Luke Wyland is an interdisciplinary artist, composer, and performer based in Portland, OR (USA). Wyland has been releasing critically acclaimed records for the past 20 years in the groups AU and Methods Body, as LWW, and under his own name, working with such labels as New Amsterdam, Beacon Sound, Balmat, The Leaf Label, and Aagoo Records.
As a person who stutters, Wyland’s approach to music is informed by his idiosyncratic relationship with language. Wyland believes deeply in the cathartic power of live performance as a means for collective healing. Through an interdisciplinary art practice that focuses on improvisation, somatic embodiment, bespoke tuning systems, the cadences of disfluent speech, and time manipulation technologies, he’s collaborated with choreographers, high-school choirs, filmmakers, sound designers, and renowned musicians such as John Niekrasz, Holland Andrews, Colin Stetson, and Abraham Gomez-Delgado. He’s also the co-creator of the It’s A Fucking Miracle dance class with Tahni Holt.
Wyland has toured nationally and internationally and performed at the Whitney Museum, Ecstatic Music Festival, Issue Project Room, PICA’s Time-Based Arts Festival, End of the Road Festival, and Les Nuits Botanique, among others.
His current duo, Methods Body, is a collaboration with virtuosic drummer John Niekrasz. They’ve released two critically acclaimed records on New Amsterdam Records and Beacon Sound. methodsbody.bandcamp.com
The Oregon Contemporary Museum commissioned Methods Body for their 2024 Artist’s Biennial to create Covert/Overt, a piece celebrating speech diversity through the lens of people who stutter. Methods Body interviewed people from Portland and abroad, drawing musical inspiration from the rhythmic fingerprints and cadences of different individuals’ disfluencies. Covert/Overt employs technological refraction and acoustic syllabic mirroring to share and expand upon some aspects of what it’s like communicating with different forms of verbal disfluency.
In 2016, Wyland was commissioned to compose for and perform with the 155 singers of the Camas High School Choir program for a run of shows throughout the northwest US, including at PICA's Time Based Arts Festival. Watch the live performance HERE.
He has also been composing music for modern dance for the past 15 years, most notably with choreographer Tahni Holt (Duet Love and Sensation/Disorientation - which was recently re-staged for Spotlight: USA - A Platform of American Dance in Bulgaria).
Luke owns and operates a studio where he has brought his unique voice as a composer to works for film and commercials, including spots for Subaru, Apple, Coca-Cola, Kia, Gatorade, Stouffers, and American Airlines, to name a few.
His original scores can be found in such documentaries as 101 Seconds, and TELOS: The Fantastic World of Eugene Tssui.
He is also an arts advocate and organizer working in collaboration with Young Audiences of Oregon and SW Washington and Ethan Chessin on the 'Business of Music' curriculum that connects composers, promoters, record labels, venues, and designers with local schools to educate students on the numerous opportunities and careers within the music world.