Beats & Beats Thursdays: Neil Young

Beats & Beats Thursdays invites local percussionists to perform freely in the exhibition’s gallery and engage with sonic and spoken dialogue around the work of Milford Graves.

Neil Young, sometimes also known as Neil ‘Cloaca’ Young (b. 1976) is an artist based in Los Angeles (aka Gabrielino-Tongva territory). An active improviser and collagist, Young’s output takes many forms as experimental cinema, audio recordings, compositions and performances, utilizing a variety of tools and media. A musician with no formal training but years of experience as a percussionist, noisemaker, and performer, Young’s solo and collaborative projects include: Bromp Treb, Fat Worm of Error, Gloyd, Carbus, Playbackers. Solo and in collaborations, Young has exhibited and performed at High Zero, ICA Boston, The Stone, EMPAC, Block Museum of Art, Rotterdam, NMAAHC, Ann Arbor Film Festival, SXSW, CPH:DOX, as well as countless basements, bars, lofts, living rooms, closets and art spaces all around North America and Europe.

As a filmmaker, Young has made many performance and collage films and videos of varying lengths, several shorts in collaboration with composer Jessica Pavone. His most widely-seen work is the feature-length portrait film Milford Graves: Full Mantis (2018) made in collaboration as co-director with friend and longtime Graves student Jake Meginsky. Awards for filmmaking include the Best International Documentary Award at In-Edit Barcelona and Best Documentary Feature at Oak Cliff as well as the Independent Vision Jury Prize at the Sarasota Film Festival. He has been awarded the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in film and has participated in residencies at Uncool in Switzerland, Signal Culture in upstate NY, and Deplayer in The Netherlands.