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 inner northern suburbs of Baltimore, Ayla Cosnett’s practice of electronic music grew gradually 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. Drawing on the perpetual flux of her queer identity and a history of its spiritual antecedents broader than afforded by present narrative trends, successive generations of Internet culture, feminist psychoanalysis, chaos magic, the haunting of prehistory (as hopefully divorced from its recuperation towards the mediation of bonsai-trained sexuality), the psychogeography and culture of the Mid-Atlantic states, 1950s B-movies, weird old computers, and the illusions of time and identity in an era of Trafalmadorian spectacle collapsing in on itself, her music conducts a dérive through the tonalities of pioneering electronic radicals (cf. David Tudor, Pauline Oliveros, Dick Raaijmakers, Daphne Oram, Louis and Bebe Barron, Vladimir Ussachevsky, İlhan Mimaroğlu, other people with names), digital artifacts of the "irrationally exuberant" fin-de-siècle and its shadow over the second Bush era, and sundry spring reverb enthusiasts, interpreted through a montage sensibility inspired by classical musique concrète and the "jam and edit" philosophy of early 1970s Can and Miles Davis.
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 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 (a constituent school of Johns Hopkins University, The City That Reads' great iron lung) under Benjamin Buchanan, McGregor Boyle, Geoffrey Wright, and Sam Pluta, earning a Bachelor of Music degree with honors and the school's James Winship Lewis Memorial Prize in May 2022. She is currently preparing to begin graduate study at the University of Louisville.
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, and Van Dyke Parks once replied to a comment she left on an Instagram post.
*Ms./Mx. Cosnett identifies as femme-aligned third gender; given of the lack of suitable pronouns for this identity, they/she uses they/she pronouns, and of course if you give people a choice between they and either he or she they'll always pick the latter so why even bother :'( maybe they oughtta come up with their own and throw notions of "cringe" to the wind
