Dominick Gray (American, b. 1990) is a drummer and music producer, and leads the multimedia project Telesonic 9000. Born and raised in Toledo, Ohio, he comes from a musical family and lineage of drummers, and in his youth attended many of his father’s gigs with various bands around town. Taking to the drums at age 11 and entering the acclaimed Toledo School for the Arts in its infancy (at the time, the experimental charter school's percussion ensemble made do with buckets and 2x4’s) he was immersed in a diverse environment of  working artists and creative problem solving, laying the foundations for his later multidisciplinary endeavors. Here, he formed the band Phantasmagoria, an instrumental group that explored various types of art and prog rock, releasing 3 albums and performing around the Midwest.

After moving to Chicago and studying music composition briefly in 2010, he worked in the city’s theater scene and developed early experiments with found video footage. His life took a left turn when, in 2014, he decided to move to Berlin and pursue drumming full-time. Gray quickly found work as a session musician with a variety of acts, playing alongside indie  experimenters, live-electronic groups, and singer-songwriters. This led to him joining the left-field pop band Alright Gandhi in 2015. The multinational group (blending the influences an English bassist, Italian guitarist, American drummer) gained momentum in the indie scene playing Berlin’s offbeat underground bars. This led to the band releasing 2 albums and taking their sound to the Baltics, Morocco, and, over the span of the next 4 years, 15+ countries spanning 4 continents - including Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, Italy, the US, and the UK. Alright Gandhi’s run found them recording in the Ligurian mountains, bus/train/budget flight-hopping to various corners of the globe, and collaborating with a Youth Orchestra in Espiñho, Portugal. Dom directed the band's music video “Dark Matter”.  

Alongside this, amidst Berlin’s ever-changing, bohemian creative scene, he began tests which led to the foundation of what would become Telesonic 9000. Always a film buff and obsessive fan of sci-fi classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, and the late night cult-favorite Look Around You, Gray gradually merged his music and movie interests by compiling original electronic tracks and collecting dozens (later hundreds) of public domain archive films. Editing to sound and composing to imagery, Dom assembled a ‘film-concert’ that synchronized his songs with kinetic remixes of postwar footage. When brought to the stage, the audiovisual components were connected by his reactive live drumming.

The first what-would-come-to-be-called Telesonic 9000 show was held on a visit to the US in early 2015. At a house party in Detroit, without a working projector on hand, a basement crowd gathered and watched the film from a computer screen perched on a stool while Dom played drums on a platform tucked in a dark corner. After returning to Berlin (and upgrading to a larger projection), he continued performing Telesonic 9000 shows around Germany, the Baltic countries, and Italy. Those initial sound and video tests were developed and refined, culminating in 2019’s album and film Progress; a release with genre-bending trips into new wave, electropop, and chillout that covered expansive topics ranging from the space race, to love and the life cycle of human beings, to the development of the laser. This was followed with a 3-week tour of Japan and a feature slot at Berlin’s Future Soundscapes Festival in the famed venue Silent Green. The Future Soundscapes performance featured a full live band arrangement of the project, with keyboards, bass, Malletkat, and live editing (performed with Resolume video software) broadening the energy and impact of what was originally one man with a drumset, a computer and a projector.

The end of 2019 saw Dom return to the US, teaching drum lessons (privately and with youth rehabilitation programs) and working on E.C.H.O., an EP and short film that features T9000’s signature brand of high-concept multimedia. It follows scientists at Telesonic Research Labs administering a kaleidoscopic audiovisual association test; at the same time, the film creates an arc that transforms the naïve excitement of technological promise in the computer revolution into the unnerving anxiety of the modern digital era. Since mid 2023, he has been based in Berlin.

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