Thomas Gaudynski has been creating music, sound art, music/theatre, and performing electro-acoustic improvisation since the mid-1970's. In addition to his own works for voice, electronics and unique ensembles, he has realized works by composers such as Cage, Bryars, Lucier, Reich, Wolff, and Zorn as well as members of Fluxus.
A native of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he has performed throughout the United States and Canada and has worked extensively with Diana David and Paul Gaudynski as DG&G during the 1980s and with Steve Nelson-Raney and Hal Rammel as Audiotrope since 1997. He has also performed with Chris Burns, Jean-Paul Curtay, Scott Fields, Malcolm Goldstein, Peter Kowald, Fred Lonberg-Holm's Lightbox Orchestra, Mike Lucas, Michael Lytle, Jon Mueller, Matt Turner, Gary Verkade, and others.
He restlessly uses what is at hand during performances –– acoustic & electric guitar, guitar-driven synthesizer, feedback, voice, percussion, and prerecorded sounds mixed live.
"Thomas Gaudynski rescues his guitar KAY –– which has lain dormant for 25 years in his basement –– and begins to improvise on it. With its original strings, the duffed-up sound of the instrument presents a blank canvas and Gaudynski deals with the actuality of what the instrument has become. He goes with the flow of its stunted tuning, generating swarms of randomly non-intentioned microtones and, later, plucking deliberate lines out from the natural grain of the instrument. He keeps the unfolding structures tightly controlled, enough to let his material make its point without overindulgence."
-- Philip Clark, The Wire, December 2007
"In Thomas Gaudynski's Elementals, his come-back album of sorts from 2002, his guitar playing took a secondary role, supplanted by an ample use of electronics. 52 + 8 or 11 swings the focus back to his string playing: electric guitar and electric violin. Gaudynski's music is his own. Ferociously atonal and a-rhythmical, it demands that the listener agrees to its own terms. Solo album doesn't necessarily equal solo music: half of the eight pieces feature overdubbed guitar and violin. Gaudynski has a rare talent for synchronizing his artistic vision to a previous take. Highlights include Duo and Duet. In the latter, you'll swear youre listening to two musicians improvising in real time."
-- François Couture, All-Music Guide
"The concept developed by Audiotrope is not a desire to break rules, but rather to play without rules. This way of describing Audiotrope's music speaks for itself. It gives these three artists, these modern-day scouts, accomplished at originality, who offer without activism, their way of envisioning art."
-- Sebastien Moig, JAZZOSPHERE, No. 26
Regarding TriCycle, "A pleasure to hear some ORIGINAL improvisation."
-- Tom Hamilton
"I had the misfortune to receive three discs by Gaudynski in the past year...."
-- Nate Dorward, www.organissimo.org
"Some relationships require serendipity. Or so says Thomas Gaudynski about the relationships between the visual arts, music, technology, design, life and thought itself.
And he should know. Gaudynski, an egghead in the best sense, also is a musician, multidisciplinary artist and Internet designer.
In his new book of essays, Artifacts: Essays on Music + Art + Design, he encourages the reader not to lean on the expertise of museum curators and music critics, among others, [but] to explore ties between art and sound, intellect and high-tech.
Some essays pay tribute to Milwaukee stalwarts such as saxophonist Steve Nelson-Raney, while also examining the ideas and work of national figures, including Esther Dyson, guitarist Eugene Chadbourne and artist Robert Rauschenberg."
--Mary Louise Schumacher, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
