In SoHo Corner, where Prince and Elizabeth Street meet, dog pedestrians, errandmen and lunch breakers tied up the April sun, beat automatas that approached parts.
Ari Miller, 25, known by his artist name Ariathome, is a New York-based Wayfahrfring musician who turns his head on a mobile beatmaking rig. Awakes up, which looks like the intersection of the Ghostbusters Proton Pack and the ballpark's Bender Tray, he smears the spot hip-hop, neo soul, funk and housebeat on plates throughout the streets around town.
“We built the rig with New York City in mind,” Miller said. “When you make a good song with strangers on the street, it's like, 'Oh, did we just become best friends?”
Packed with a keyboard, looper, six speakers and a controller with dozens of knobs and faders, the mirror Frankenstein instrument offers a buffet of drums, keyboards and bass sounds interfaced via the music software's clearton. On the back, cable confusion hides Mac Mini M4, modem, and hot-swappable camera battery.
Perhaps the most important part of the gear is tucked into the chest strap of the ensemble. The microphone, a brave improviser, is ready to jump on and sing and sing on the beat of the mirror.
“It's important that I'm not running a talent show,” Miller said. “The main goal is to build connections with legitimate strangers by helping them to emphasize their own self-expression, not just music.”
Miller was a bedroom beatmaker when he moved to New York City in 2020, but his desire to interact with a city that was energised by Covid-era cabin fever has created the current project. “I'm in such an incredible city, but for some reason I'm hiding in my room,” he recalled in a video interview. (The name of his artist is nodded to this time.) In his bright Brooklyn apartment before Thursday's excursion, Miller is working on his 55-pound set-up, designed and welded with the help of a friend in Denver, with a practiced multi-legged choreography.
Miller's first live stream of outdoors was in 2023, when he used a camera mounted on a pole to document the music meanders. He wasn't the first person to come up with an idea. Zach Sabrie was an early inspiration, a British DJ known as Suat, who wears mobile rigs for both everyday and extreme location sets. “All the interactions and the quick wit of that kind are not completely scripted,” Sabrie said in a video interview. “I just want a pure organic reaction.”
Miller abandoned Paul Cam and with the help of videographer Dylan Gouche in September 2024, he was completely committed to the project around this time, increasing the cross-post highlights from the stream to Instagram and Tiktok to over 1 million people on Instagram, reaching beyond Twitch's Niche Music community. He soon went viral in a segment of spontaneous collaboration with freestylers.
Miller's musical life began early near Albany, New York, where he grew up in an artist's home (his father and brother are orchestra conductors). “We had a piano in our living room, but my brothers were always skilled in reciting classic pieces,” Miller said. “When it was my turn, I was just tinkering around, trying to find the chords and find the scale.”
He taught himself how to make music and accumulated a collection of electronic music gear, but Covid thwarted his ambition to perform live shows. To scratch the itching of that performance, Miller turned to live streaming from his apartment on Twitch in 2021. He attended Twitch Conventions where he was featured to IRL (actual) streamers such as Yuggie_tv, Jinnytty, and Jaystreazy.
These types of content creators “go to new countries or new places. They usually just have cameras, phones, backpacks and create an experience for themselves,” explained Miller. “They enrich themselves. That's what they do. I remember being so impressed with it.”
Miller's experiments were permanent and became a full-time gig. Despite the overhead costs of Goucher payments, streaming data costs, repairing and upgrading his instruments, he makes a living through online audience contributions and brand sponsorships.
Upon arriving in Soho, Miller drifted out some warm synth chords and began bopping his head towards the evolving beats. Soon he had a collaborator: Kossivi Alokpovi was on lunch break from a nearby restaurant, drawing him in by Miller's hefty backbeats and a sample of his own voice. Next was vocalist Hannah Tangen, who enjoys his days off from work as a singing waitress. She sped up her backing vocals when Miller shot her freestyle poems.
“He has a very good attitude about it. He doesn't make you nervous,” Tangen said.
A small crowd of passersby paused, and another audience member enjoyed an improvisation show online. Approximately 6,500 viewers on Twitch and YouTube were coordinated live, unleashing a slipstream of fire emojis in chat. Miller is deeply pondering about the culture of live streaming. For a senior paper in comparative literature, he provided on-site feedback on livestream chats as a contemporary metaphysical audience of musical performances.
In the shadow of The Trees in NYU junior Gannon Green's Petrosino Park, he swooped proudly on his longboard to turn on the microphone. He and Miller moved to the number of rocks in Varadare, and soon a little Cedric from a class at Brooklyn University took part. (“It helps to help the freestyle flow get much better,” Small pointed out.) Finally, Instagram handles were shared, DAPs were swapped, and small green, which arrived as a stranger, was left as a music collaborator.
“That's New York. That's the passion of the city, and I'm really trying to get involved,” Green said. These evanescent moments are worthy of Miller as they pass through the city of New York.
“Free styling is freed,” said Anastasia Caulfield, one of Miller's favorite collaborators, in a video interview. “Ali invites the community into his world with a truly lighthearted heart, not his own ego.” Whether the off-cuff improvisation is gritty, deep, X-rate, or just stupid, their power lies in fundamental vulnerability. “It's like talking to a giant megaphone. You're showing them you,” Miller said.
Thursday's session lasted four hours, with the mirror's physical and social batteries, as well as the juices in the gear, beginning to fade. He and Goucher jumped on Uber, went home and cut the Stream video into short form content on Instagram, Tiktok and YouTube.
Miller and his mobile music studio packed and left, recreating the sonic landscape of SoHo as the sounds of ambulance sirens and sangria glasses clicking. However, online, listeners freely revisited the sidewalk.
