Jack Langdon (b.1994) is a musician, video artist, and writer.
He creates work that heightens our attention towards commonplace sounds, images, and narratives—reassembling things we take for granted into strange, elusive constructions. His works are stark and expansive, drawing inspiration from the landscape and folk modernisms of the American Midwest. As a musician, Jack performs on a variety of keyboard and string instruments as well as composes concert music. His films focus on landscape, the built environment, and people, and he writes on the political economy of cultural production.
His concert music has been presented and supported by Klangspuren Schwaz, Darmstädter Ferienkurse, Composers Conference, the Fromm Foundation, Northwestern University, New Music Mosaic, Williams College, Microfest Prague, Montreal Contemporary Music Lab, reMusik, and MISE-EN_PLACE, and has been performed by Yarn/Wire, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Miroslav Beinhauer, Current Resonance, Talea Ensemble, Jack Yarbrough, Ensemble Dal Niente, Trio SÆITENWIND, Yoshi Weinberg, Southland Ensemble, Graeme Shields, Sara Constant, RenegadeEnsemble, Minnesota Sinfonia, The St. Olaf Band, and The St. Olaf Lyric Theater. He has recorded alongside Anthony Vine, Weston Olencki, Kelley Sheehan, Webb Crawford, and Taylor Ho Bynum. His recordings have been released by Sawyer Editions and Lobby Art Records. His written work has been published by Sound American, Cacophony, and Shred Magazine.
Jack was raised in Keyeser, Wisconsin and currently lives in Chicago, Illinois. He belongs to the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians and is of German, English, French, and Ojibwe descent.
"...corporeal vibrations that accentuate the architecture of the instrument. And a twinkling and startling melody sprinkling it. Each begins by subverting characteristics of the organ; each ends having succumbed to them. Always an argument between high and low registers."
-Keith Prosk for Harmonic Series (on Less Than You Remember)
"It's hard to place exactly where an album such as Three Fanfares belongs. Is it experimental? Not really, since Langdon is using a tuning system even Johann Sebastian Bach occasionally employed. It is ambient? Here and there, but there's too much structure on some tunes to qualify. Is it weird? Hell yes. And that's a good thing."
-Chris Farnsworth for Seven Days (on Three Fanfares)
"Time slows to a crawl with Langdon sending divergent, elongated melodies into stained glass chasms. Metallic vibrations imbue the cavernous yawns with bedrock, driving an ethereal gauze back into the sunlit cracks."
-Brad Rose for Foxy Digitalis (on THETFORD)