Bio

Justin Wright is a composer, cellist, and multidisciplinary artist from Montreal. Wright’s music is characterized by a seamless blending of avant-garde approaches and timbral experimentation with the evocative and meditative spirit of folk and sacred music traditions. Classical concert halls, underground loft venues, art museums, pop music venues, planetariums, and the glaciers of the High Arctic have all comfortably been home to his performances, a reflection of his defiance of traditional categorization and wide-ranging artistic interests. Wright’s primary composition tools, for both electronic and acoustic music, are his cello, Ableton Live, a modular synthesizer, and a 4-track tape machine. With a background in molecular biology research, Wright remained self-taught as composer until recently beginning his PhD in music composition at Princeton University.

A prolific collaborator whose partnerships include Jeremy Dutcher, Peter Broderick, Common Holly, and Mauritanian singer-songwriter Daby Toure, Wright was once dubbed the “ever-present Mile-End string king” by Cult MTL and “Montreal’s busiest cellist” by arts journalist Lisa Sproull. After beginning his eponymous solo project, he has shared the stage with artists such as Johann Johannsson, Lubomyr Melnyk, Thomas Mapfumo, Colin Stetson, Alexandra Streliski, Hauschka, Mount Eerie, Weyes Blood, Okkyung Lee, and Bing & Ruth, and has performed at the Montreal International Jazz Festival, MUTEK, Digital in Berlin, and Pop Montreal. He has written for ensembles such as Alarm Will Sound, JACK Quartet, and SO percussion. 

Lately, Wright has focused on filmmaking, early music, virtual reality, and in situ composition. His interactive compositions for virtual reality were exhibited at Montreal’s PHI Centre, and he is continuing to collaborate with McGill’s spatial audio research program. He is currently editing a short film documenting his travels to Svalbard, an archipelago close to the North Pole, and his attempts to serenade the glaciers with the most northerly cello performances in history. His next major project will involve improvising in paleolithic caves in Western Europe.

If you wish to contact him, email him at justin@justinwright.ca