Symposium Full Schedule with Bios

Critical Sonic Practice Symposium: Elegy

4:30pm Symposium Discussions

4:30-5:20 pm: Interfacing African Electronic Music

Moderated by Jason King
Jason King is the Chair of NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. He is a musician, DJ, performer, producer, songwriter, scholar, curator, journalist and the author of The Michael Jackson Treasures, a Barnes and Noble exclusive biography. He is a widely published scholar, writing on the cultural politics of artists like Beyonce, Drake, Roberta Flack and Luther Vandross. He has hosted and produced radio programs and podcasts for platforms like NPR Music and CNN featuring musicians like Dua Lipa, Alicia Keys, and Miguel. Jason is a regular contributor to publications like Pitchfork, Slate, Los Angeles Times, Spin, NPR Music, Red Bull Music Academy, and he has been an expert witness in legal cases for Drake, Katy Perry, JAY Z, Timbaland, Lady Gaga, and Madonna.

Will Calhoun: Bronx Native Will Calhoun is a Berklee College of music graduate, and two time Grammy winner with the genre bending iconic rock band Living Colour. He’s produced and toured with a wide range of artist. From Harry Belafonte,  B.B. King, Wayne Shorter, Herb Alpert, Public Enemy, Philip Glass, Yassin Bey aka Mos Def, Mic Jagger, Lauryn Hill, Master Gnawa Musicians of Morocco, and many others. Will has invested over 25 years of personal research in the Outback of Australia, Mali, Morocco, Senegal, Belize, and Northern Brazil to document and study the true History of the drums, rhythm, sonic vibrations and their impact on modern music.  Will is an inventor and avid user of technology and it’s unique role in creating music. Three well known colleagues continues to brain storm with are: Jaron Lanier(Virtual Reality Inventor), Roger Linn, and Mario DeCurtiis. “Simultaneously studying the past and future of music/rhythm is essential in today’s musical environment”.

Stéphane Costantini is Ph.D. in Communication Sciences, and researcher at Centre Georg Simmel (EHESS) and LabSIC (Paris 13 University). He is currently a Postdoc fellow for AFRINUM research project, investigating Digital Music Cultures in West Africa. His research focuses on the strategies of industrial players in the field of digital and collaborative web, and on the practices of amateurs and professionals in the music worlds. Besides his scholar activities, he also worked as communication officer, notably for CISAC (International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers), Midem (music market convention), and other companies in the music business.

Leila Adu-Gilmore: Composer-theorist Leila Adu-Gilmore’s compositions have been played at The Kennedy Center and Ojai Festival; singing and performing globally with over twenty releases including five solo albums. A Ghanaian New-Zealander born in London, Dr Adu-Gilmore is passionate about black and indigenous music, decolonization and social change. She has been published in Critical Studies in Improvisation journal and the Music Technology Cookbook (Oxford University Press), and has presented at Zhejiang Conservatory, Huddersfield University, and EHESS & IRCAM. Dr Adu-Gilmore received her BMus from Victoria University, NZ; Phd from Princeton University, and is an Assistant Professor in New York University’s music technology program. Composer Site: http://www.leilaadu.com/ & NYU site https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/people/leila-adu-gilmore

5:30-6:20pm: Making Creative Music in 2021 

Moderated by Kwami Coleman
Kwami Coleman is a pianist, composer, and musicologist specializing in improvised music. His research interests include experimental music history, jazz history, the history and music cultures of the African Diaspora, the political economy of music, music technology, aesthetics, and cultural studies. Coleman’s current book project, in production, is titled Change: The “New Thing” and Modern Jazz. His 2017 album is titled Local Music, and features original music written for trio and field recordings. His upcoming electronic recording project is titled POLY. Coleman was a founding member of the Afro-Latin@ Forum, a non-profit organization devoted to the study and increased visibility of Latinos of African descent in the United States, now housed in NYU’s Steinhardt School.

James Gordon Williams- James Gordon Williams is a pianist, composer, improviser, and critical musicologist who collaborates with poets, dancers, and experimental film artists.  In addition to collaborating with video artist, Suné Woods and poet Fred Moten in Woods’s You are mine. I see now, I’m a have to let you go (2018), he improvised a piano score for filmmaker Cauleen Smith’s world premiere of Crow Requiem (2015) and collaborated with Crystal Z. Campbell’s exhibition Model Citizen, Here I Stand (2019) through contributing a recorded piano arrangement of Paul Robeson’s version of “Ol’ Man River.” He has performed at the Village Vanguard, Birdland as well as several international jazz festivals in the United States, Malta, Switzerland, France, and Italy. He is the author of Crossing Bar Lines: The Politics and Practices of Black Musical Space (2021 University Press Mississippi) and several peer-reviewed articles on improvisation.  Under the umbrella of critical improvisation studies, his research explores the Black intellectual thought and spatializing practices in creative improvisation using the framework of Black Geographies and Black feminism.  He is an assistant professor of music in the Department of African American Studies at Syracuse University.

Rajna Swaminathan
http://www.rajnaswaminathan.com/about.html

Michael Veal – Michael E. Veal is Henry L. and Lucy G. Moses Professor of Music and African-American Studies at Yale University. He is the author of Fela: The Life & Times of an African Musical Icon (Temple University Press, 2000), Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae (Wesleyan University Press, 2007) and the forthcoming Living Space: John Coltrane and Miles Davis from Analog to Digital. He is the co-author of Tony Allen: Master Drummer of Afrobeat (Duke University Press, 2013) and the co-editor of Punk Ethnography: Artists and Scholars Listen to Sublime Frequencies (Wesleyan University, 2015). He is also an electric bassist and saxophonist and leader of the Afrobeat-jazz big band Michael Veal & Aqua Ife.

6:20pm-7:00pm: Futures Club 

Moderated by Kevin Gotkin
Kevin Gotkin is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, & Communication at NYU. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018. He is the Artist-in-Remote-Residence at the Critical Design Lab and from 2016-2019, he was Co-Founder and Co-DIrector of Disability/Arts/NYC.

Zephyr Ann Doles is a DJ, educator, independent scholar, and mental health professional. Her work exists within the liminal space and intersections between culture, identity, mental health, and social justice, particularly concerning systems of harm and systems of healing in cultural spaces. She is currently pursuing her graduate degree in social welfare with a focus on racial trauma and somatic and multi-sensory modalities of healing. As a DJ, she has played in many of the major venues throughout NYC and draws upon history, narrative and nostalgia to craft unique emotional experiences through sound and performance.

TYGAPAW: Dion Mckenzie known as TYGAPAW, is a one-person army on a mission to highlight inclusivity and displacement through sound. Originally from Mandeville, Jamaica, and based in Brooklyn, New York, TYGAPAW is a polymathic artist injecting their Jamaican heritage into techno. Operating at the intersections of their musical and cultural roots, TYGAPAW infuses the raw energy of dancehall with their signature emotional club sound. The self-taught producer founded monthly club nights Shottas, No Badmind and Fake Accent, creating platforms and spaces for QTIPOC. Fake Accent also functions as TYGAPAW’s own imprint, which aims to platform and center black electronic music artists.

Dreamcrusher: “Playing a fringe yet stylized version of noise and industrial that is intelligent, expressive, and powerfully physical, Dreamcrusher is the solo musical endeavour of multidisciplinary artist Luwayne Glass- hailing from Wichita, Kansas. Formed in 2003, reveling in the aughts of myspace, tumblr, soundcloud and other social media sites, Dreamcrusher began as a project of self-discovery and self-release while contained in a queer, gender non-binary (they/them pronouns, not he/him or she/her), black body in America’s bible belt. Creating over thirty releases, splits, extended plays and singles all before 2014, without ever releasing a full-length album, each project shows a very individual growth while sitting in many scenes that often don’t lend
themselves to explicit artistic morphing. The Dreamcrusher project and their releases have become increasingly more personal,
confrontational, concise and challenging. After migrating from Kansas to New York City, their success hit new heights diving headfirst into the American live DIY scene. Dreamcrushercontinues to alter the overwhelmingly rigid aesthetic of ‘noise’ and underground scenes by expanding the meaning of ‘genre’, and in many ways completely distorting ‘genre’ to form to them rather than the reverse. They choose not to underestimate the intelligence of their audience by challenging them at every sea change.”

Alex Morris
Writer, Producer, Composer Alex Morris started in music working with Youth (Killing Joke) releasing on Dragonfly Records, and on Big Life (the Orb) with Youth and Guy Pratt (Pink Floyd) as Sensation Corporation. Alex went on to sign with BMG and Universal Music  where he released with Robert Owens (Fingers Inc), remixed The Rapture (Vertigo records), and produced The Laurel Collective for (Domino Records).

7:00pm: Fred Moten’s Post-Notes

Fred Moten is Professor in the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts. He teaches courses and conducts research in black studies, performance studies, poetics and critical theory. He is the author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, Hughson’s Tavern, The Feel Trio, The Little Edges, The Service Porch, and All that Beauty among others. Moten has served on the editorial boards of Callaloo, Discourse, American Quarterly and Social Text; as a member of the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California, Irvine; on the board of directors of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, City University of New York; and on the advisory board of Issues in Critical Investigation, Vanderbilt University.  He holds an A.B. from Harvard and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. https://tisch.nyu.edu/about/directory/performance-studies/fred-moten

7:10pm: Elegy (Streaming Music Show)

• Kwami Coleman/ Jamar Roberts
  “In Memory” (audio visual)

• Debit “The Fifth Night”
  (audio)

• Dreamcrusher “Wanderer”
  (audio visual)
  Artist: Dreamcrusher
  Album: Another Country
  Release date: June 2020
  Label: Purple Tape Pedigree (PTP)
  Video: Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”

• BL Shirelle/ Leila Adu “The 2100”
  (audio)
  Radiophonic collaboration for the Network for New Music, Philadelphia

• TYGAPAW “who cant hear must feel”
  (audio visual)
  (TYGAPAW ICA live)

• Bon “Flora”
  (audio visual)
  Album: Pantheon (Visual Album)

Click here for Elegy Streaming Music Show Schedule & Artist Bios

7:40pm Symposium Discussions

7:40pm-8:30pm: Sharing Knowledge: Music Press & Writing

Moderated by Delia Beatriz
Delia Beatriz is an electronic music producer, performer and DJ with a Masters degree in Music technology from NYU. Her thesis research involved MIR and an archeological archive of Mayan wind instruments from the Late Classical Period. She got her B.A. from Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Latin American Studies. Her bachelor’s thesis project The Incunables investigated the role of the book & the printing press as a colonial technology in Mexico. Her debut LP Animus was released in 2018, receiving critical acclaim from a wide range of international media. It was ranked 14th in Fact Mag’s Best 50 Albums of the year and # 1 in Noisey Español’s Best Latin American Electronic Albums of 2018. That year, Vice’s Noisey Español also placed her as the top “20 Hispanic artists to keep in the radar of 2018”. In 2019, her third release System was ranked best music by Fact Mag, Resident Advisor and Pitchfork.

Yerosha Windrich: Yerosha Windrich is a composer, producer/songwriter based in East London signed to Warp Publishing and one half of music production duo Bon. They have contributed to projects on Warp Records, producing alongside Jam City and SOPHIE, Angel Ho’s projects on Hyperdub Records as well as having releases with Alxndr London and Dadras (Uno NYC). Their own label Spatial Awareness has released previous collaborations with Mykki Blanco as well as their own project 33:33 with more to come in 2021. During the first lockdown Bon were inspired to create a modern classical ambient visual album Pantheon – ‘A Ritual to the Goddesses’ with collaborations from Maxwell Sterling, Lucinda Chua, and Laraaji due spring/summer 2021. The images glitch between altered perceptions and the internal worlds all around us. Half remembered clips from a fragmented timeline – colliding with the brains desire to ‘make sense’ of things’. Yerosha has also worked as a journalist interviewing a variety of personnel in the music industry, from Grammy award winning mix engineer Matt Lawrence, as well as artists and musicians such as Jess Glynne, Adam Duritz and Queen Cora.

Jason King is the Chair of NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. He is a musician, DJ, performer, producer, songwriter, scholar, curator, journalist and the author of The Michael Jackson Treasures, a Barnes and Noble exclusive biography. He is a widely published scholar, writing on the cultural politics of artists like Beyonce, Drake, Roberta Flack and Luther Vandross. He has hosted and produced radio programs and podcasts for platforms like NPR Music and CNN featuring musicians like Dua Lipa, Alicia Keys, and Miguel. Jason is a regular contributor to publications like Pitchfork, Slate, Los Angeles Times, Spin, NPR Music, Red Bull Music Academy, and he has been an expert witness in legal cases for Drake, Katy Perry, JAY Z, Timbaland, Lady Gaga, and Madonna.

Isabelia Herrera (Pitchfork): Born and raised in Chicago to Dominican parents, Isabelia Herrera is a critic based in Brooklyn. She writes about popular music and Caribbean identity, with a special focus on identity formation, diasporic belonging, and femme aesthetics. Isabelia holds a bachelor’s degree from Barnard College and a master’s degree from NYU in Latin American & Caribbean Studies. In January 2017, she was named on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in Media list. Isabelia is currently a Contributing Editor for Pitchfork and a curator for Warm Up, MoMA PS1’s outdoor summer music series. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, GQ, Playboy, The FADER, Rolling Stone, and more.

Andrew Mason (Wax Poetics): Andrew Mason is the Editor and a founding member of Wax Poetics magazine, a music publication dedicated to hip-hop, jazz, and soul, started in 2001. In addition to editing and authoring many pieces for Wax Poetics and other publications, he has had a long-running career as a DJ and producer under the name Monk-One, and runs the Names You Can Trust record label. A dedicated advocate of criminal justice reform, he spent three years working in correctional facilities as an ESOL instructor.

Amirtha Kidambi: Amirtha Kidambi is invested in the creation and performance of subversive music, from free improvisation and avant-jazz, to experimental bands and new music. She is a composer, vocalist, educator, activist and organizer, informed by anti-racism, decolonization and anti-capitalism. As a bandleader, she is the creative force behind Elder Ones and has received critical praise from the New York Times, Pitchfork, Downbeat and WIRE magazine. Kidambi topped the categories of “Rising Star Vocalist”, “Rising Star Composer” and “Rising Star Jazz Group” in the Downbeat Critics Poll for 2019. She is active in an improvising duo with electronic musician Lea Bertucci, in a kinetic interaction with reel-to-reel tape machine two albums on Astral Spirits. Kidambi is a key collaborator in Mary Halvorson’s latest sextet Code Girl, the duo Angels & Demons with Darius Jones and in various collaborations with William Parker and has worked with Muhal Richard Abrams and Robert Ashley. She has performed and presented her music in the U.S. and internationally at Carnegie Hall, The Kitchen, Whitney Museum, EMPAC, Berlin Jazzfest and various DIY/punk spaces. Kidambi has received grants from the Jerome Foundation, Asian Cultural Council and artist residencies at EMPAC, Roulette, Pioneer Works and Bucareli 69 in Mexico City. She has taught and been engaged in decolonizing curriculum at CUNY Brooklyn College and The New School.

8.40-9:30pm: Being Heard: Venues & Funding 

Moderated by Leila Adu-Gilmore

Vijay Iyer: Composer-pianist Vijay Iyer was described by The New York Times as a “social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway.” His twenty-fourth album, Uneasy, is out April 9 on ECM Records. He has collaborated with Amiri Baraka, Wadada Leo Smith, Carrie Mae Weems, Teju Cole, Tyshawn Sorey, Pamela Z, Henry Threadgill, Jennifer Koh, Matt Haimovitz, Imani Winds, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and many others. He received a MacArthur Fellowship, a U.S. Artists Fellowship, the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, and the Alpert Award in the Arts, and was the four-time Jazz Artist of the Year in the DownBeat International Critics’ Poll. He teaches at Harvard University in the Department of Music and the Department of African and African American Studies.   

Vanessa Reed (New Music USA): Vanessa Reed is President and CEO of New Music USA , a national non-profit which supports the creation, performance and appreciation across the US. She took up this role in August 2019 following a decade as CEO of PRS Foundation (UK) which she transformed into a leader of major artist development programs. Vanessa founded the international Keychange program for gender equity in music and has received multiple awards for her work including from The Ivors Academy, Classical Next, SIM Sao Paolo and the BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour Power List 2018which named her 3rd most influential woman in the music industry after Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. @iamvanessareed

Lucia Anaya (Derre-Tida)
Since 2010 DERRETIDA encompasses collective work in music with several approaches such as: music curation, management and music services for Artists. Based in Mexico City, since 2010 we’ve worked and discovered the most forward thinking music projects to introduce in Mexico and Latin America. Currently she is working full time at Music Battles, a new music distribution platform that works through gaming and social. She is also managing artists like Mare Advertencia feminist and Zapotec rapper, music producer Tayhana and Ali Gua Gua from Las Ultrasonicas and Kumbia Queers. 

BL Shirelle (Die Jim Crow Records): Philadelphia native BL Shirelle is an accomplished musician, producer and songwriter. In addition, Shirelle serves as Deputy Director of Die Jim Crow Records, the first non-profit record label in United States history for currently and formerly incarcerated artists. After serving ten years in prison herself, Shirelle is dedicated to social change and activism through her music and work with DJC Records. Shirelle has been a guest speaker at colleges across America, educating youth on mass incarceration. She has spoken at Augustana University, Stockton University, Goucher University, and Susquehanna University. She also continues to work with artists still in prison to produce and share their music on high-quality platforms. Her debut solo album ASSATA TROI will be released with DJC Records June 19th, 2020. Shirelle’s new wave, yet classic sound is a sonic exploration of Hip Hop, Rock, Blues, and R&B, with incredible lyricism coupled with complex instrumentation. Shirelle and her work have been featured in Rolling Stone, PBS/Whyy, The Indypendent, Flowertown, Ms. Magazine, Bushwick Daily, Aesthetics For Birds, and We Want The Airwaves among others.

9:30 AfterParty (DJ Set)

Hosted by Kevin Gotkin / VJ Yo-yo Lin

TYGAPAW