Gus Tomizuka is a composer and multi-instrumentalist based in Los Angeles. His music for films, records and installations pairs traditional instrumentation with experimental digital techniques, always with an ear for the sound worlds folded into everyday moments.
He first studied with his father, a bass professor at the Dutch Royal Conservatory, and later with Sergio and Odair Assad, Jeffrey Zeigler (Kronos Quartet), David Russell and Judicaël Perroy. At 17 he was a featured artist on NPR’s From the Top. The following year he won the National YoungArts competition, which led to a debut at the New World Center in Miami. A few months later he premiered his first guitar works at the Hohenloher Kultursommer in Germany, going on to tour France, England, and the Netherlands.
His first solo album, Prospect & Refuge (2022) established a narrative approach to ambient music that continues to define much of his work. BIEmusic Beijing wrote (in translation), “within the rich dynamics Gus Tomizuka creates, listeners find themselves tuning in closely, without meaning to, to dreamlike points of starlight distilled from the small moments of simple life."
In 2023 his free-improvisation ensemble Music for Connection recorded Coincidence with Laraaji, Agnes Martian, and Hair and Space Museum, described by KLOF Magazine as “a record bursting with the joy of spontaneous creativity... It is both an uncompromising demonstration of free and experimental spiritual jazz and a document attesting to the power of collaboration.”
Moving beyond the studio, he collaborated with artist Rebeca Bollinger on a 2024 grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation to produce the sound and sculpture installation Parallel H(ear) in a dry riverbed near Tomizuka's childhood home in the Sonoran Desert. Audio samples from Bollinger's sculptures were processed into discrete, elastic waveforms in an algorithmic score, giving voice to the pieces. The duo developed the project further the following year for Echo (~), an extended exhibition commissioned by MOCA Tucson.
Tomizuka has worked with a number of filmmakers including Silvia Grav, David Fenster, Anna Brody, Susanna Batin, Kalin Steen and Gabriella Molina. In 2024 he contributed the score for the Arizona Public Media documentary Atascosa Borderlands, which won a 2025 Edward R. Murrow Award, and went on to score the corresponding eight-part audio series by Luke Takata and Jack Dash. He is currently composer-in-residence for the Southwest Folklife Alliance’s documentary film series Folklife Lens, and is scoring Kalin Steen’s Always Becoming, a Smithsonian Institution miniseries slated for release in mid-2027, based on Nora Naranjo Morse’s project of the same name at the National Museum of the American Indian.
His work has been released on Sony Music, Centripetal Force, Tobira Records and Dream Chimney. From 2020 to 2024 he was co-founder of Transitory Tapes, a label highlighting the cross-border community of experimental musicians in the Southwestern U.S. and Mexico.
Tomizuka continues to work as a sideman and mixing and mastering engineer, having performed or produced with dozens of artists including Mesquite, Chris King (This Will Destroy You), Arrington de Dionyso, American Monoxide, Calexico, Carrie Rodriguez, Lori Goldston (Nirvana), Daniella Spala, Chetes Garza, Jumbo, Macario Martinez, Carin León, Gaby Moreno and the Tucson Symphony Orchestra.
He first studied with his father, a bass professor at the Dutch Royal Conservatory, and later with Sergio and Odair Assad, Jeffrey Zeigler (Kronos Quartet), David Russell and Judicaël Perroy. At 17 he was a featured artist on NPR’s From the Top. The following year he won the National YoungArts competition, which led to a debut at the New World Center in Miami. A few months later he premiered his first guitar works at the Hohenloher Kultursommer in Germany, going on to tour France, England, and the Netherlands.
His first solo album, Prospect & Refuge (2022) established a narrative approach to ambient music that continues to define much of his work. BIEmusic Beijing wrote (in translation), “within the rich dynamics Gus Tomizuka creates, listeners find themselves tuning in closely, without meaning to, to dreamlike points of starlight distilled from the small moments of simple life."
In 2023 his free-improvisation ensemble Music for Connection recorded Coincidence with Laraaji, Agnes Martian, and Hair and Space Museum, described by KLOF Magazine as “a record bursting with the joy of spontaneous creativity... It is both an uncompromising demonstration of free and experimental spiritual jazz and a document attesting to the power of collaboration.”
Moving beyond the studio, he collaborated with artist Rebeca Bollinger on a 2024 grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation to produce the sound and sculpture installation Parallel H(ear) in a dry riverbed near Tomizuka's childhood home in the Sonoran Desert. Audio samples from Bollinger's sculptures were processed into discrete, elastic waveforms in an algorithmic score, giving voice to the pieces. The duo developed the project further the following year for Echo (~), an extended exhibition commissioned by MOCA Tucson.
Tomizuka has worked with a number of filmmakers including Silvia Grav, David Fenster, Anna Brody, Susanna Batin, Kalin Steen and Gabriella Molina. In 2024 he contributed the score for the Arizona Public Media documentary Atascosa Borderlands, which won a 2025 Edward R. Murrow Award, and went on to score the corresponding eight-part audio series by Luke Takata and Jack Dash. He is currently composer-in-residence for the Southwest Folklife Alliance’s documentary film series Folklife Lens, and is scoring Kalin Steen’s Always Becoming, a Smithsonian Institution miniseries slated for release in mid-2027, based on Nora Naranjo Morse’s project of the same name at the National Museum of the American Indian.
His work has been released on Sony Music, Centripetal Force, Tobira Records and Dream Chimney. From 2020 to 2024 he was co-founder of Transitory Tapes, a label highlighting the cross-border community of experimental musicians in the Southwestern U.S. and Mexico.
Tomizuka continues to work as a sideman and mixing and mastering engineer, having performed or produced with dozens of artists including Mesquite, Chris King (This Will Destroy You), Arrington de Dionyso, American Monoxide, Calexico, Carrie Rodriguez, Lori Goldston (Nirvana), Daniella Spala, Chetes Garza, Jumbo, Macario Martinez, Carin León, Gaby Moreno and the Tucson Symphony Orchestra.
