bio / statement
Improvisation is the focal point of my art; a rhizome of genre, context, impulse, and materials. I thrive on orchestrating moments for improvisation to shine, while teetering on collapse at any level. I create ephemeral happenings that engage audiences in witnessing my success and failure as a performer.
My creative practice unfurls from a traditional drum set into gestural performance art, kinetic sculpture, textiles, and video. My career has moved through entertainment jazz gigs to punk/DIY tours, chamber concerts, composer commissions, dance & film collaborations, and art installations. I aim to elevate improvisational music with visual and spatial dimensions, drawing on traditions of classical music while embracing the provocations of contemporary art. I define my extramusical work in galleries, squats, museums, and artist-run spaces where I can corral and guide components that fluctuate on intersecting axes of space, time, acoustics, and culture. Moving between institutions, art scenes, musical styles, and mediums helps me sustain one seamless, transient voice that animates all of my work. I am motivated by a living, unnamable material that connects each endeavor.
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My work has reached international audiences. Highlights include solo performances at The Getty Center, LACMA, Fylkingen (Stockholm), Billedhoggerforening (Oslo), Bergen Kunsthall, Yarn/Wire International Festival (New York), Audio Foundation (New Zealand), and Mengi (Reykjavik). I have presented my original compositions at the New Music for Strings Festival / (Reykjavik), Café OTO (London), and Zebulon (Los Angeles). I have been an instrumental collaborator with musicians such as Julia Holter, Patty Waters, Simone Forti, Tashi Wada, Judith Berkson, and Todd Barton, at Meakusma Festival (Belgium), Rewire Festival (Netherlands), Roskilde Festival (Copenhagen), Redcat (Los Angeles), MoCA Geffen (Los Angeles), Knockdown Center (New York), and many others. My recorded discography spans more than two decades, including releases on Domino, RVNG Intl, 4AD, Post Present Medium, and Geomancy Records. I have presented solo exhibitions in multiple galleries throughout Los Angeles, including Graphic Score Facsimiles at Human Resources (2021), Bacecik Batteri with Redling Fine Art (2017), Theater of Haecceity at Montevista Projects (2016), My work has also appeared in group exhibitions such as Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. (2012), Redling Fine Art, Cirrus Gallery, and SeeLine Gallery.
My career has been supported by residencies and awards from The Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center (2023); Foundation House, Greenwich, CT (2023); Time, Space, Money program, Human Resources Los Angeles (2021); UC Irvine Research Grants (2018, 2020); California Community Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2014); Cannonball, Miami (2013), Atlantic Center for the Arts, (2008, 2013); SWAP Artist Residency, SPACES Gallery, Cleveland, OH (2011); STEIM Interactive Technologies (2007); American Composers’ Forum (2007); and Diverseworks, Houston, TX (2003).
I earned my B.Mus. in Jazz Performance/Percussion at Arizona State University (2001), my MFA at the California Institute of the Arts (2004), and my Ph.D. at UC Irvine (2023)
more standard bio
Corey Fogel (b 1977) is a composer, drummer, and artist based in Los Angeles. He works across genre and medium to explore many facets of improvisation. He approaches sounds, textiles, collaborators, gestures, and objects as viable materials for spontaneous, strategized, time-based experimental performance, often incorporating sculpture, video, music traditions, theatricality, and ritual.
Fogel performs and composes in many rock, jazz, noise, folk, and chamber music capacities. He can be heard on over one hundred recordings as a percussionist. His compositions range from collaborative media scores to aleatoric ensemble compositions which use a combination of traditional and novel notation. For two decades, he has worked with alternative music notation, creating innovative and novel systems that encode and visualize the behaviors that comprise musicians’ improvisational vocabulary. His scores use digital design techniques to represent sonic trajectories, relational dynamics, and situationism in space. Once an exclusive transaction between composer and performer, this work has grown into site-specific, immersive mural paintings for an expanded audience. This creative activity became the subject of his doctoral dissertation, entitled Graphic Score On Trial - The Utility and Emergence of a Transciplinary Linguistic.
Fogel’s works have been presented at Machine Project, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Human Resources, Los Angeles; Redling Fine Art, Los Angeles; The Wulf, Los Angeles; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Oaxaca, REDCAT; Los Angeles; and New Music for Strings Festival: Reykjavik. His performance work was also included in J. Paul Getty Museum’s Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival and West of Rome’s Trespass Parade. Corey was awarded The California Community Foundation 2014 Fellowship in Visual Arts. He recently earned his Ph.D. in UC Irvine's Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology (ICIT) program.
Recent collaborations include: Julia Holter, Tashi Wada, Phil Minton, Patty Waters, Abigail Levine, Simone Forti, Judith Berkson, Yoshi Wada, Michael Winter, Robert Blatt, Maya Dunietz, John Butcher, John Russell, Todd Barton, Misha Marks, Brian Allen, Alexander Bruck, Patrick Shiroishi, Haley Fohr, Liz Glynn, Chris Speed, Mark Dresser, Kathleen Kim, Ezra Buchla, Tony Malaby, Devin Hoff, John Dieterich, Carlin Wing, Sam Mickens.