"Luke Martin is an experimental composer, musician, and poet currently living in Allston, MA (Boston). His work focuses on the concepts of silence, blandness, and community and is primarily interested in exploring the limits of perception. More specifically, he is interested in the combined use of poetry notation and graphic notation, silence and sound, and listening and active sound-making, as equally considered elements in the compositional practice; for instance, the composer's task is not only to consider the parameters of determined sound making, but also - particularly - the parameters of how we listen, and how we may interact with and frame silence. The composer, then, seeks to create situations of possible events which the audience, performer(s), and composer may experience concurrently. Further, it is essential to critically consider the hierarchical roles and power relations at work between composer, performer(s), and audience; or in other words, the nature of the political/social significance of that situation. In short, the composer is not simply someone who composes a musical performance, but rather someone who composes a social situation in which there is, regardless of their desire or intent, sound. Recently inspired by David Dunn's notations for listening and Lasse Thoresen's spectromorphological analysis of electronic music and sound, Luke is developing a notation for the performance and analysis of silence (i.e., incidental sounds, contingency).

Among his many influences, Luke is inspired by the work of Samuel Beckett, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Peter Ablinger, Deleuze and Guattari, Joseph Beuys, the Wandelweiser Collective, and Christian Bok. Luke performs (and has performed) with various groups on no-input mixer, guitar, objects, and other various odds-and-ends including sinecure (Andy Young, Ben Levinson, Isaac Aronson), Variant State (Michael Rosenstein, Howard Martin, Jesse Collins, Chris Johnson), DogStar Orchestra (large ensemble of experimental musicians led by Michael Pisaro), Ordinary Affects (ensemble of experimental musicians, led by Morgan Evans-Weiler), ample parking (trio with John Pax and James Bean), The Readers Chorus LA (a reading group led by Sara Roberts and Jordan Biren), and others. He has an M.F.A. in music composition from California Institute of the Arts, studying with Michael Pisaro, and a B.A. in English and Music from Colby College (magna cum laude, honors in music composition/theory).

Having recently relocated from Los Angeles to Boston, Luke spends his time composing, performing, writing, and working as the grant writer for Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles, CA) and The Center for Advanced Musical Studies at Chosen Vale (Hanover, NH), in addition to being the operational assistant for Boston-based experimental music organization Non-Event (Boston, MA) and an associate producer at the Ojai Music Festival (Ojai, CA). Of particular note is his new experimental music residency: co-incidence, an experimental music residency. Developed with Aaron Foster Bresley, this program will have its first season in January 2017, hosted by Non-Event and Washington St. Gallery, in Somerville (Boston), MA. This project is based on an expanded view of what constitutes art, music, and the traditional concert. Following the example of the revolutionary arts community Black Mountain College, it will bring together a group of radical artists operating in the boundary-zones of their practice(s) to take part in a residency curated as 'social scultpure.' Attending will be Co-Directors Luke Martin and Aaron Foster Bresley, Resident Artist Michael Pisaro, and six Guest Artists chosen from a domestic and international pool of applicants (it is also fully open to the public).

On January 8, 2016, Luke released "residues," a CD of graphic score string quartets on FWD: rcrds; on December 7, 2016 he will be releasing a 72-minute piece on Edition Wandelweiser Records; and he has two more projects in the mixing stages, a 3-disc collection of noise and poetry/spoken works, to be released in Spring 2017, and a 72 min piece for solo trumpet to be released in Fall 2017.

Luke is from Massachusetts, has spent and continues to spend time in Maine with family and friends, has lived in L.A. studying and making music for the past couple years, and is currently residing in Boston, MA. He loves playing cribbage and is a sucker for superhero movies and mint chocolate chip ice cream. At one point in his life, he was a top-ranked junior tennis player and a head tennis professional on Cape Cod."