Mahogany are an electric music-based multidisciplinary media ensemble formed in Michigan in 1995 and currently working in Philadelphia, New York City, Chicago, and other locations. The band's sound combines vocals, cello, massed guitars, pianos, melodicas, sequencers, synthesizers, samplers, tape, percussion, and other instruments. Mahogany also use film, video, animation, cinema, graphic design, photography, typography and other realization and rendering techniques for a cumulative effect that the band refers to as the "Hypercube". Mahogany have released two critically acclaimed full-length albums, The Dream of the Modern Day (2000) and Connectivity! (2006), as well as numerous singles, EPs and compilation tracks collected on Memory Column: Early Works and Rarities 1996-2004 (2005). They have performed live with Vampire Weekend, Spoon, Chairlift, Clinic, Bloc Party, Serena Maneesh, Interpol, Luna, Broadcast, Resplandor, and others, maintaining a cult status among the group's listeners. Foundation Mahogany are the brainchild of Andrew Prinz, created as a response borne of multidisciplinary generational precedent initiated by Prinz's great-grandfather Harry S. Will, a violinist, artist, designer and founder of the Columbus Orchestral Society (who Prinz cites as establishing Mahogany's organizational tabula rasa), and his grandfather Vernon A. Will, a mathematician and guitarist (who, according to Prinz, provided the ensemble's theoretical, aesthetic and ethical basis via his 1961 doctoral thesis The Order of Freedom: An Inquiry into the Theory of Human Selection). According to Prinz, the band's name references the Kurt Weill/Bertolt Brecht opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, as well as the mahogany tree's role as a "precious and beautiful living resource, essential to the Earth's biosphere...and a superior material for the construction of both interiors and musical instruments, prized for its beauty and naturally harmonious resonant characteristics." The group was founded by Prinz and cellist/vocalist Allysa Massais in 1995 while Prinz attended Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, initially studying music theory and composition, then photography, art history, studio art, and graphic design. With concentrations in cello under Owen Carman and bass with Peter Dominguez, Prinz had already performed with and attended workshops and master classes led by jazz greats like Maynard Ferguson, John Faddis and Dizzy Gillespie before forming the first iteration of Mahogany. Prior to Mahogany, Prinz collaborated with mentor Scott Cortez in two of the latter's musical projects, Lovesliescrushing and Astrobrite. He contributed cover art photography to Lovesliescrushing's second album Xuvetyn and performed 12-string electric guitar with that band on their 1995 East