Artist in Residence: 16bard

Detroit's 16bard is a prolific and brilliantly inventive electronic music artist whose album 'Introduction to Electrodynamics' on the <1 label has been playing on grey clay since November 2023 and is a huge favourite of mine. Following the release of a  collaboration with The Museum of Viral Memory, a correspondence commenced which has led to this, the first artist in residence slot(s) in the grey clay schedule.

16bard's main Bandcamp page is a visual treat. They describe themselves as 'colors, heard' and each release is titled as a particular colour hex code(eg #0cc8a4)with a block of that colour as the cover art. The cumulative effect is striking and apart from a couple of 'polychrome' releases, the page scrolls down for quite a way like this. There is always a deeply embedded story within each release, though intriguingly, the artist does not always make this visible. They are all unpredictably different, original and hugely rewarding.

Their second page, which is added to weekly, is called The Forsyth Sessions and comprises a series of live session recordings of a little over 41 minutes each. They take 16bard's exploratory approach to albums in the main page and extend them into one long-form, flowing piece that evolves as it goes. A new work is released every Monday and it is these that will comprise what you hear in the residency slots; playing the most recent release on Wednesdays 12:00 and 23:00 [UK time].


Main page: https://16bard.bandcamp.com

The Forsyth Sessions: https://forsythsessions.bandcamp.com