Wheeler performs structured improvisation of spatialized sound, contemporary modern dance, and interactive media with custom-developed electronic tools focused on tactile control. Wheeler’s music, often noted for blending disparate genres, contains healthy doses of Impressionist, Minimalist, and 20th- and 21st-Century Avant Garde composers alongside digital and analog electronic textures. Wheeler often writes poetic texts as scores for guided improvisation, inspired by the conceptual work of Yoko Ono and Pauline Oliveros. Other influences include applied phenomenology (particularly in performance interface design), speculative fiction, playing trombone in primary school, and engaging in the Denver metro DIY punk/noise/free improvisation scenes.
Wheeler has opened for William Basinsky, Tim Hecker, Josephine Foster, and many other noteworthy performers. Their works and collaborations have been shown at venues around the world, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA PS1, Gibney Dance, Judson Church, Museum of the Moving Image, Fridman Gallery, and various Off-Broadway theaters in New York, as well as museums and venues in Berlin, Taiwan, Indonesia, Vienna, Chicago, San Francisco, Santa Fe, Houston, and Denver.
Wheeler was raised in the foothills outside of Boulder, Colorado. They received a BM in Music Composition from the University of Colorado at Boulder where they studied with Michael Theodore, John Drumheller and Carter Pann, and an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College in Oakland, California, where they studied sound performance with Maggie Payne, Roscoe Mitchell, Fred Frith, and John Bischoff, and choreography with Kara Davis and James Graham. They studied Javanese Gamelan on a Darmasiswa scholarship in Yogyakarta, Balinese Gamelan in the US with master Pak Made Lasmawan, and American gamelan with Daniel Schmidt.
email: wheelersounds at pm.me
mastodon (open source twitter): https://sonomu.club/@standage
