PLS&TY

Artist

PLS&TY · 1stdibs.com/the-mint/tommy-leas-oceans-lost ↗

Raster

raster.art/artist/plsty ↗

Practice

Electronic music, audiovisual composition, digital art, and collaborative image-making

In the set

Synesthesia ↗ · 123 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

PLS&TY is the creative identity of Florida-born musician and audiovisual artist Tommy Leas. The name itself folds biography into branding: “PLS” plays on Leas, while “TY” is drawn from Tommy.¹ Although his public career was established through electronic music, visual form has been integral to the project from its beginning. Leas has described album artwork and promotional imagery as early sites of collaboration, followed by animated concert visuals and digitally native works.² This continuity matters when approaching Synesthesia. The collection is not a musician’s incidental excursion into generative art, but an extension of a practice already organized around correspondences between listening and seeing.

Composing between media

PLS&TY’s accounts of his working method repeatedly begin with atmosphere. Travel informed the contrasting rhythms and moods of his 2019 Run Wild / Feeling Forever release, whose accompanying film used a nonlinear narrative and a stylized dystopian setting to carry the music into visual space.³ In another interview, he characterized musical inspiration as unpredictable, arriving at moments that cannot be forced.⁴ Both observations help frame his digital practice: composition is less a fixed translation from one medium to another than a process of finding visual and sonic structures that share an emotional register.

That principle became explicit in his NFT work. Discussing the exhibition Oceans Lost, which he guest-curated for 1stDibs in 2021, PLS&TY explained that his process in the digital-art sphere usually began with an image. He then approached music and sound effects as a screen composer might, matching them to the image’s mood.² The exhibition brought together 11 invited digital artists, while an associated critical profile described 12 sea-themed works for which he composed individual soundtracks.⁵ The project joined environmental subject matter, collaborative production, animation, field recording, and musical composition. It also demonstrated that his authorship can operate through selection and sonic interpretation as well as through the production of images.

For PLS&TY, the image is not packaging for the music. It is a compositional prompt with its own rhythm, atmosphere, and claim on attention.

Synesthesia

Released through Art Blocks Factory on January 14, 2022, Synesthesia comprises exactly 123 unique editions.⁶ Its title names the joining of sensory channels, a fitting proposition for an artist whose work moves persistently between sound and image. The edition format distributes that proposition across a bounded field of variations. Each output belongs to a common generative system, yet each resolves the system differently through color, shape, density, and spatial rhythm.

The six examples reproduced here reveal an idiom of luminous abstraction. Saturated elements appear to pulse, accumulate, or drift across dark pictorial fields. Repeated forms establish cadence, while changes of scale and placement produce syncopation. These are visual analogies rather than literal recordings of sound. Their importance lies in how they invite temporal looking: the eye follows recurrences, interruptions, and chromatic shifts as it might follow motifs within a musical arrangement.

Live on Art Blocks: synesthesia-by-plsandty ↗

A practice of collaboration

PLS&TY’s broader career clarifies why the collection privileges sensation over depiction. His breakout recording “Good Vibes” emerged from a difficult day but was shaped into an affirmative electronic track, illustrating his tendency to transform an initial condition through production.⁷ Interviews also show an artist attentive to the distinct interpretations listeners bring to songs. In 2023 he declined to prescribe a single meaning for “New Color,” preferring audiences to form their own associations.⁸ Synesthesia offers a visual counterpart to that openness. Its system establishes constraints, but its individual outputs do not dictate a narrative.

This approach also links the Art Blocks project to PLS&TY’s experiments with digitally distributed music and ownership. He has described releasing limited NFT versions of songs and associated artwork through Gala Music.⁸ Earlier, Oceans Lost connected tokenized works to embedded scores, while a profile of that exhibition reported his use of ocean field recordings and his earlier hybrid vinyl-token experiment.⁵ Across these projects, the recurring question is how music can acquire visual, collectible, and spatial forms without losing its temporal character.

PLS&TY remains best understood as a cross-media composer. His interviews foreground piano, electronic production, performance, collaboration, and a deliberate visual identity rather than a conventional studio-art lineage.⁹ Later profiles continue to emphasize the communal origins of his practice, including making mixes for friends before moving toward live performance.¹⁰ Within that trajectory, Synesthesia is concise but consequential. Its 123 editions place generative variation inside a practice already committed to rhythm, mood, and sensory exchange.

Bibliography

The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the PLS&TY links page ↗.