Julius Eastman

“NYC-born composer Julius Eastman was young, gay, and black when it was even more difficult to be young, gay, and black in America. He swerved in, out, and through academia, downtown experimental music, discos, European tours, sex clubs, and Carnegie Hall. He died at 49 in Buffalo, less than a decade after the New York City Sheriff’s Department threw most of his scores and belongings into the winter snow of the East Village.

There’s something about the identity and presence of Eastman’s music that engages us and makes us obsessed. It’s music that, we’ve found, lives in the minds of audiences unlike anything else we’ve performed. With our recordings and performances, we endeavor to discover the way to carry his music forward.”

Wild Up, on Julius Eastman