The Recipe for the Making of a Musician
That was our first sentence.
This is the rest of the conversation.
The Beat
It started with a snare drum. “I was nine or ten,” Tom recounted. “They did a school demo of all the band instruments. The moment the instructor hit the snare, I was like—yep. That’s it.”
He climbed the classic school-band ladder: practice pad, then snare, then finally a full kit. As a teenager, his influences swirled between drummers from Led Zeppelin, Radiohead, Nirvana, and The Police, musicians who played like their lives depended on it. Manic, loud, but precise.
Through that, Tom found his people, others who played loud, played raw, played like they meant it. That pulse led him to joining Second Child at nineteen, which later became Ritual Talk, where he began carving out his voice as both a drummer and a co-writer.
Tom attended The New School for Jazz, where he earned his BFA in Jazz Performance for drums. The studies were intense and Tom spent four to five hours a day honing his craft and immersing himself in new sounds. The program gave him access to one-on-one lessons with legendary jazz musicians across New York City such as Anat Cohen , musicians he had once looked up to from afar. He studied with SNL drummer Shawn Pelton, who even brought him into professional rehearsals. Though surrounded by jazz, Tom never claimed the identity of a “jazzer.” “I was always an outsider,” he said. “I’m a rocker.”
The Chord Progression
When Tom was thirteen, his brother asked for a bass for Christmas. Naturally, Tom, by association, ended up with a guitar. Drums had always come with structure: lessons, evaluations, the discipline of practice. But the guitar felt different. There were no expectations, no right answers. It became his freedom instrument.
During the pandemic, after long flour-dusted shifts at a sourdough pizza kitchen in Bushwick, Tom would come home and play for hours. Just him, his guitar, a growing collection of pedals, and ambient sound drifting into the quiet night. Rock had begun to fade from his playlists, replaced by pop and bands like Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine. This was when he discovered the perfect in-between of pop and rock: shoegaze. He was drawn to shoegaze not just for its volume but for its softness too, its ability to be both grand and gentle. As Tom puts it, “a large wall of sound you could swim in”.
This became teasea, his solo shoegaze project.
After a breakup in the winter of ’23, music became a ritual. Every Sunday, he would write and record a new song in a single sitting. No comping. Just feeling. Then he would step into the cold, headphones on, walking through the city to process what he had made. Always the same bar. Always the same quiet reflection. A beer, a journal, and space to let things settle.
By the end of that winter, he had twenty songs. Six became Flowering, his debut EP.
Flowering is a meditation on love, loss, and growth, where endings blur into beginnings, tracing the natural cycle of heartbreak and healing. It doesn’t search for answers so much as it leans into the certainty of uncertainty. The spacey synths of "Parallel Sameness," the mournful cello on "Always," and the steady tidal pulse of the chords across each track pull you under, weaving you into their current before gently carrying you back to shore, ready to begin again.
The Vocals
There was a promise among three voices. Back in high school, Tom, his brother Dan Criblez, and Michael John Mimmo, a childhood friend, vowed they’d live together someday. In 2020, they made good on that dream, moving into a six-bedroom apartment in Central Brooklyn. It was the kind of place that doesn’t really exist in New York anymore. “A unicorn” as Tom puts it. They knew they couldn’t keep it to themselves. They had to open their doors.
An idea was born out of their shared love for homemade Italian cooking, passed down from Tom and Dan’s mother, seasoned with ritual: dinner together every night, one person cooks, the others clean. Food was always at the heart of their friendship. So they decided to build something around it.
And they did. Their first house show was small and intimate, just Tom and his brother performing, with Mimmo cooking for everyone. That night, a blueprint emerged: food, music, community.
“New York is full of brilliant artists,” Tom says, “but it can be so intimidating to talk to anyone. We were tired of that.” They realized food could be the bridge. Nourishing and grounding, it softened nerves and opened people up. It didn’t take long for the gatherings to evolve into something bigger, with a name that captured it all: Ambient Pasta. Collaborations happened. Bands formed. Friendships and relationships took root. Ambient Pasta began as a name, but morphed into a shared ritual of food, music, and connection.
When I asked Tom about his favorite event, he took me back to a warm September evening inside a sake brewery in Bushwick. Eight poets stepped up, one by one, each offering ten minutes of themselves. Behind them, a jazz band scored their poems live. “The music was breathing with them,” Tom said, remembering how the notes curled around each word. It was a shared pulse, much like the multi-sensory spirit of Ambient Pasta.
We’re three hours into what was meant to be a one hour interview. Tom sits in his new apartment in Montréal, a city he moved to just last week. He didn’t leave New York out of disillusionment, but instinct. “I’d been there too long,” he said. “It was comfortable. I needed a different energy, a different pace.”
It’s late now, and threaded through our conversation is a quiet conviction. Tom doesn’t know exactly where he’ll be in six months, or six years, but he knows what he’s after: to make a consistent piece of work and to consistently make work. To look back one day, as an old man, and say, I spent my life exercising my expression.
I think through loops and reverb, pasta dinners and poetry readings, he already has.