biography
Jack Herscowitz is a Los Angeles based composer, improviser, and sound artist whose work enacts presence, full-body engagement, and relationality within our isolating and disembodying zeitgeist of obsessive digital attention. To reclaim our affect and attention, he employs diverse means: horror stories of haunted tech, commitment to unadorned musical materials to reveal their complexities, interruptions which peel back the curtains on cultural practices of art making, noise as an activation of the full body, and relational non-hierarchical webs of listening. Jack engages and often hybridizes multiple musical and non-musical practices including instrumental composition, dramaturgy, electroacoustic improvisation, installation, landscape film, object performance, sampling, text, and communal sound making. Ultimately, his art is a site for action in which new social possibilities beyond extractive technology and economics cannot only be imagined, but realized.
His instrumental music has been performed in North America and Europe by artists including the Arditti Quartet, Del Sol String Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, Syntagma Piano Duo, Atlantic Reed Consort, Hypercube, .abeceda Ensemble and the soloists of Talea Ensemble, Meitar Ensemble and the Locrian Chamber Players. Festivals, venues, and organizations that have presented his work include: IRCAM ManiFeste (Paris), CENART (CDMX), Barcelona Modern Festival, The Moscow Conservatory, Norges musikkhøgskole (Oslo), .abeceda Contemporary Music Festival (Bled), The Composers Conference (as a Fromm Foundation Fellow), NettNett Space (Tijuana), Neofonía Festival (Ensenada), Norcal NoiseFest (Sacramento), Hear Now Festival (Los Angeles), CNMAT (Berkeley), soundpedro (San Pedro), Villa Aurora (LA), 2220 Arts and Archives (LA), Coaxial Arts Foundation (LA), Automata Theater (LA), Beyond Baroque (LA), The Dog Star Orchestra (LA), and Riverside Church (NYC). His recorded music has been released on Drongo Tapes with an upcoming release scheduled on Harmonic Ooze Records.
Jack has held residencies at the Dorland Mountain Arts Colony (as a Barbara Fellow) and the Spencer Museum of Art (with Amorphous Ensemble) and has been supported by grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Jack performs improvised live electronics on digital instruments with groups Mystic Elevator and Castle Anthrax in addition to various solo improvisers. His solo performance practice draws from noise, glitch, vaporwave, and lo-fi electronics to re-claim the sounds of capitalism's sonic warfare. He has collaborated on multidisciplinary works with poet/novelist Julia Alvarez, filmmaker/artist Clemente Ciarrocca, installation artist Ásgerður Arnardóttir, choreographer Ashlee Dance, and choreographer-filmmaker Sam Kann.
Jack received his M.F.A. in Composition and Experimental Sound Practices at CalArts and his B.A. in Music and Environmental Studies from Middlebury College. His teachers include Michael Pisaro-Liu, Matthew Evan Taylor, Steve Lehman, Carolyn Chen, Tim Feeney, and Micaela Tobin.