About

Adam Buffington is a performing composer and musicologist traversing the boundaries between practitioner and scholar. Specializing in contemporary art and music in Iceland, as well as Fluxus and later 20th-century developments, his research focuses on issues concerning interdisciplinarity, transnationalism, historiography, and aesthetics.

His research has been published in Myndlist á Íslandi, Current Musicology and Artzine.is, and has been presented at the American Musicological Society, Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study, Dark Music Days Festival, Iceland University of the Arts and the Hartt School of Music. A close collaborator of interdisciplinary artist Magnús Pálsson, Buffington is currently the Editor & Senior Writer of a comprehensive monograph on Pálsson’s oeuvre. The book’s projected publication date is autumn 2026.

Alongside visual artist Tumi Magnússon, Buffington is the co-founder of Mumbling Eye, an independent record label dedicated to the publication of rare and unreleased Icelandic sound art. Mumbling Eye’s releases Gapassipi and Enginn Gleypir Sólina (both sound installations by Pálsson) have been featured in I Care If You Listen, Medium, Bridge, and Scandinavian Studies, and have been broadcasted by Resonance FM (London, UK), Montez Press Radio (New York City, USA), RÚV (Reykjavik, Iceland) and Helsinki Open Waves (Helsinki, Finland), amongst others.

Buffington earned a Ph.D. in Historical Musicology from The Ohio State University in 2020, and is currently based in Reykjavik, Iceland.