Ayla Cosnett (b. 1999) 𒐖𒌍𒐚 LONG BIO:
Born in Easton on Maryland’s Eastern Shore not long before the peak of the dot-com bubble and raised on a diet of Switched-On Bach and Johnson/Nixon-era rock, soul, and jazz in the northern suburbs of Baltimore, Cincinnati-based electroacoustic provocatrix of melancholy Ayla Cosnett’s practice of electronic music grew gradually through the 2010s out of the desire for her precocious experiences with the post-Fordist electric guitar to be supplanted by the growing parade of electronics emerging from the instrument, transcending the heteropatriarchal ivory tower of online guitar communities and their enthrallment towards fnord the instrument's more ithyphallic tendencies. After discovering Morton Subotnick, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and estradiol, 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 human prehistory and ritual (as hopefully divorced from its recuperation towards the Orientalized mediation of bonsai-trained sexuality), the nature of queer identity, the psychogeography of the Upper South, the history and (her) contemporary practice of so-called Western esotericism, Roger Corman movies, and the illusions of time, image-making, and identity in an era of Tralfamadorian spectacle collapsing in on itself, her music echoes and engages critically with the ideological inheritances of 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 evenly-paced linear time and the mediation of a sound object's meaning through juxtaposition and 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. (Tradition necessitates also shouting out some abstract expressionist painters here, but I'd prefer not to invoke the constructed narrative of that movement as Manly Man Art By Drunken Philandering Manly Men. So, Lee Krasner?)
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. In 2025, her piece "Preemptive Notion" for live electronics was presented at the SPLICE Institute at Western Michigan University, following a heady week of workshop tutelage under luminaries including Anne La Berge, Per Bloland, Ted Moore, and Sam Wells; later that year it was reprised at the University of Louisville New Music Festival. In 2026, she made a semi-triumphant return to SPLICE, featuring the premiere of "Splinters of Messianic Time" for double bass and electronics by Jack Synoski and a measured degree of fumbling with breadboards under the tutelage of Levy Lorenzo. She also likes to improvise with synthesizers in so-called DIY venues.
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 in May 2022. In May 2026, she completed a Master of Music degree in composition with an emphasis on electronic media at the University of Louisville under Krzysztof Wołek, on an assistantship backed by reams of sweet sweet NCAA [foot][basket]ball money that entangled her provenance with both Mitch McConnell and the dregs of the Darmstadt and post-Darmstadt worlds (in addition to various institutional and underground compositional and musicological legacies of her home country). She is currently pursuing doctoral study at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music under Carl Jacobson and Mara Helmuth.
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. 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 spiritual and magickal practice are of course far too sensitive to be shared here. 🜃
SHORT BIO:
Born in Easton, Maryland, and raised in Greater Baltimore, Cincinnati-based electroacoustic provocatrix of melancholy Ayla Cosnett’s practices of composition and improvisation first grew from the desire for her precocious experiences with the electric guitar to be supplanted by the electronics emerging from the instrument, transcending its heteropatriarchal trappings. She has since drawn from and ultimately sought to destroy the tensions witnessed in her liminal position between academic electroacoustics and DIY "noise”, variously engaging with these ideological inheritances, the psychogeography of the Upper South, the perpetual flux of queer and female identity, [post-]internet culture and aesthetics, and the history and (her) practice of so-called Western esotericism. Her work has been presented at the 2021 SEAMUS conference and the 2025 and 2026 iterations of the SPLICE Institute, alongside locales of less institutional prestige and/or baggage where she might be seen making synthesizers produce various timbres of agony. Cosnett's past teachers have included Dan Ryan, Benjamin Buchanan, McGregor Boyle, Sam Pluta, and Krzysztof Wołek. She holds degrees in electronic music from the Peabody Conservatory (BM '22) and the University of Louisville (MM '26), and is currently a doctoral student in composition at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music under Carl Jacobson and Mara Helmuth. 🜃
