Terre Thaemlitz

Terre Thaemlitz is an award-winning multi-media producer, writer, public speaker, educator, audio remixer, DJ and owner of the Comatonse Recordings record label. His work critically combines themes of identity politics - including gender, sexuality, class, linguistics, ethnicity and race - with an ongoing critique of the socio-economics of commercial media production. This diversity of themes is matched by Thaemlitz' wide range of production styles, which include electroacoustic computer music, club-oriented deep house, digital jazz, ambient music, and computer-composed neo-expressionist piano solos.

His audio projects have found release on an eclectic variety of record labels ranging from Mille Plateaux, to YMO founder Haruomi Hosono's Daisyworld Discs, to Bill Laswell's Subharmonic Records, to Universal Music Germany's Classical Division, to the UK dance label Disorient, and so on. Graphic design, photography, illustration, text and video also play an important part in Thaemlitz' projects. His writings on music and culture have been published internationally in a number of books, academic journals and magazines.

Activism
As a speaker and educator on issues of non-essentialist transgenderism and pansexual Queer sexuality, Thaemlitz has participated in panel discussions throughout Europe and Japan, as well as held numerous cross-cultural sensitivity workshops at Tokyo's Uplink Factory, near his current residence in Kawasaki, Japan.

Terre Thaemlitz's Soil and Tranquilizer releases in the early and mid-1990s served to introduce a "political" form of ambient music, continued in later releases such as Couture Cosmetique and Means from an End, which aim to recast the usually passive artist-listener-environment equation. Thaemlitz' colleagues in the political ambient music front include the sound activist group Ultra-red. Following their remixes of Thaemlitz' Still Life with Numerical Analysis in 1998, Ultra-red joined Thaemlitz on the German label Mille Plateaux for their first two albums; Second Nature: An Electroacoustic Pastoral (1999) and Structural Adjustments (2000).

Awards

 * Honorable Mention In Digital Musics, 1999 ORF Prix Ars Electronica
 * Best Ambient/Experimental Artist 1997, 1997 Readers Poll Results in "URB Magazine" (US: March/April 1998)
 * Best DJ 1991, Underground Grammy Award from the House of Magic, Midtown Manhattan drag circuit

Interviews

 * "The Questionnaire by Thierry Massard" - Dec, 2007
 * "Exclusive Interview with Terre Thaemlitz by Gabriel Brunner" - gopopular.com, 2007
 * "Private Studio 2002: Terre Thaemlitz" - Sound & Recording Magazine: 249, Jan. 2002
 * "Terre Thaemlitz's polymorphous electronica exercises its right to be perverse" - The Wire (magazine): 206, April 2001
 * "An Interview with Terre Thaemlitz" - PERFECT SOUND FOREVER, Feb. 1998
 * On: "Means From an End" - AmbiEntrance, 1998