Nathan Cook

St. Louis-based sound artist, visual artist, and graphic designer, Nathan Cook's performance work often considers the acoustic and spatial qualities of physical settings as he utilizes sound as a transient, duration-based medium that encourages extended and focused listening. Cook believes this approach fosters patience, concentration, and introspection. His work is also typically concerned with proximity, geometry, mysticism, psychodynamics, identity, and the primeval.

Cook runs the Close/Far Recordings experimental music label which publishes cassettes, zines, and art prints. Past commissions include the Laumeier Sculpture Park for Site/Sound, the World Chess Hall of Fame for a performance of John Cage’s Reunion, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis for Audible Interruptions, a residency with High Concept Laboratories (Chicago), a performance for the Oscillations series at Experimental Sound Studios (Chicago), and a commissioned composition for Alarm Will Sound (NYC) for the opening of the Public Media Commons.

He has been documenting the work of St. Louis sound artists and experimental musicians over the last six years by publishing the Rhizomatic St. Louis compilation. For the past five years Cook has also been programming a concert series called Bruxism which focused on presenting St. Louis sound art, jazz, noise, free improvisation, electronic, ambient, and avant-garde music.