#m. lamar

[icymusicdiary]

daily song rec 3

Haela Hunt-Hendrix has justly gotten loads of acclaim for her work as Liturgy but I wish this collab with M. Lamar were more well-known!

for fans of: lingua ignota, diamanda galas, liturgy

[wanderingandactingout]

Mapplethorpe was obsessed with black men, and that’s no secret. We seem to be some symbol of his transgression, as if he was a radical, white male artist because he was daring to be fucked by “big, black cock.” He’s reenacting a white supremacist fantasy, what I call plantation fantasy, imagining black people as overly-sexualized with enormous genitalia—black women and men. White people have this incredible fantasy world around the sexuality of black people. By casting Mapplethorpe as plantation master, I’m trying to give back this construction of the white supremacist imagination. It’s yours, you made it, here it is. I don’t want this anymore. I’m trying not to be didactic in the work, but I don’t want this. I don’t want this thing placed on my body.

M.Lamar

[blackrockandrollmusic-blog]

A Goth Male Soprano Who Plumbs the Darkness

What kind of music does M. Lamar play?

It’s a simple question, but there’s no easy answer. Mr. Lamar’s lush and gloomy new show, “Funeral Doom Spiritual,” is an assemblage of old spirituals — but it isn’t your usual Sunday at church. And while he has over time trained his penetrating, whooping soprano register with the help of an opera coach, it isn’t like any opera you’ve ever heard, either.

Mr. Lamar — who is the twin brother of Laverne Cox, the transgender “Orange Is the New Black” actress, and has appeared on that show as Ms. Cox’s pretransition self — inhabits a musical genre pretty much his own. He embodies, as he put it in an interview after a rehearsal this week, a “gothic-devil-worshiping-free-black-man-blues tradition.” He plays death soul. Or maybe blues metal. Or maybe apocalyptic lieder gospel.

The hourlong “Funeral Doom Spiritual,” which has its New York premiere on Friday at National Sawdust in Brooklyn as part of the Prototype festival of contemporary music theater, is fueled by the anger and sadness of the Black Lives Matter movement. But instead of explicit protest, this otherworldly, goth-tinged projection into the distant future of our violent, racially and sexually charged present offers a space of melancholic, alluring, ultimately stirring reflection.

Charting the stylized journey of a man mourning the loss of his love, “Funeral Doom Spiritual” follows him over the centuries as he hopes for a resurrection. The songs’ lyrics may describe movements from life to death, but the work tries to reverse that course, seeking a state that Mr. Lamar calls deathlessness.

“What the dead gotta say,” he sings at one point. “They say, ‘Don’t give up on me.’”

While the focus of the piece is the gangly, black-draped Mr. Lamar, 32, sitting at the piano and singing, no singer-songwriter has ever sounded quite like this, unless you’ve imagined the love child of Tori Amos and Marilyn Manson. [Read More]

[gothiccharmschool]

This is powerful and chilling. 

"M. Lamar's musical performances posses an otherworldly quality, a dark opulence that is simultaneously stunning in its beauty as well as tortured in its despair. Lamar is a countertenor, pianist, and composer whose work intervenes directly with discourses of race in America."

[afrogoth]

[blackrockandrollmusic-blog]

M. Lamar - Negro Antichrist

[blackrockandrollmusic-blog]

A Moment with M. Lamar

Interviewer Katherine Cooper speaks with M. Lamar about racialized histories, the scream of the soprano and meeting one of his heroes on the street in New York. ALSO: PTSD, getting the hell out of the art world and Black Metal. [Read More]

[sodomyordeath]

M. Lamar/Hunter Hunt-Hendrix/Anagram Ensemble - “The Living Dead“