Aric Improta | The drummer who backflips between kits
Aric Improta plays for Night Verses and co-founded Fever 333. The performance art, the playing underneath it, and his Tama and Meinl setup.
Most drummers who become famous for a stunt turn out to be mediocre players. Aric Improta is the opposite problem: the stunts are so good that people forget to notice the drumming.
He once backflipped from one drum kit to another, mid-solo, without dropping the beat. Rolling Stone and NME both covered it. In 2019 MusicRadar and Rhythm’s readers voted him the best rock drummer in the world.
Here is what is going on when he is not airborne.
Who is Aric Improta?
Aric Improta is an American drummer from Southern California.
His main band is Night Verses — an instrumental post-hardcore trio, and later a duo, whose records are essentially a drum showcase with guitars attached. It is where the serious playing lives.
In 2017 he co-founded Fever 333 with Jason Aalon Butler (formerly of Letlive) and Stephen Harrison (formerly of The Chariot) — a politically charged, deliberately confrontational rock band that got a Grammy nomination almost immediately.
He has since gone on to House of Protection, the project with Harrison.
Drumeo’s panel gave him the Viola Smith Award for Defying Expectations in 2021, which is the correct category for him by some distance.
What Aric Improta actually does
He treats performance as part of the instrument. The kit placement, the movement, the skateboard-and-parkour visual language of his solo films — none of it is decoration. He is genuinely trying to answer the question of what a drum performance can look like.
He plays with enormous physical commitment. Everything is at full extension. It looks exhausting because it is.
He is a real technician underneath. Night Verses material is odd-time, polyrhythmic and structurally complicated. Strip away the visuals and the playing stands up on its own.
He is comfortable being the melody. In an instrumental trio, the drums often carry the hook. He writes drum parts that people can hum, which is a strange sentence and an accurate one.
He is a hybrid player. Electronics and samples woven through the Fever 333 material, where the band’s sound is half hip-hop production.
The backflip
Worth explaining properly, because “he does a flip” undersells it.
The setup is two kits, facing each other. Mid-solo, he leaves one, flips between them, and lands playing — with the phrase continuing across the gap.
The difficulty is not the flip. It is that the musical idea has to survive it: you have to leave the first kit on a beat that gives you enough air, and arrive on the second kit on the correct beat, in tempo, with the right limb.
It is a rhythmic problem disguised as a gymnastic one, and that is exactly the sort of thing he is interested in.
Aric Improta’s drum kit
His setup is smaller and plainer than his reputation suggests, which makes sense — he has to be able to move around it.
- Drums — Tama Superstar Classic, with single lugs. A mid-priced, straightforward kit, chosen because it works rather than because it is exotic.
- Cymbals — Meinl, including a 22” Soundcaster Fusion Ride.
- Electronics. Pads and triggers for the Fever 333 material, where samples do as much work as the kit.
Every era, with buy links, is on Aric Improta’s Rig Vault page.
Want the sound without the rig?
This is a genuinely affordable sound, and that is part of the point — Improta plays a mid-range kit and gets a huge noise out of it.
Spend the money on cymbals, not shells. A Superstar-class kit with good cymbals will out-perform an expensive kit with bad ones every time. Our cymbal buying guide is the place to start, and the Gear Guru will split a budget between the two for you.
Then set the kit low and open. You cannot move like he does around a kit built like a cockpit. Everything within reach, nothing crowding you.
Where to start listening
- Night Verses — “Copper Wasp” (2018). The clearest demonstration of what he does musically.
- Night Verses — Every Sound Has a Color in the Valley of Night (2022). A whole record’s worth.
- Fever 333 — “Made an America” (2018). The Grammy-nominated one, and much simpler on purpose.
- His solo drum films. Watch one for the visuals, then watch it again with your eyes closed.
Final thoughts
Improta is doing something almost nobody else is: treating a drum performance as a piece of staging as well as a piece of music, and refusing to accept that the drummer has to sit still at the back.
It could easily be gimmickry. It is not, because the playing holds up when you take the pictures away — which is the only test that matters.
The Viola Smith Award is about defying expectations. Very few drummers have had fewer expectations imposed on them, largely because he keeps ignoring them.
See Aric Improta’s full rig in the Rig Vault, or read about Terry Bozzio — the other winner of that award, and another drummer who decided the format needed changing.