bio

Clifton Ingram is a DC/Boston-based composer​ and ​performer (Rested Field, guitar/electronics), whose music aims to approach and retreat from itself along fault lines of musical and extra-musical. Clifton’s music revolves around the delicate obstinance of hidden objects, aberrant mutations and self-devouring ornamentation, and obsessive canon-like structures — the masked expression of a so-called unreliable narrator.

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). Clifton’s 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). Clifton 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.

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 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 the world-blocking of an unreliable narrator, as an aversion to literalization that provides the reader with enough space to distinguish self from text.

I’m interested in music as a negotiating of the mapping of private forces onto and into public space, and vice versa. With a desire for the experience to be irreducible, I design my work to intertwine itself around its own conditions, especially social ones between performers as well as composer and performer(s). I am also invested in designing performance-installations in which details of the audience’s presence (passive participation) are observed by performers as a means to encourage interaction/engagement, as well as to amplify a sense of surveillance and responsibility.

More drawn to historiography than history, when composing I am preoccupied with processes of imbrication and excessive layering as experienced over time — in a literary sense, how modes of reading and writing (density and diffusion) are used to conceal and reveal lines of power (rhetoric). In this way, I approach score craft in a prescriptive way, with the aim of underlining a gap between musical image and somatic experience. I desire to make scores (unrealized music) that knowingly occupy a middle ground — the difference between mapping (exploration) and tracing (replication) — scores that lay in wait for performers like found objects.

A stressed infolding, from one medium to the next — music as translation from text to sound, a beauty afforded only by a kind of distance or proximity.