Developed in relative secrecy over the past five years, CULTURESPORT is an animated science fiction web series set inside a sprawling fictional universe—the result of intensive and ongoing collaboration between artists, designers, musicians, actors, dancers, brands, and CULTURESPORT’s in-house creative team.
Music & sound design by Aaron David Ross, Joe Kubler, Jake Merrick, Javier Morales & Rotterdam Terror Corps
Arranged, Mixed & Mastered by Aaron David Ross
CULTURESPORT
ROTTERDAM 1995
"GROUND ZERO"
Original Soundtrack and Sound Design by Aaron David Ross
10 years ago, in the summer of 2009, the Tamil homeland of ‘Eelam’ was wiped out by the Sri Lankan army. Born through a neo-Marxist revolution, it had been self-governed as an autonomous state for almost 30 years. However, following attacks on the United States on September 11th 2001, revolutionary movements around the world were re-labelled as terrorists, enabling their eradication. As the international community turned a blind eye, Eelam was annihilated. Curiously, in the months following that violence (and with the economic liberalisation that followed), the first white cube commercial galleries opened in the Sri Lankan capital Colombo, projecting democratic values internationally and representing a generation of artists influenced by the Western canon encountered online.
“Around the world, the juridical framework of human rights has been leveraged not only to protect the oppressed and disenfranchised but also to justify the imperial ambitions of the nation states by which human rights are enforced. Perhaps though, the problem is not with the concept of human rights but with the very category of ‘human’ itself.”
Christopher Kulendran Thomas in collaboration with Annika Kuhlmann at Schinkel Pavillon Berlin
Audio & Video samples available on request
YOU WASTED A GOOD CRISIS
A Good Crisis features the Night King from HBO’s Game of Thrones discussing the missed opportunity for economic revolution following the mid-2000s global financial crisis. He explains how financiers and CEOs now revel in the feudal frenzy of the “new rentership society,” a term propagated by private equity firms to explain the economic shift that has seen the renter population of the United States soar in the aftermath of the 2008 housing crash.
Created by Dis
Written in collaboration with Moritz Schularick and Drew Zeiba
Directors of Photography Alex Gvojic and Rory Muhlere
Edited by Anthony Valdez
Score by Aaron David Ross
Collected by New Museum New York and Baltimore Museum of Art
TELFAR
Installation & Performance, Spazio Maiocchi Milan, 2018. Presented by Kaleidoscope
"NUDE"
Launching his eponymous line in 2005 at the age of 18, Liberian-American unisex prodigy Telfar Clemens has developed a strikingly original and democratic design vocabulary. Laying the blueprint for today’s black avant-garde, TELFAR was genderless a decade before it became a trend, launching projects with a remarkably horizontal cultural impact—from collaborations with Solange Knowles at the Guggenheim Museum to designing the nationwide uniforms for over 10,000 employees of the US fast-food chain White Castle. After winning the 2017 Vogue/CFDA Fashion Fund, TELFAR is poised to take its place in the foreground of America’s fashion future.
At Spazio Maiocchi, KALEIDOSCOPE presents TELFAR’s first project in Italy, Nude, a fashion presentation without a single garment, eloquent to the brand’s progressive aesthetics and artistic DNA. The exhibition centers around a 30-feet-tall nude image of the designer by photographer Rob Kulisek surrounded by ten nude and genderless sculptures designed by American artist Frank Benson and manufactured by German state-of-the-art mannequin factory Penther Formes—an updated version of the iconic mannequins presented by TELFAR in the 2016 Berlin Biennale. The show is completed by a short film about Telfar’s apartment building in Queens, New York, by filmmaker Finn MacTaggart; and a musical composition written for clapping by Aaron David Ross in collaboration with artist Ryan Trecartin.
TELFAR’s exhibition will also take over the 3x6m billboard in the courtyard of Spazio Maiocchi, and will be accompanied by a book of images by New York photographer Jason Nocito, a performance by South-African musical duo FAKA, and an exclusive limited-edition T-shirt.
Soundtracked by Aaron David Ross & Ryan Trecartin in collaboration with Telfar & Babak Radboy, featuring FAKA
KELELA "JUPITER"
Produced by Aaron David Ross, Additional Production by Nightfeelings
on ‘Take Me Apart‘, debut album from Kelela, out on Warp Records 2017
Written by Kelela + Romy Madley Croft
BUFFER
By Xavier Cha
Opera, Dance & Theatre work commissioned by BAM
2017 Next Wave Festival & Performa 2017
Original Music by Aaron David Ross
Xavier Cha’s perception-altering new work lays bare the intimate yet alienated relationships we have with the bodies on our screens.
Music and sound design by Aaron David Ross
Libretto by Juliana Huxtable
Stage design by Paul Kopkau, Felix Burrichter, and Michael Bullock
Costume design by Avena Gallagher
With history in a room filled with people with funny names 4
Audio & Video available upon request
Winner of the Ammodo Tiger Short Competition at IFFRby Korakrit Arunanondchai
2017, HD video, 23 minutes 32 seconds
Original Score by Aaron David Ross
SELECTED PRESS: FADER | PAPER | BOOMKAT | TINY MIX TAPES
SELECTED REVIEWS: PITCHFORK | RESIDENT ADVISOR | RAVEN SINGS THE BLUESTHROAT
‘THROAT’ is the 4th studio solo album by composer/producer Aaron David Ross (ADR). Arriving as the New York artist’s second release on PAN, ‘THROAT’ is made entirely from vocal sounds. It could only be crafted in the ultra-present; an age where the poetry of songwriting is flattened into catchy hooks. As words are sliced into sounds, ideas are reduced to sibilant syllables that still contain a range of emotional power, but deliver it in subversively different ways.
‘THROAT’ exploits these ways, borrowing vocal fragments from everywhere to collage a choral congregation of singing servers; pinging one another to create open-source equal-opportunity electronic pop music. Reichian polyrhythmic EDM drops into Bieber-esque beatboxing. Hypothetical K-pop stars conduct holographic choirs in altruistic ritual. Virtual summer festival DJs transcode into pure phonemes; anthropomorphizing formant-shifted vacuums of communication. When you drop the cargo of making sense, you can go so much faster.
As a classically trained musician inspired equally by pop and contemporary art & technology practices, ADR’s work has distinguished itself through its formal deliriousness and playful tenor. Besides ongoing collaborations with an international community of vocalists, producers, artists and fashion designers, Ross releases solo recordings, composes music for film, TV and advertising, and maintains a practice of live performance and sound installation.
EVERY NODE
"New York-based producer ADR has shared a collage-based new video for "Every Node," off his recently released LP Throat. The clip evokes the experience of scrolling through a Google image search for "mouth," and builds on conceptual questions explored on the new album about the relationship between mediated communication and the voice. Every sound on Throat is a vocal sample of some kind; "Every Node" finds ADR using the technique to produce something that's equal parts funny, gorgeous, and uncanny."
“There is nothing else in today’s art world even remotely like Ryan Trecartin‘s videos,” proclaimed Art in America. “It’s a sci-fi theater of the absurd for our manically paced YouTube era.“ Within these fluidly structured and visually commanding works, Trecartin’s groundbreaking sound design—a densely layered mix of rapid-fire dialogue, electronic music and live instrumentation—extends the depth, intensity, and insane hilarity of his art. He is joined by his principal collaborator Lizzie Fitch, music producer and DJ Ashland Mines (aka Total Freedom), and composer/producer Aaron David Ross (who will be conducting and doing the music direction) to present a new, digitally-inflected sonic composition live for the very first time.” – Armory Press Release
JAZZFEST
RYAN TRECARTIN / TOTAL FREEDOM / AARON DAVID ROSS
Audio & Video samples available upon request
Selected Press: Armory Listing | Art NewsNOVEMBER 2016, Presented by the Armory Artists' Studio, New York
Film by Korakrit Arunanondchai and Alex Gvojic featuring Boychild
Original Score by Aaron David Ross
Premiered at the 9th Annual Berlin Biennale, 2016
On a Boat sailing up and down the Spree River, Berlin
There’s a word I’m trying to remember, for a feeling I’m about to have
(a distracted path toward extinction)
Audio and Video samples available on request
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