Thomas Stanley (a/k/a Bushmeat Sound) is an artist, author, and activist deeply committed to audio culture in the service of personal growth and social change. As performer and curator, Bushmeat Sound has been an integral part of a visionary music scene straddling the Baltimore-Washington corridor. His audio work employs musical sound to anchor, frame, and accelerate our subjective experience of history. In 2014 he authored the Execution of Sun Ra, a critical response to the cosmological prognostications of the late jazz iconoclast. Dr. Stanley has spent three decades exploring the ramifications of Alter Destiny, Sun Ra's unique construct for a just and sustainable AfroFuture. He has written and lectured extensively on emergent musical cultures and is co-author of George Clinton and P-Funk : An Oral History (1998, Avon paperback). He hosts "Bushmeat's Jam Session," a weekly collage of radical music heard on WPFW-FM radio. His doctoral work examined Butch Morris' art of Conduction as an extended meta-instrument offering unique opportunities for musical pedagogy and ensemble consciousness. He is also featured in “Stranger”, a documentary film about seminal P-Funk and Talking Heads keyboardist Bernie Worrell.
Stanley’s Black Art is a loudly joyful noise, illuminated by Black light, the thundering gasp of serendipity in the caverns of bohemia as audio intentionality releasing frothy bubbles of anti-sovereignty, expanding microtemporalities erected as positive ghettoes of solar real estate, Blackadelic afterFutures outside of americanExceptionalism, yielding at least one tripped-out-impossibility of a timeline where no one ever dreamed america and the maroons never came down out of the hills and the Jankanu is still being danced on bloody feet that have never been enslaved and no tin-star soldier ever nullified Strange Fruit.
Dr. Stanley is assistant professor in George Mason University’s School of Art where he teaches classes in sound art, critical theory, and a course exploring hip hop as a holistic cultural complex. Stanley (as Bushmeat) is an Independent Public Intellectual/Artist Activist working in the wilderness of North America to push capitalism and white supremacy toward their logical conclusion with all deliberate haste because Black Art, Black Light, Black Sound, Black Love, and Black Lives Matter.
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LECTURES and WORKSHOPS
Stanley's work erupts at the churning intersections of sound art, noise-music, and afrofuturism, all informed by his travels through the inner and outer cosmos. Sessions with Stanley can become pointed interventions, rife with broad musical references, blackadelic dimensional shifts, and a genuine love for human beings and their evolving condition away from war and slavery -- towards some kind of collective renewal and justice.
BUSHMEAT/BUSHMEAT JAMS
Bushmeat is a term borrowed from parts of Africa where humans supplement domestic foodstuffs with wild game. While the killing of primates and other endangered species for food is highly discouraged, the name conveys the sense that Stanley is sustained by sources beyond the reach of consensus. Dr. Stanley uses Bushmeat (registered since 2018 w/USPTO) as the banner for his solo electronics. His radio show on WPFW is called Bushmeat Jams.
MIND OVER MATTER MUSIC OVER MIND (MOM²)
MIND OVER MATTER MUSIC OVER MIND or MOM² have been liberating zones of sonic sedition since 2004. Dr. Stanley is joined by bassist and multi-instrumentalist Luke Stewart for a performance product that takes no prisoners and leaves no mansion ungnawed. americanExceptionalism is the gentrification of white supremacy, a retrograde, planet-wasting ideology.
THE EXECUTION of SUN RA
Thomas Stanley has given himself the daunting task of taking Ra seriously as a critical thinker while not violating Ra's refusal to exclude paradox, play, outright contradiction, jokes puns, bon mots and loopy homemade aphorisms from the kaleidoscopic critical mix. If Stanley doesn't succeed in rationalizing Ra's arcana for academia, he's certainly made the gamest attempt yet at rhizomaticising the many-splendored knotty tangle of Mr. Mystery's soaring and sonorous metaphysics.
~~ Greg Tate, writer
Thank you for your book Thomas. It is amazing!!! I completed it on a bus in Germany. I went into it expecting it to be about Sun Ra in a more or less typical biographical format but soon discovered that it's SO much more than that. I learned an incredible amount, thought a lot, and FELT a lot when I read it. Tears on the last chapter. The feeling lingers. Above all (at least to me) what shines through is the tremendous love that went into it. Thank you for bringing it into the world!
~~ Mark Cooley, professor
~~ Byron Hawk in
Resounding the Rhetorical
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