Jack Herscowitz is a Los Angeles based composer, improviser, and sound artist whose work engages impossibility, autobiographical sampling, performance-as-commitment, horror, unstable loops, and the extremities of noise to recognize music as a multi-sensory social art form: bringing attention to the situations in which we experience and create sound, rather than just sound itself. His work runs the wide gamut of participatory sound installations, noisy electroacoustic improvisations, theatrical performance, process-based chamber music, deconstructed remixes, and communal spaces for sound making.

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His instrumental music has been performed in North America and Europe by artists including the Arditti Quartet, Del Sol String Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, Syntagma Piano Duo, Atlantic Reed Consort, Hypercube, and the soloists of Talea Ensemble, Meitar Ensemble and the Locrian Chamber Players. Festivals, venues, and organizations that have presented his work include: IRCAM ManiFeste (Paris), CENART (CDMX), Barcelona Modern Festival, The Moscow Conservatory, The Composers Conference (as a Fromm Foundation Fellow), NettNett Space (Tijuana), Neofonía Festival (Ensenada), Norcal NoiseFest (Sacramento), CNMAT (Berkeley), soundpedro (San Pedro), 2220 Arts and Archives (Los Angeles), Coaxial Arts Foundation (LA), Automata Theater (LA), Beyond Baroque (LA), The Dog Star Orchestra (LA), Riverside Church (NYC), June in Buffalo, The Resonance Collective (LA), and The Provincetown Film Festival. His trio Castle Anthrax's self-titled album will be released on Drongo Tapes in October 2024.  

 

Jack is the 2023-2024 composer residence with .abeceda ensemble and has held residencies at the Dorland Mountain Arts Colony (as a Barbara Fellow) and the Spencer Museum of Art (with Amorphous Ensemble). His work and words have been featured in PRXLUDES Magazine and on The Watt From Pedro Show. Jack performs improvised live electronics on digital instruments with groups Mystic Elevator and Castle Anthrax in addition to improvisers including Ana Luisa Diaz de Cossio, M A Harms, and Jeonghyeon Joo. His solo performance practice draws from noise, glitch, vaporwave, and DIY electronics to re-claim the sounds of capitalism's sonic warfare. He has collaborated on multidisciplinary works with poet/novelist Julia Alvarez, filmmaker/artist Clemente Ciarrocca, installation artist Ásgerður Arnardóttir, choreographer Ashlee Dance, and choreographer-filmmaker Sam Kann.

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Jack received his M.F.A. in Composition and Experimental Sound Practices at CalArts and his B.A. in Music and Environmental Studies from Middlebury College. His teachers include Michael Pisaro-Liu, Steve Lehman, Carolyn Chen, Tim Feeney, Micaela Tobin, and Matthew Evan Taylor.