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 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, Ambient Church, Experimental Intermedia Foundation (NY), MaerzMusik Festival (Berlin), Rewire Festival (Den Haag), Desert Daze Festival, 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 recorded releases with Important Records, Ash International/Touch, Hands in the Dark, Umor Rex, Root Strata and Psychic Troubles and 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 Marcus Schmickler, David Behrman and Marina Rosenfeld. He also worked closely with Phill Niblock to produce, record and archive concerts at Experimental Intermedia Foundation in NYC from 2005-2014. Westbrook 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 recently 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.

“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

“Byron Westbrook produced some incredibly refined electronic music in recent years, summoning spellbinding alien textures into abstract rhythms and clouds of trippy synaesthetic colour….The result is, for want of a better term, fucking glorious.”
– Tristan Bath, The Quietus

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