About

Byron Westbrook is an artist and composer based in Los Angeles, CA. He works with both music performance and installation formats, with a focus on architectural qualities of sound and exploring the potential for audio to generate visual and social spaces. Westbrook’s work has been shown at the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), ICA London, Cafe OTO (London), MoMA PS1, Fridman Gallery, Abrons Arts Center, Pioneer Works, ISSUE Project Room, Experimental Intermedia Foundation (NY), MaerzMusik Festival (Berlin), Rewire Festival (Den Haag), MOCA Los Angeles, Human Resources (Los Angeles), the LAB (San Francisco), Disjecta (Portland, OR), Experimental Sound Studios (Chicago), Instants Chavires Art Space (Paris), Fylkingen (Stockholm), O’ (Milan), Suoni Popolo, Akousma Festival (Montreal) among others. He has released recordings with Important Records, Ash International/Touch, Hands in the Dark, Umor Rex, Root Strata and Psychic Troubles. His debut LP Precipice was named by Pitchfork as #4 best experimental release of 2015.

Westbrook holds an MFA from Bard College, where he studied with Laetitia Sonami, Marcus Schmickler, David Behrman, Matana Roberts and Marina Rosenfeld. Previously a long-time resident of New York City, he worked closely with Phill Niblock from 2005-2014 to produce, record and archive concerts at Experimental Intermedia Foundation. Westbrook has received awards from the Jerome Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts and New York State Council on the Arts. He has been in residence at Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Banff Centre for the Arts, ISSUE Project Room, Clocktower Gallery, Diapason Gallery, Wassaic Project and EMS Stockholm and has been visiting faculty with Pratt Institute’s Graduate Fine Arts Dept, Columbia University Sound Arts MFA, and International Center of Photography’s New Media Narratives program. He currently hosts the monthly radio program Chromatic Fields on dublab radio, which explores overlap in ideas between music making and visual arts practice.

“..Byron Westbrook’s Shelter Press debut is his most mesmerizing album to date – a set of electroacoustic pieces that advances the rough blueprints laid out by legends like Maryanne Amacher, Bernard Parmegiani and Luc Ferrari.. Every time we’ve played it, we’ve heard something completely different, and that’s not an easy task – if you’re at all interested in electroacoustic music, ‘Translucents’ is just about as good as it gets.”
–Boomkat review of Translucents

“Over the past few years, Byron Westbrook has been one of the most interesting and distinctive composers in any genre.”
-Marc Masters, Bandcamp Daily

“In the crowded field of drone-based ambient composers, Los Angeles’s Byron Westbrook stands as one of the most rigorous and interesting.”
-Dave Segal, The Stranger

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