About

Adam Buffington is a composer and musicologist traversing the boundaries between practitioner and scholar. Specializing in contemporary art and music in Iceland, his research focuses on issues concerning interdisciplinarity, transnationalism, historiography and aesthetics. His artistic practice, rooted in musique concrète and DIY underground aesthetics, is an ongoing exploration of memory and identity’s entanglements with material and sonic culture.

His research has been published in Art in Iceland and Current Musicology, and has been presented at the American Musicological Society, Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study, Dark Music Days Festival, Fondazione Arthur Craven, Iceland University of the Arts and the Hartt School of Music.

Alongside visual artist Tumi Magnússon, Buffington is the co-founder of Mumbling Eye, a record label dedicated to the publication of Icelandic sound art. Mumbling Eye’s releases 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 Musicology from The Ohio State University in 2020. He is currently based in Reykjavik, Iceland.