Assistant Professor
Office: College Hall C209A
Phone: (703) 993-3754
Email: tstanle1@gmu.edu
Office Hours: by appointment
http://www.soundzimpossible.com/
Thomas Stanley is an assistant professor in the Department of Art and Visual Technology at George Mason University. He received his MA in Ethnomusicology at the University of Maryland, College Park where he is completing doctoral research on emerging performance practice. He is co-author of George Clinton and P-Funk: An Oral History and has written and lectured extensively on radical forms of Black musical expression and their role as arenas for an underground discourse on the same essentially philosophical questions that are the preoccupation of cosmologists and mind-body theorists. As an artist, Stanley has attempted to exploit the capacity of sound and music for anchoring, framing, and energizing our subjective experience of macrotemporal texture (history). Currently, within the trio Mind Over Matter Music Over Mind, he constructs and deploys sampled and electronically generated music against a backdrop of various visual stimuli. This most recent phase of Stanley’s sonic-craft evolved out of the performance troupe Noumenal Lingam, a multi-genre ensemble organized in 1993 to provide a musical and dramatic space for his librettos. Noumenal Lingam’s illustrious crusade is highlighted by the production of “Powerball: When the Blind Stumble it is Not for Lack of Light” – a natural history of human error and the electronic composition “Barking Dog, Laughing Squirrel”, used as a closing theme for “Kingpin” a crime drama televised by NBC/Bravo. Thomas Stanley is a founding member of Transparent Productions, a non-profit volunteer collective that has produced improvised jazz and experimental music concerts throughout the DC metro area since 1997. He is a regular contributor to signal to noise magazine and is included in the books Live Movies, Erotique Noire, and Beyond the Frontier: African-American Poetry for the Twenty-First Century. He is also featured as a source in Stranger, a documentary film about P-Funk and Talking Heads keyboardist Bernie Worrell.
