Thursday December 7 * 7pm * TICKETS

Thomas Stanley (Bushmeat) lives a short distance from the Chesapeake Bay where he is co-parenting two school-aged sons. As an artist, author, and activist deeply committed to audio culture in the service of personal growth and noetic (r)evolution, Stanley has performed and curated musical sound for most of his adult life. From 2008-2022, Dr. Stanley hosted Bushmeat's Jam Session, a weekly FM music show, arguably the world’s first and only blackadelic radio program. Stanley is the author of The Execution of Sun Ra (Wasteland Press, 2014), a critical response to the cosmic prognostications of the late jazz iconoclast. Dr. Stanley has spent three decades exploring the ramifications of Alter Destiny, Sun Ra’s unique construct for an authentically survivable Future. He has written and lectured extensively on emergent musical cultures and their connection to struggles for social justice and psychosocial liberation. He is co-author of George Clinton and P-Funk: An Oral History (1998). His doctoral work at the University of Maryland (2009) examined Butch Morris’s Conduction method as an extended meta-instrument offering unique opportunities for musical pedagogy and ensemble consciousness. Dr. Stanley is currently an associate professor of Sound Art, Sound Studies, and Consciousness at George Mason University.

The Caribbean - "You’re forced to occupy their barren pop architecture…. You don’t understand it, but, though you might not admit it, you do hope it will understand you. Or at least not destroy you…. You feel like there’s a real live pop song in there somewhere, but it seems that most of the essential moments have been recorded over with silence or incidental noise. There’s obviously still a skeleton to hang a song on, but you start to wonder whether you’re the one who was supposed to bring it…. These songs are for real, but they’re not about disappointment, or complacency, or shame, or attention, or glee. They’re about themselves. Without ironic distance, such oblique experiments can seem exhausting. But only on the giving end: it takes a humble and prolific writer, some cunning musicians, a very patient engineer, and an overarching commitment to self-censorship to pull an album like this off." -Pitchfork