Trillium is thrilled to welcome back our first ever artist-in-residence, guitarist/composer Thomas Echols, whose work is an amalgam of classical, jazz, modernist, and pop music forays. He’ll present a free gallery performance inside the contemporary galleries of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art from 6-7 p.m., Thursday, December 8. Thomas will be performing new songs and compositions from the Man, Woman, Friend, Computer catalogue in an immersive, electro-acoustic setting. Thomas uses GRADUS, his Gesture Responsive Analogue and Digital Untethered System, to create an exotic sonic pallet interweaving with his classical guitar, modular synthesizer, and voice while exploring themes of memory and forgetting, grief and loss.
As visiting artistic director for Austin Classical Guitar, Thomas curated programs incorporating traditional instrumental recitalists, experimental electronics, newly commissioned works, and interactive visual projections. His experimental-pop alter ego, Man, Woman, Friend, Computer, creates deconstructed pop songs that unfold into meandering compositions, synth fetishism, polyrhythmic laments, bebop ballads, and somnambulist visions —with a spontaneous interplay between performer and the generative algorithms of his custom software. Thomas’s performances include engagements with the Grammy Nominated choral ensemble Conspirare with the Houston Symphony Orchestra, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Palazzo Chigi (Siena, Italy), Los Angeles’s The Whittier Bach Festival, and Austin’s Blanton Museum of Art. As a classical guitarist, music technologist, composer, and songwriter, Thomas is a mainstay in the thriving classical guitar and experimental music scenes in Austin, as well as an active performer and lecturer. His popular YouTube channel “The Labyrinth of Limitations” combines his work as an educator, theorist, composer, jazz improviser, and music technologist to teach the concepts of the great jazz pianist and teacher Barry Harris.