Thomas Stanley, PhD .::. Bushmeat Sound .::. Blackadelic

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 associate 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 Black improvisation, 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.

Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother) keeps the heat on the oppressor.

Mendi Obadike brought her sound art to my students.

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.

Gullah Jack

Gullah Jack reunites 3 founding members of the 90s power project Noumenal Lingam: Christopher T. Downing has been creating in the space of sound and music for over 40 years. This Grammy Award-winning recording engineer mixed "What About the Future" and is heard on synth, turntable, EFX, and sound design. Elnathan Starnes is a Grammy-Nominated teaching artist who creates exciting educational shows for young humans. Starnes contributed funky grooves played on electric guitar, talking drums, friction drum, mouth bow, jaw harp, plastic straw, and sample treatments. Conceptualist Thomas "Bushmeat" Stanley offered his sampled voice, synth, and EFX, to a musical project offered in the spirit of the great 19th-century insurrectionist, Gullah Jack.

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

ONO features P Michael(l) and Travis(r).

Khalid Thompson paints Blackadelic Expressionism.

Ryan Clarke and Bushmeat at Yes We Cannibal.

"Thomas is fairly adamant about seeing his work as nonrepresentational. Sound art, for him, should be about the force and the experience of the sound waves as they entangle the audience in and through the performance, not about the ways sound evokes birds, or trains, or water in a listener. Thomas wants the audience to experience sound -- feel the waves hitting them, leaving their mark on the body as tessera, coproducing their resonating body in that moment, coordinating them with the ecology via sound, and disclosing them differently...Circulating sound waves entangle everything into an enactive coordination, making the audience a relay for resounding."
~~ Byron Hawk in
Resounding the Rhetorical

READ

An article about the challenges facing RHIZOME and other independent art centers

Pitchfork reviewed Blacks Myths II.

So did the Washington Post.

Cecil Taylor interviewed in Seconds magazine (Issue No. 5001, 2000)

Bevis Griffin interviewed in Yoyo/so4 (The Advanced Ebonics Issue, 2015)

Dr. Stanley has articles on Medium.

WATCH

LISTEN

<a href="https://eatbushmeat.bandcamp.com/album/full-of-water">Full of Water by Bushmeat Sound System</a>
<a href="https://eatbushmeat.bandcamp.com/album/dollar-bill-set-the-world-on-fire">Dollar Bill Set the World on Fire by On Ka'a Davis and Bushmeat Sound System</a>
<a href="https://eatbushmeat.bandcamp.com/album/the-way-of-torn-flesh">The Way of Torn Flesh by Bushmeat Sound System</a>