Aaron Drake

Aaron Drake is a musician, composer, and curator living in Los Angeles, California. A classically trained pianist, Drake's instrumental pieces explore sociological principals (group behavior, social constructs of rules and power, etc.) in performance; the relationship that performers have to each other, or to their instruments and/or environment.
His electronic and installation work has focused on notions of authorship by appropriating and manipulating digital 'objects' such as .mp3, .jpg, .dmg, etc., as well as recycling and redesigning discarded objects such as children's toys, CDs, synthesizers and radios.
Education
Drake received a Bachelor of Music in Composition from San Francisco State University in 2002 where he studied with Richard Festinger, Ronald Caltabiano and Josh Levine. His final year at SFSU was spent abroad at the where he studied with . While in Germany, he met American expatriated composers Mark Randall Osborn and Franklin Cox under whom Drake studied for the remainder of his time in Germany.
After returning to the USA, Drake enrolled at the California College of the Arts and studied kinetic sculpture and networked art under Barney Hanyes. In 2007 he graduated from the California Institute of the Arts with a Masters of Fine Arts in Composition. While at CalArts he studied with David Rosenboom, Mark Trayle, Michael Pisaro, Morton Subotnick, James Tenney and visiting artist .
Sound Installation
Drake's sound installations have been exhibited nationally and internationally in many group shows. Notably, he collaborated with Kari Rae Seekins, Andreas Kratky, Norman Klein and Margo Bistis on The Imaginary 20th Century which has had installations at the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Orange County Museum of Art, Ben Maltz Gallery at OTIS and at 3rd International Design and Cinema Conference at Tütün Deposu in Instambul, Turkey.
Other presentations and installations at distinguished museums and galleries include Hammer Museum, Machine Project and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.
Film and television
Since 2007, Drake has worked for CBS' show How I Met Your Mother creating much of the show's web content and music for the show's DVDs. Most notable was his work creating the online hoax "Lorenzo von Matterhorn" for the episode"The Playbook".
After the airing of this episode, "Lorenzo Von Matterhorn" became the fastest rising Google search for the day of November 16, 2009. Drake also created the tie-in websites mentioned in the episode: Balloon Explorers Club, Big Business Journal, Extremities Quarterly. A Myspace profile was also created for Matterhorn under the moniker Dog Stevens. A page for Lorenzo Von Matterhorn was also created but was deleted when it was revealed to be a hoax.

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