NAT GRANT
sound artist / percussionist
Nat Grant is a multi-instrumentalist, sound artist, composer and teacher from Melbourne, Australia. She works predominantly as a freelance artist, and has been employed as a composer and performer in the fields of puppetry, theatre, film, animation and dance. Nat’s work explores intersections between improvisation, chance and intention in the development of sound as a sculptural medium.
Through the integration of electronic processing and sampling with acoustic instruments and sound recordings, she creates cumulative sound works that link consciousness and memory, allowing interaction between human and natural environments, and between audiences and performers.
Nat holds a PhD in music composition from the Victorian College of the Arts (University of Melbourne). The subject of this degree was Momentum, a cumulative recording and composition project incorporating a blog and online sound diary. Momentum utilised field recordings made over 400 days in 2012–13, sculpted into short, connected compositions and posted online each day to delve deeper into compositional processes and the capturing of time and place through sound in a very public way. Momentum was created collaboratively, with more than 60 artists from around the world contributing sounds to the project. Momentum has been exhibited as an installation in galleries around Australia as well as in the US and New Zealand.
As a composer, Nat has created original chamber music, durational sound art works, and composed and created sound design for theatre, dance, film and live art, including for ITCH Productions, Jonathan Homsey Productions and The Stain.
Previous compositions for other artists include the work ‘Cocoon’, commissioned by the 3 Shades Black ensemble in 2012, for chamber ensemble with digital integration, a solo vibraphone work with digital accompaniment, ‘With the Inside Where the Outside Should Be’, for Erica Rasmussen, composed and premiered in 2014, and ‘Eclipse’, a chamber work commissioned for a series of interactive painting performances in Melbourne in 2014. The solo vibraphone work was subsequently performed at the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival in 2015.
As a teaching artist, Nat has been involved in projects with a number of community groups including the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, Footscray Community Arts Centre and Barking Spider Visual Theatre.
Nat performs regularly at venues around Melbourne and has also performed internationally, at the Percussive Arts Society’s Annual Convention in Indianapolis in 2011, and the Y2K International Live Looping Festival in Santa Cruz, California, in 2009 and 2011. She has released several solo recordings as well as with a number of local and international bands and artists including bassist Steve Uccello from California, Welsh guitarist David Cooper Orton, composers David Shea, James Hullick and James Rushford, Lapsteel artist Chris Rainier, Melbourne Afrobeat band Papa Chango and electro pop artist Emah Fox. Collaboration is key to much of Nat’s work, including previous and current partnerships with Speak Percussion, Jolt Arts and the Amplified Elephants, animator Christie Anditama, experimental filmmaker Dirk DeBruyn, and Adam Simmons’ Creative Music Ensemble.