grant cutler
Grant Cutler (b. 1983) is an American composer and artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Raised in rural South Dakota, Cutler’s early experiences shaped an inclination to invent worlds and create from scratch. From the mid 1990’s through early 2000’s, a number of small South Dakota communities were home to a surprisingly vibrant and energetic DIY underground punk scene. During this small window of vigorous counter culture activity, Cutler cultivated his iconoclastic penchant and an affection for subverting the standard.
Over the last decade, Cutler has composed award-winning modern-classical and experimental work for installations, ensembles, vocalists, stage performances, and films. He has been honored as a guest lecturer, and selected as artist-in-residence by numerous institutions and foundations around the country.
Cutler’s recent work takes form in multichannel sound installations, experimental composition, generative websites, and music for film, and explores the profound effects of engaging in deep silence, the entropic nature of memory, and the probability of an intermittent consciousness.
PRESS:
"A melancholy undercurrent runs throughout Self Portrait, an indirect expression on Cutler's part of the sadness that attends experience as it slips from the present into the past, thereafter retrievable only through memory and imperfectly at that. Music is fundamentally about time, and Cutler's is no exception; in his case, however, time is even more integral to the project when it involves musicians responding in the present to themselves in the past, and ultimately seeing those responses turn into the past, too, when Cutler shapes them into new forms." [FULL ARTICLE]
"Self Portrait by Brooklyn composer and multimedia artist, Grant Cutler, is composed of artists improvising to recordings of themselves, the results heavy with loops, delays and textures. innova’s press release dresses this up as ‘an act of memoir, an active reimagining of the self’. I think that’s stretching a point: if that’s what these tracks are, they’re cosy, untroubled imaginings that rarely stray far from their original path. (Not what I see in my mirror, certainly.) Nevertheless, set that aside and Cutler and his musicians have made an attractive, not always predictable work of instrumental/electronic ambiance. Requires a sweet tooth, but I have one." - Tim Rutherford-Johnson
Music, memory & machinery all come together in the work of Brooklyn-based sound artist, keyboard player, & composer Grant Cutler. Cutler recorded artists improvising to delayed recordings of themselves, a kind of soundscape where memory and experience are blended together in an active reimagining of the self. LISTEN HERE