Jack Langdon (b.1994, Keyeser, Wisconsin) is an organist, video artist, and writer.
Jack creates work that disintegrates commonplace sounds, images, and narratives—reassembling them in strange constructions. His music is gentle and expansive, drawing inspiration from the landscape and folk modernisms of the American Midwest.
Jack is an organist, whose approach to performance investigates the unique qualities of individual organs—utilizing drones, extended techniques, and electronic augmentations. Jack is a proponent of contemporary organ music and regularly creates new work in collaboration with other performers and composers. Jack is the vice-president of the Vital Organ Project, and is on the board of Epsilon Spires in Brattleboro, Vermont.
Jack has composed works for Yarn/Wire, Ensemble Dal Niente, Southland Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, Trio SÆITENWIND, New Music Mosaic, Minnesota Sinfonia and has collaborated with musicians Will Yager, Sara Constant, Yoshi Weinberg, Jack Yarbrough, Weston Olencki, Anthony Vine, Taylor Ho Bynum, Kelley Sheehan, Graeme Shields, and Jonathan Hannau.
Jack works as a videographer, documenting religious and cultural events in the Midwest as well as project-based documentation of work by artists and musicians.
Jack writes on the political economy of music, sociology of performance, speculative aesthetics, and the poetics of musical machines. Jack is a Music & Economics Area Editor for Shred Magazine.
Jack currently lives in Chicago, Illinois.
Jack is a member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians.
"...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)