bio

Clifton Ingram (he/they) is a DC/Boston-based composer​ and ​performer (Rested Field, guitar/electronics), whose music thrives on hiddenness. His writing aims to approach and retreat from itself along the fault lines of the musical and extra-musical, revolving around the delicate obstinance of obscured objects, the generation of aberrant mutations and self-devouring ornamentation, as well as obsessive canon-like structures.

Clifton has written for pianist-composer Andy Costello, pianist-composer Marti Epstein, clarinetist Chuck Furlong, cellist Byron Hogan, violinist Michelle Lie, cellist Stephen Marotto, vocalist Joshua Scheid, percussionist Matt Sharrock, Castle of our Skins, Del Sol String Quartet, Equilibrium Ensemble, Joint Venture Percussion Duo, Ludovico Ensemble,​ Music of Reality, Rested Field, Strange Trace, Tesla Quartet, and Transient Canvas. Clifton has been a fellow at the Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice (2013) and was recently the Julius Eastman Fellow at Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music (2020).

Clifton’s music has been released by Experimental Sound Studio (OSCILLATIONS 2016 Mixtape | Chicago IL), Dismissive Records (Four Instrumentals, 2015 | Denver CO), and New Focus Records (Right now, in a second, 2020 | New York, NY). His contributions can also be heard on Type Records (Khonnor, Handwriting | 2004) and Sundmagi (Who Cares How Long You Sink, Folk Forms Evaporate Big Sky | 2007). He has also contributed sound for film, including Paracusia (dir. Christopher Dreisbach, 2011). Clifton was a curator/presenter for Chicago experimental venue Brown Rice (2009-2012) and was a founding member of the Chicago Scratch Orchestra (2010). Clifton is also a freelance music writer. Lately, he has been enjoying hosting an open mic at Hellbender Brewery in Washington DC.

artist statement

Distracted, preoccupied, compulsively turning in on itself, visceral yet fragile — I think of my music as waking-dream, as a kind of atmosphere or landscape with an oneiric logic — dissipating when approached, eluding when questioned — a sonic weight that comes from a sense of hiddenness.

I’m interested in the feedback between the lure of haunted spaces (presence of history) and the indifference of hostile architecture. I think of this as akin to world-blocking (perhaps by an unreliable narrator of sorts) as opposed to world-building: an aesthetic aversion to literalization that provides the reader with enough space to distinguish self from text.

More recently, I have become invested in designing performance-installations for particular spaces or pieces of visual art. In these works, details of the audience’s presence are observed by performers as a means to encourage interaction/engagement, as well as to amplify a sense of surveillance and responsibility.

I approach score craft in a prescriptive way, underlining a gap between musical image and the somatic experience of sound-making. I want to make scores (unrealized music) that knowingly occupy a middle ground, exploring the difference between mapping (exploration) and tracing (replication). I think a lot about how modes of reading and writing are used to conceal and reveal lines of power. In this way, I create scores that lay in wait for performers to exploit a stressed infolding from one medium to the next — that is, music as translation from text to sound, a beauty afforded only by a kind of distance or proximity.