| Thomas Stanley |
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Artist Views: 10994
City of Birth: Cincinnati
Current Residence: Mechanicsville
Played With: Seif Abdoun, Marshall Allen, Jean-Paul Bourelly, Joe Bowie, Alex Braden, Vattel Cherry, Erica Fallin, William Hooker, Susie Ibarra, Elliott Levin, Magpie, James McKinney, Shu-ni Tsou, Soul Defender Posse, Leo Svirsky, and Tom Wisner.
Instruments: electrons and voice
Other Activities: 1) Volunteer music programmer on wpfw, 89.3 fm; 2) Volunteer curator for Transparent Productions; 3) Crafter of sonic Installations; and 4)Contributing editor to Signal to Noise magazine.
Website: www.musicovermind.org
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| Thomas Stanley (a/k/a Bushmeat) is an assistant professor of Sound Art and Consciousness in the School of Art at George Mason University. He received his MA in Ethnomusicology at the University of Maryland, College Park where he completed his doctoral dissertation on Butch Morris and the Art of Conduction. He is co-author of George Clinton and P-Funk: An Oral History and has written and lectured extensively on radical forms of Black musical expression as arenas for an underground discourse on the same philosophical questions that are the preoccupation of cosmologists and mind-body theorists. As an artist, Stanley has attempted to exploit the capacity of sound and music for anchoring, framing, and energizing our subjective experience of macrotemporal texture (history). Currently, within the trio Mind Over Matter Music Over Mind, he constructs and deploys sampled and electronically generated music against a backdrop of various visual stimuli. This most recent phase of Stanley’s sonic-craft evolved out of the performance troupe Noumenal Lingam, a multi-genre ensemble organized in 1993 to provide a musical and dramatic space for his librettos. Noumenal Lingam’s illustrious crusade is highlighted by the production of “Powerball: When the Blind Stumble it is Not for Lack of Light” – a natural history of human error and the electronic composition “Barking Dog, Laughing Squirrel”, used as a closing theme for “Kingpin” a crime drama televised by NBC/Bravo. Thomas Stanley is a founding member of Transparent Productions, a non-profit volunteer collective that has produced improvised jazz and experimental music concerts throughout the DC metro area since 1997. He is a regular contributor to Signal to Noise magazine and is included in the books Live Movies, Erotique Noire, and Beyond the Frontier: African-American Poetry for the Twenty-First Century. He is also featured as a source in Stranger, a documentary film about P-Funk and Talking Heads keyboardist Bernie Worrell and authored the liner notes for the 35th anniversary recording of Kahil El'Zabar's Ethnic Heritage Ensemble. |
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My principle ensemble is the trio Mind Over Matter Music Over Mind which also features Bobby Hill on record players and Luke Stewart on sampler and bass.
Our medium is sound. Sound generated. Sound borrowed and relocated. With this sound we create places and we create events. Some of these events are music. Many are not. To the extent that the places and events we create are extraordinary and the manner in which the events are allowed to occur within these places is extraordinary, our work product is extraordinary. This is the critical dimension of MOMMOM. The semantic dimension of the project is a bit more nuanced. First point of order: Our work is not a text. By intention, the sounds that we have generated, collected and brought into conjunction are not to be taken as a socially conditioned statement to be decoded or read, nor as an instance of personal or cultural expression to be felt. MOMMOM seeks to change minds not fiddle around with their contents. The political dimension of MOM² is rooted in the distinction between these two approaches. Art can do many things. It need not be limited to making additions to the clutter of facts, beliefs, ideological warrants, and emotional tropes within which our attention flutters like debris in a strong wind. MIND OVER MATTER MUSIC OVER MIND is directed at the function of consciousness, not at its contents. For the mind, morphology is physiology and MOM² seeks to redraw the boundaries of mental health. This radical re-normalization of mental possibility is inherently political, challenging as it must, the most basic premises of social organization and order.
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