Alexa Dexa is a multifaceted artist with footholds in composition, electronic sound design, and performance. Her toychestral electronic pop solo project parades her floating vocals, handcrafted soundscapes, and enough instruments made with children in mind to rival a playpen. Among her growing collection are her beloved toy pianos, pitched desk bells, and typatune.

An adventurer at heart, Alexa spends 4-6 months out of the year touring the world with a strong do-it-yourself ethos. Her 12 previous self-booked tour itineraries over the past 5 years have taken her throughout North America, Europe, Oceania, and Asia. With a 40 liter Deuter backpack, 7 of her desk bells, her smallest 18-key Schoenhut baby grand toy piano, and an iPhone housing her beats, Alexa traverses the map with ease, heavily favoring use of public transportation. Her festival appearances include Omaha’s BFF Femme Fest (2017), New Zealand’s Future City Festival (2017), Croatia’s Fairy Tale Festival (2016), the Florida International Toy Piano Festival (2016), Burning Man (2015), Germany’s Fusion Festival (2014), NYC’s UnCaged Toy Piano Festival (2013 & 2017) curated by toy piano legends Margaret Leng Tan and Phyllis Chen, Detroit’s Sidewalk Festival of Performing Arts (2013-2015) for which Alexa created and performed with site-specific sound installations including her Living Sound Library, and Make Music New York (2010-2017), for which Alexa composed and organized mass appeal performances for toy piano and theremini. Alexa handles all of her own booking and tour planning.

A graduate of Berklee College of Music (2011), member of the Schoenhut Artist Roster, and volunteer artist for Sing for Hope, Alexa is known for the duality between the innate childish affability of her toys and the maturity of her lyrical content and compositional means. She was awarded the 2015 Creative Individuals Grant from the New York State Council on the Arts for her most recent album “Year of Abandon” and a 2014 Puffin Foundation grant for her activist album “Whale Bones and the Boundary of a Fish”. Her discography includes 3 full-length albums, 2 conceptual micro-albums, and 2 soundtracks for site-specific performance and theater. Alexa’s ongoing projects include Chorale Corral: A Living Sound Library, a collection of found objects that invite public participation in cataloguing and fulfilling their potential as sound-makers, and Culture Culture: Cultivated Samples, a collection of field recordings taken from her tour travels that frame society through sound. She also leads a workshop on “Pursuing Indie Music Professionally” for Long Island high school students through the BOCES Arts-in-Education program. Her past projects include taking on the capacity of Sound Designer for the Off-Off-Broadway production of “Someone’s Trying to Kill Me” at NYC’s HERE theater (2011).

Rawhide Records is Alexa Dexa’s humble recording studio on Long Island. It is where she records all of her albums, as well as the albums of other musicians for whom she acts as an audio engineer and producer. Her beat-making workstation also resides there. With the aid of her Oxygen 49 keyboard, Alexa architects aural surroundings using Digital Performer, Logic, Reason, & sample libraries from Native Instruments. Contact Alexa to book studio time or inquire about purchasing a custom beat.

Dexa is Alexa’s middle name, after her paternal granny. Always a playful girl enchanted with miniatures and sonically drawn to resonant bell tones, it is not much of a surprise that upon first discovering the realm of toy instruments, Alexa fell head over heels instantly and immediately began to seek out the toys she now uses to self-accompany and that continue to shape the contours of her compositions and musical sensibilities.