Our Practitioners

Was born into a Syrian-Lebanese family and took to music at a young age. He sang spirituals in elementary school and began learning drumset at home at age 14. While attending Brown University he deepened his interest in Jazz through lessons and combos, while forging important relationships with musicians Andrew Fox and Dave Harrington. During a gap year he travelled New Zealand and met Chief White Cloud from Vancouver Island during a Lakota Sundance and had the honor of playing the drum during the 4-day spiritual ceremony.

After graduating with a BA in Sociology (2006) Samer moved to New York City to reunite with childhood music partner Juan Pieczanski (Small Black, Pitchfork) and would play in several bands including Dave Harrington Group, Deradoorian, and Matthew Dear Live (with whom he opened for Depeche Mode on five dates in Europe, 2013). He formed his own projects and produced two self released drone based albums, ETDH (2016) and Rudolph (2018). His solo gong meditation album Soft As Metal is due to release April 2024.

In January 2018 Samer began learning sound healing with various teachers and institutions in NYC and upstate New York, and has been actively working, learning, and practicing in the field ever since. He has repeated intensive training courses and served in assistant positions with Sage Academy of Sound (Woodstock NY) and 9 Ways Academia (Perkasie, PA), apprenticed with energetic healer Rebecca Singer, learned with and assisted for Dr. John Beauliue (Biosonics tuning forks), and has attended and assisted classes with legendary gong guru Don Conreaux. He continues taking courses with 9Ways Academia and actively assists classes in person and online with Dr John Beauliue, while mentoring privately and offering group workshops.

Photo from Basilica Hudson performance by Sam Marble, 2022

As a percussionist and improvising musician Samer leans into the musical sensibilities that transcend sound healing over millennia. He offers recurrent sound meditation experiences at studios, private events, and for corporations. He has played at Basilica Hudson, The Rubin Museum of Art where he also consulted on their Mandala Lab, and for Metropolis Ensemble’s 2023 Soundgarden: Biophony at the Brooklyn Botannical Gardens. In March 2022 Samer took up a monthlong music residency program at Pioneer Works where he engineered and recorded his array of large gongs. In the same year Samer kicked off Spontaneous Space, a collaborative concert series at the Greenpoint venue IRL, inviting friends Greg Fox, Yuka Honda, Billy Martin, Dave Harrington, Angel Deradoorian, Jeremiah Cymerman, David Lizmi, and Eliot Krimsky into live improvisatory explorations that featured the artists’ natural styles fused with Samer’s approaches to music more typically associated with “sound healing”. He is set to release his first album from this period in early spring 2024. He appears in recorded works such as Alanis Morissette’s The Storm Before The Calm and the award winning film Everything Everywhere All At Once, playing gongs and bowls.