Brooklyn, NY
Born 1967, Louisville, Kentucky
Composer, Recording Artist
I first started making records as a teenager in Kentucky in the early 1980s. The record is still my favorite medium, because it strikes me as a multidisciplinary form. It combines music and visual art, allows for the creation of group identities or individual personae, and facilitates contact across geographical and temporal distances. Furthermore, I've always conceived of sound recording as a framing device for chance and impossible-to-script idiosyncracy.
I'm currently at work on a book about writing the history of 1960s musical avant-gardes through their recordings. It's a tendentious angle, given that so many new genres in the 1960s, following John Cage's lead, virtually defined themselves in opposition to being represented in the form of a recording. Yet in the intervening years, recordings have become the way that music from this period is most often encountered.
The people from whom I've learned the most are those with whom I've been fortunate to collaborate. John McEntire, Jim O'Rourke, Mayo Thompson, Stephen Prina, Tony Conrad, Will Oldham, Luc Ferrari, Susan Howe . . . that's about as short a list as I can provide in good conscience.
2005-2006 Assistant Professor, Conservatory of Music, Brooklyn College, CUNY
2005 Ph.D. in English, University of Chicago
1992 M.A. in English, University of Chicago
1989 B.A. in English, Georgetown University
1997-2006 Label Director, Blue Chopsticks Records (releasing recordings by Luc Ferrari, Derek Bailey and Noel Akchote, Workshop, and others)
1997-1999 Instructor, Sound and Liberal Arts Departments, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
2005 Thiefth with Susan Howe, (Blue Chopsticks, CD)
The Harmless Dust with Nikos Veliotis, (Headz, CD)
2004 A Guess at the Riddle (Drag City/FatCat/P-Vine, CD/LP)
2002 Rickets & Scurvy (Drag City/FatCat/P-Vine, CD/LP)
1998 Camoufleur (Gastr del Sol, Drag City/Domino/P-Vine, CD/LP)
1997 Banana Cabbage, Potato Lettuce, Onion Orange (Table of the Elements, CD)
1996 Hazel (The Red Krayola, Drag City, CD/LP)
2002 Horizontal Technicolour, soundtrack for work by Angela Bulloch, Institute of Visual Culture, Cambridge, England
2000 Between a Raven and a Writing Desk, sound installation, Elysian Fields group exhibition, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France
