Jed Speare

Jed Speare was born in Boston in 1954. He has lived and worked in San Francisco, Amsterdam, and Warsaw, and resides in Boston today. He studied music composition at the Philadelphia Musical Academy from '72-'76 and Acoustic Communication at the Sonic Research Studio in Burnaby, Vancouver in 1978. That experience set him forth on the particular style of field recording and sound processing he is known for today. He has also worked as a Hearing Conservationist and has made conceptual works and writings about sound and the sound environment, and is currently active performing his music. During the late 80's and thereafter, Speare's work migrated over to other time-based media such as video and performance, as well as directing choreography. Jed Speare is an artist and arts manager working in a variety of media and settings. Initially trained in music composition, he has presented sound, performance, video, installation, conceptual, multimedia and community-based works locally, nationally, and internationally in festivals and locales such as San Francisco, Amsterdam, Canada, Taiwan, Croatia, Czech Republic, Poland, Belarus, Bulgaria, France, and Italy. In Boston, Jed has been known primarily as a member of the Mobius Artists Group since 1995 and as the Co- Director and Director of Mobius, Boston's artist-run center for experimental work in all media, from 1996 through 2004. He recently became Director again in July 2009. He has also been Director of Studio Soto, a space for ideas in Boston since 2006. Jed has written about sound and performance art in P-Form magazine (Chicago, 1995), Art New England (2001-2003), Art and Architecture and Vision (2009, China) and has also worked in collaboration with and as the international coordinator for choreographer/performer Rob List/Company OZU, based in Amsterdam, Netherlands. He is the creator of Cable Car Soundscapes on Smithsonian Folkways Records, for which he received an award from the secretary of the Smithsonian as a Folkways artist in 1998. In January of 2008, Family Vineyard Records released a special, archival double-CD of his music, Sound Works, 1982 - 1987. He was featured in the March issue, #289 of Wire magazine's Cross Platform section, and on that occasion, Wire wrote: “Working field and documentary recordings into socially resonant performance works, this unsung composer is a pioneer of multimedia presentation.” Jed also recorded with the San Francisco bands Ultrasheen, Research Library, (Subterranean, Red Spot compilation) and Appliances. http://www.folkways.si.edu/albumdetails.aspx?itemid=1117 http://family-vineyard.com/catalog/fv52.php http://mobius.org/ http://www.studiosoto.org/ Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.