Chris Fisher-Lochhead
composer/performer
Vermont-based composer/performer Chris Fisher-Lochhead has blazed an idiosyncratic path through the landscape of contemporary music. Working across a broad range of styles and media, he has developed a creative practice which seeks to cultivate open, adventuresome, and playful spaces for musical and social experimentation. He has created notated compositions in close partnership with some of the world’s most celebrated performers of new music, toured and recorded as an improviser, and participated in cutting-edge interdisciplinary research collaborations.
In 2016, his string quartet Hack—described as a “knockout” by the New Yorker’s Alex Ross—was a centerpiece of the Spektral Quartet’s Grammy-nominated album Serious Business; as a founding member of the Grant Wallace Band, a group dedicated to stylistic alchemy and collective creativity, he has released numerous studio albums and performed across the country; and in December of 2023, New Focus Recordings released a portrait album titled Wake Up the Dead, featuring performances of his music by the JACK Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, Ben Roidl-Ward, and the Quince Ensemble. His current project, supported by a 2023 commission from the Fromm Foundation, is an evening-length work for the Chicago Wind Project based on text by Renee Gladman. He holds degrees from the University of Michigan and Northwestern University and has served on the faculty of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute since 2018.
“an imaginative tour de force”
(Boston Globe)
“cheerfully anarchic stuff”
(Chicago Tribune)
“[Fisher-Lochhead’s] stretched out spectral analysis of Bessie Smith’s vocals take the JACK Quartet to places of exquisite dissonance and the expression of a pain that is both searing yet irresistible.”
(BBC)
“the subtle warping of effort and ease”
(New York Times)
“the music takes on the sense of a beautiful memory that one keeps on almost remembering”
(I Care If You Listen)
“deliciously gnarly…a strong corrective to complacency”
(Bandcamp Daily)
“Fisher-Lochhead writes some incredibly specific and constantly varied rhythms, giving the whole affair a sense of improvisatory looseness more characteristic of roadhouse performance than the concert hall” (NewMusicBox)
