Greg Fox

Rhythmic Excavation 

“Listener and player; a transformative rather than performative force.”

Greg Fox is a multi-instrumentalist, interdisciplinary artist, and teacher born and based in New York City. A versatile and prolific creative, he moves through musical stages as both listener and player, a transformative rather than performative force.

As a drummer with hundreds of credits on obscure records, Fox is well-known in the lesser-known. He has toured, recorded, and released numerous records with Liturgy, Guardian Alien, ZS, Ex Eye, Skeletons, Teeth Mountain, Dan Deacon, Colin Stetson, Ben Frost, and many more. His reputation is that of the elevated beast, the one who plays fast and loud and expresses himself at the extremes and in the extremes. That’s not wrong. Yet Fox is also a slow theorist, a musician aware of those who came before him, and a teacher of drumming, with students all over the world.

Exorcise. Ex Eye (Colin Stetson, Toby Summerfield, Shahzad Ismaily, Greg Fox). CTM 2017 Festival. © CTM / Stefanie Kulisch 2017

Any sound, repeated quickly, becomes a sustained tone. Any sound, slowed down, starts to beat. Music is the line between these two points, the wave that lives between the terminal ends of voice and drum. That’s where you’ll find Greg Fox. Music journalist Sasha Frere-Jones wrote about him in 2020: “He remains a student himself, open-minded, honest, and willing. He has worked with drummers like Thurman Barker (Mighty Joe Young, Marvin Gaye, Cecil Taylor), Guy Licata (Drummers Collective, Jojo Mayer, Jim Chapin), Marvin “Bugalu” Smith (James Brown, Sun Ra, Chet Baker, Charles Mingus), and Milford Graves . Fox has a practice that goes beyond drumming—he is a certified professional coach who focuses on transformational life changes. He helps people find their rhythms, in behavior, mind, and spirit.

The Gradual Progression, 2017. Album cover by Tauba Auerbach

Contact, 2020. Album cover by Emma Kohlmann

As a mentor, Fox is looking for candidates who are interested in using rhythm to explore time and space, whether in music or art practice. “This invitation is not only being offered to musicians and drummers, I’m open to all types of creative practices, whatever you might be doing.”

gregfox.space

Watch Greg Fox’s video statement:

Nominees

Alex Grübler

Chrysalis

German musician Alex Grübler, aka Baal & Mortimer, proposes a transdisciplinary oratorio that seeks to highlight notions around release, resilience, and alchemical modes of art-making. It evokes a speculative hypothesis for how Saturn, the planet linked to melancholy, received its rings, stating that a former moon of Saturn named Chrysalis was torn into pieces 160 million years ago, forming the rings in the distinct steep axial tilt. The oratorio centers on drawn diagrams that will form the metric foundation of the piece, sewn onto textile as scores. A Berlin-based ensemble will participate in the textile- and costume-making and in printing the libretto. The sonic vocabulary will include a vocal ensemble, drums, electronics, and traditional instruments including the psaltery, lute, and odrecillo—a small medieval bagpipe. The piece is conceived as a process-based sonic investigation around breath, muscle, and speculation.

Carlos Gutiérrez

Infinite Warp and Weft

Carlos Gutiérrez is a composer, performer, archivist, and researcher based in La Paz, Bolivia. His work is influenced by the indigenous music of the Bolivian Highlands and extends to the creation of instruments, sound objects, public interventions, and installations in which he explores tuning systems, the spatialization of sound over long distances, aural illusions, decentralized structures, and the relationship between orality and experimental writing. His proposal entails a digital high-resolution matrix score. It’s conceived as an expandable and collapsible notational space that can generate elastic music structures with multiple coexisting time layers, rhythm configurations, and combinatorial possibilities. By applying this flexibility to time and pitch parameters, rhythms can be turned into continuous tones. Add to these movements the possibility of generating several interdependent rhythmic levels, and you’ll obtain a multilayered grid, a complex weaving of time.

Whitney Johnson

FIAT

Chicago-based artist Whitney Johnson, aka Matchess, works in sound composition, performance, and installation with viola, organ, voice, sine waves, electronics, and tape.
Johnson proposes a durational performance and installation for solo viola and multi-channel sound, which strives to explore the mysterious relationship between sound, bodies, and the human psyche. Inspired by the hermetic philosopher Robert Fludd's text Utriusque Cosmi Maioris Scilicet et Minoris Metaphysica from 1617, FIAT will engage with the alternative healing practice of brainwave entrainment. While the hours-long viola performance oscillates in just intonation, the sinewave installation constructs four distinct zones of binaural beating that correspond to energetic categories of brain activity. Visitors are encouraged to come and go, circulating freely in the sonic sensorium while considering their own skepticism and belief in the effects of sound on bodies and minds.