About

Tristan Kasten-Krause is a bassist and composer living in New York City, whose work enlarges the minutiae of close tones and subtle gestures. As a bassist he has been credited with providing his “low-end authority to vital New York institutions” (the New Yorker) such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and The Whitney Biennial, as well as across the globe at LA’s Disney Hall, Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie and the Ruhrtriennale.

He has performed with many of the world’s top modern music ensembles including The Bang on a Can All-Stars, Talea Ensemble, Wet Ink, the International Contemporary Ensemble, Contemporaneous, and Ensemble Signal.

Over the last decade Tristan has worked with forward-thinking artists such as Sigur Ros, Alvin Lucier, Sarah Hennies, Julia Wolfe, Sarah Davachi, Caroline Shaw, David Lang, Ichico Aoba and Steve Reich. He has performed on Broadway in Gypsy with Audra McDonald (2025), Justin Peck’s Illinoise (2024) and Daniel Fish’s Oklahoma! (2019-2020), and can be heard on television in Netflix’s The Witcher, PBS’s Frontline and Amazon’s Mozart in the Jungle.

As a composer, Tristan has been praised for his “heavenly” (the Guardian) original music. His work has been showcased at Issue Project Room, The Stone, The Hudson Basilica, the Cleveland Uncommon Sounds Project, Black Mountain College Museum and the University of Chicago’s Grey Sound series. He has recently been the recipient of the 2024 Copland Fund, and is a 2025 NYSCA grantee. In 2026 his duo with Sarah Hennies premieres their new electroaccoustic work at the Groupe de Reserche Musicale (GRM) in Paris. Their debut album The Quiet Sun was released May 2nd on Dinzu Artifacts to critical acclaim.

Tristan is the bassist for the extreme metal band Scarcity and holds a masters in music from The Hartt School where he studied with Robert Black.