Thomas Stanley

Dr. Thomas Stanley 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.

Specialist Areas:

• Aesthetics
• Critical Theory in Visual Arts
• Sound Art