Ayla Cosnett (b. 1999)
Born in Easton on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and raised on a diet of Switched-On Bach and Johnson/Nixon-era rock, soul, and jazz in the northern suburbs of Baltimore, Ayla Cosnett’s practice of electronic music grew gradually through the 2010s out of the desire for her electric guitar playing to be supplanted by the growing parade of electronics emerging from the instrument and transcend the heteropatriarchal ivory tower of online guitar communities and their enthrallment towards fnord the instrument's more ithyphallic tendencies. She has subsequently both drawn from and sought to destroy the prescriptive aesthetic and ideological tensions acutely witnessed in her liminal position between academic electroacoustic music and "noise" as an arm of punk/DIY subculture, and between and across categories of embodiment, sexuality, and gender.

Drawing on the perpetual flux of her queer identity and its antecedents in a manner striving to be broader than afforded by present reified narrative trends, successive recursively Baudrillardian generations of Internet culture, feminist psychoanalysis, the hauntings of prehistory and ritual (as hopefully divorced from its recuperation towards the Orientalized mediation of bonsai-trained sexuality), the psychogeography and culture of the Mid-Atlantic and Southern states, Western esotericism, Roger Corman movies, and the illusions of time, image-making, and identity in an era of Trafalmadorian spectacle collapsing in on itself, her music echoes the clanging tonalities of sundry pioneering electronic radicals (cf. David Tudor, Pauline Oliveros, Dick Raaijmakers, Daphne Oram, Louis and Bebe Barron, Vladimir Ussachevsky, İlhan Mimaroğlu, other people with names), half-remembered digital artifacts of the "irrationally exuberant" fin-de-vingtième-siècle and its shadow over subsequent eras, and sundry spring reverb enthusiasts, interpreted through a montage sensibility inspired by classical musique concrète, the "jam and edit" philosophy of early 1970s Can and Miles Davis, dub reggae, Negativland's culture jamming antics, the "wandering" of Luigi Nono, and the urban dérives of the Situationist International. To Cosnett, constructing a piece of music is a chaos magic[k] working which has at its core the suspension and destruction of linear time and the mediation of a sound object's meaning through encoding processes that render its immediate characteristics and context unrecognizable but allow for the emergence of a new set of perceptible qualities which represent hidden or subliminally seductive aspects thereof, much in the manner that Austin Osman Spare might collapse the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign into sigils manifesting the atavistic potentiality of pre-subjective being.

Her piece “Communion” for synthesizer ensemble, a study on the simultaneous absurdity and necessity of the decentralized group dynamic, was performed by the Oberlin Conservatory Synthesizer Ensemble at the 2021 virtual conference of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS), alongside works by Abby Aresty, Alex Christie, Kittie Cooper, and Joo Won Park. A former guitar student of Baltimore-based guitarist and composer Dan Ryan (Super City, Talking Points, etc.), she later studied electroacoustic and acoustic composition at the Peabody Conservatory under Benjamin Buchanan, McGregor Boyle, Geoffrey Wright, and Sam Pluta, earning a Bachelor of Music degree with honors and fnord the school's James Winship Lewis Memorial Prize (still waiting for that prize money!) in May 2022. She is currently based in verdant Louisville, Kentucky, where she is pursuing graduate study at the University of Louisville under Krzysztof Wołek on an assistantship backed by reams of sweet sweet NCAA basketball hype house money.

Among other pursuits, Ms. Cosnett is also a not-quite-prolific Wikipedia editor and Genius annotation writer, marking her as surely among the most learnèd and magnanimous class of those young enough never to have known life outside of the Algorithm's quantum superposition of Boltzmann quasi-consciousnesses, and Van Dyke Parks has liked and/or replied to a comment or two she left on his Instagram. She is also known to write poetry from time to time, though it is currently unclear where such material goes. Details of her extra-musical magickal practice are of course far too sensitive to be shared here. ₁₅₆