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 noetic (r)evolution. As performer, curator, and broadcaster, Bushmeat Sound has been an integral part of a visionary music scene straddling the Baltimore-Washington corridor.
Dr. Stanley is assistant professor in George Mason University’s School of Art where he teaches classes in sound art, sound studies, and critical theory. He began his teaching career in 2004 with a course exploring hip hop as a holistic cultural complex. Stanley theorizes an affective dimension to our experience of historical flow that can be accessed and activated by audio culture, including music. In the musical practice of the Black avant garde, Stanley has found ways of engaging historical epochs that we have yet to fully enter. As a public intellectual/artist activist working in the wilderness of North America, Stanley’s lectures and performances demonstrate our ability to exceed and escape historical narratives authored by capitalism and white supremacy.
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LECTURES and WORKSHOPS
Dr. Stanley's work erupts at the intersection of sound art, improvisational practice, noise-music, and AfroFuturism. In April, 2022 he presented “Epochs, Ages, and Yugas: Macro-Temporal Texture and the Expiration of White Power” at the Prime Meridian Unconference hosted by Black Quantum Futurism at The New School. Exactly a year later, he reprised this framework for examining the subjective experience of historical flow as a part of Archival Silent Noise at Towson University.
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 use of the term conveys the value of undomesticated resources that exist 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 (2008-2022) was called Bushmeat Jams.
MIND OVER MATTER MUSIC OVER MIND (MOM²)
MIND OVER MATTER MUSIC OVER MIND or MOM² began blowing minds with the support of the David C. Driskell Center in 2004. Originally composed of broadcasting legend Bobby Hill, Chris Downing, and Bushmeat, the trio’s first sets were performances of improvised long-form soundscapes to replace the soundtracks of experimental films. In 2008 Downing was replaced by bassist and multi-instrumentalist Luke Stewart. In 2019 Hill left the group for personal reasons, leaving MOM² as a duo that takes no prisoners and leaves no mansion ungnawed. (This project has been in stasis for a while, but you never know.)
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
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~~ Byron Hawk in
Resounding the Rhetorical
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