Philippe Landry

Born in Saint Martinville, Louisiana, Philippe Landry is a self-taught composer, multi-instrumentalist, and visual, video, and performance artist. Philippe has collaborated twice with choreographer Paige Krause, composing and performing the music for her large-scale dance-installation piece, I've Stopped Having That Dream I've Been Having; it premiered as an excerpt in the spring of 2011 at the Acadiana Center for the Arts in Lafayette, Louisiana, and was then expanded for a second installment in the fall of 2011. He and the dance collective that he composes for and performs with have been chosen to perform in June at Fringe 2012 in Montreal. Landry also releases music under the name the Cake Dancers, his latest albums being Negro Music, Home Of The Ponies, and Triadic Prelude.

Philippe's approach to composition involves a varied range of instrumentation and techniques. His score for dance was composed for various tape loops, effects, harmonium, piano, contact microphones, glockenspiels, bowed psaltry, penny whistle and voice, with the compositions moving in and out of primitive drone chanting, tape looping and manipulation, piano tone-clustering and motifs, and minor-key jazz vocals. Landry's recorded work utilizes field recordings, reel-to-reel analog cut-ups and editing, chance, improvisation, tape collage, free jazz, spoken word, folk, and generative music.

In addition, Philippe has collaborated with visual artist Brian Guidry, exhibiting a mixed media installation at Good Children Gallery in New Orleans, and contributed sound design to visual artist Adrien Price's mixed media installation at Madame John's Legacy as part of the Prospect 1.5 biennial in New Orleans. He has also taken part in the Difficult Music series curated by Maggie McKweon at McKeown's Rare Books & Difficult Music in New Orleans. Philippe also exhibits various performance-based installations, which blend video, sound, and visual art. His work has been discussed in Gambit Weekly.

He holds a Bachelors in Anthropology from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and has done graduate-level research on right-wing political culture in early-20th century France, including presenting a paper on culture and nationalism at the Western Society for French History 2010 annual conference.