rosenthal, piano with Inara Morgenstern, and composition with Richard Festinger, Josh Levine, and Carlos Sánchez-Gutiérrez.