“My life is based on the immersive experience of music. I write the songs, play all the instruments, and I build from the ground up the systems that audiences listen to music on,” shares composer, solo artist, and multi-award winning, genre-crossing producer Kris Halo Pierce. Parallel to his career as an Avant-pop artist and a producer, Kris is also an audio tech and engineer for major events in New York City.
As a composer and a songwriter, Kris's aesthetic is moody and danceable, and draws from such genres as synth-pop, goth, industrial, classical, ambient, EDM, and pop. His work has garnered favorable comparisons to NIN, Depeche Mode, Halsey, Front Line Assembly, and KMFDM, among others. Thematically, Kris explores notions of dreams and longing with abstract and non-linear lyrics. “A lot of times, if it sounds like it is a love song, its probably actually about music itself. I don't like to write about people or situations I feel negative about,” Kris says.
Kris's theatrical musicality might very well date back to his parents introducing him to Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture which he nicknamed, The Boom Boom Song, at the age of three. At the age of six, he started playing piano, and at the age of eight he started on the violin. By the 7th grade, Kris's fate as a musician was sealed when he scored his first orchestral piece and premiered it at the final school recital of the year to a standing ovation.
Parallel to his studies as an artist and an instrumentalist, Kris embarked on a freewheeling discovery adventure of audio engineering and production. This dates back to Kris recording Saturday morning cartoons and Casey Kasem's American Top 40 show on this cassette recorder, and then sneaking in his room to do surgery on the tape, cutting and taping the cassettes to rearrange the music.
In audio tech and engineering contexts, Kris has worked with The News & Documentary Emmy Awards (broadcast mixer), Trevor Horn, Whoopi Goldberg, Cyndi Lauper, Tori Amos, Steve Martin, Debbie Gibson, Fishbone, Busta Rhymes, Squirrel Nut Zippers, and Lin-Manuel Miranda, as well as various events for Paramount, Bloomberg Philanthropies, MTV, and Viacom. He currently mixes front of house audio, and a lot of monitors, at the Palladium Times Square, NYC, in addition to owning the boutique record label based in New Jersey, Halo Askew Entertainment, LLC.