One of the second generation of New York minimal composers, Dreyblatt studied music with Pauline Oliveros, La Monte Young, and Alvin Lucier and media art with Woody and Steina Vasulka. Dreyblatt charted his own unique course in composition and music performance, inventing a set of new and original instruments, performance techniques, and a system of tuning, and is often characterised as one of the more rock-oriented of the American minimalists.

• arnold dreyblatt kinship collapse 2007, by Arnold Dreyblatt Archive

• arnold dreyblatt kinship collapse 2007, by Arnold Dreyblatt Archive

His music has been performed by the Bang On A Can All-Stars in New York, Jim O'Rourke, The Great Learning Orchestra in Stockholm, Pellegrini String Quartet, and the Crash Ensemble Dublin. He has recorded for such labels as Tzadik, Hat Hut, Table of the Elements, Cantaloupe, Important, Choose, and Black Truffle.

Based in Berlin since 1984, in 2007, Dreyblatt was elected to lifetime membership in the visual arts section at the German Academy of Art (Akademie der Künste, Berlin). With a 30 year visual art practice, alongside his music, and exhibitions across Europe, he is currently Professor of Media Art at the Muthesius Academy of Art and Design in Kiel, Germany.