CBTP Spotlight: Jake Meginsky
Composer/performer/curator/filmmaker Jake Meginsky, a New Music USA award winner and Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow, has collaborated and performed with an extraordinary range of musicians including Milford Graves, Alvin Lucier, Joan La Barbara, Kim Gordon, Vic Rawlings, Greg Kelley, Bhob Rainey, Joe McPhee, Thurston Moore, William Parker, Daniel Carter, Paul Flaherty, Arthur Brooks, and Bill Nace. His work has been presented widely and internationally, including IFFR Rotterdam, SXSW Film Festival, CPH:DOX and Click Festival (Copenhagen, Denmark), Standards (Milan, Italy), the Duolun Museum of Modern Art (Shanghai), Beijing Today Museum and Jinse Gallery (Chongqing, China); throughout New York City at The Kitchen, New York Live Arts, Joyce SoHo, Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project, Symphony Space, Judson Church, La MaMa, The Stone, The Flea Theater, Vision Festival, Roulette, Museum of Arts and Design, Center for Performance Research, Improvised and Otherwise Festival, and Free 103; in Boston, MA at Opensound Festival, The MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology, YDLMER Festival, Mobius Gallery, Le Laboratoire and the New England Complex Systems Institute; The Neurosciences Institute (La Jolla, CA), Context Art Fair (NYC & Miami), Experimental Music and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) and the Arts Center for the Capital Region (Troy, NY), The Fisher Center for the Performing Arts (Bard College, NY), DOT AIR Festival (Providence, RI), University of Iowa, Flynn Center for the Performing Arts (Burlington, VT), Work in the Performance of Improvisation Festival and USDAN Gallery (Bennington College, VT), A.P.E. Gallery, Academy of Music, and the Sound and Space Festival (Northampton, MA), Pioneer Arts Center (Easthampton, MA), and the Mead Museum of Art (Amherst, MA).
His work has been presented widely and internationally, including IFFR Rotterdam, SXSW Film Festival, CPH:DOX and Click Festival (Copenhagen, Denmark), Standards (Milan, Italy), the Duolun Museum of Modern Art (Shanghai), Beijing Today Museum and Jinse Gallery (Chongqing, China); throughout New York City at The Kitchen, New York Live Arts, Joyce SoHo, Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project, Symphony Space, Judson Church, La MaMa, The Stone, The Flea Theater, Vision Festival, Roulette, Museum of Arts and Design, Center for Performance Research, Improvised and Otherwise Festival, and Free 103; in Boston, MA at Opensound Festival, The MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology, YDLMER Festival, Mobius Gallery, Le Laboratoire and the New England Complex Systems Institute; The Neurosciences Institute (La Jolla, CA), Context Art Fair (NYC & Miami), Experimental Music and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) and the Arts Center for the Capital Region (Troy, NY), The Fisher Center for the Performing Arts (Bard College, NY), DOT AIR Festival (Providence, RI), University of Iowa, Flynn Center for the Performing Arts (Burlington, VT), Work in the Performance of Improvisation Festival and USDAN Gallery (Bennington College, VT), A.P.E. Gallery, Academy of Music, and the Sound and Space Festival (Northampton, MA), Pioneer Arts Center (Easthampton, MA), and the Mead Museum of Art (Amherst, MA). His work has also been supported by several organizations, including the Jerome Robbins Foundation, Bumper Foundation, National Performance Network, Vermont Arts Council, Massachusetts Cultural Council, Northampton Arts Council, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Meginsky’s work has been reviewed extensively in leading contemporary music, art and culture publications worldwide. Huck Magazine (London) describes Meginsky’s work as “constantly transgressing the boundaries between acoustic and electronic, analog and digital.” David Keenan called Meginsky’s 2014 solo record, L’appel Du Vide, “a hallucinatory electro percussion masterpiece” and in the WIRE Magazine review of the LP, Nick Cain writes, “the album uses little more than a couple of sounds, extracting often head-spinning complexity from a minimum of means.” Art In America Magazine says, “Meginsky’s digital concrète takes percussion to outer extremes.” Secret Thirteen (Berlin) calls Meginsky “one of the most adventurous minds in experimental music today.” L’appel Du Vide was included in the WIRE’s 2014 Top 10 Records of the Year for Outer Limits. Meginsky's Seven Psychotropic Sinewave Palindromes was listed in FACT Magazine’s Top 50 Albums of 2016.
Meginsky frequently collaborates with choreographers and has worked with Cori Olinghouse, Paul Matteson, Jennifer Nugent, Susan Sgorbati, Katie Martin, Wendy Woodson and Nora Chipaumire. He has a longstanding artistic relationship with Gwen Welliver. Welliver and Meginsky will premiere a new evening-length work at Gibney Dance Center (NYC) in 2018. Meginsky is the recipient of a New Music USA Live Music for Dance award for his original composition for Welliver’s Beasts and Plots, which premiered at New York Live Arts in 2013 and will be restaged at the Guggenheim in 2018.
His recordings can be found on NNA (Burlington, VT), Mantile (London), Second Sleep (Milan), Feeding Tube Records (Northampton, MA), Rel Records (Providence, RI), Open Mouth Records (Northampton, MA), Wooden Finger Records (Belgium), Ultra Eczema Records (Belgium), and Ecstatic Peace Records (London/Northampton). He recently remixed Body/Head’s (Kim Gordon & Bill Nace) “Last Mistress” for Matador Records (NYC). His latest solo LP, Gates and Variations, was released on Open Mouth Records in October, 2017.