M. Lamar works across opera, metal, performance art, and video to craft sprawling narratives of radical racial and sexual transformation. The New York-based composer’s newest music theater piece, DESTRUCTION, for male soprano and piano with projections, is a song of mourning for "the motionless movement of death through slavery, segregation and neo-segregation”. Drawing on themes of apocalypse, end times, and rapture found in Negro Spirituals, the work explores radical historical expressions, and invokes long held and continued calls to end our current world order, synonymous with white supremacy. DESTRUCTION is a futuristic salvaging of the negro spirit in a destroyed western world in flames.
“Slavery to segregation to neosegregation is not progress, it is not even movement. Slavery is death and death is the end. But the motionless movement of death through slavery, segregation and neosegregation is not the end of death. The cycle of repetition, slavery-to-segregation-to-neosegregation, white-over-black to white-over-black to white-over-black, is not living; it is not life, it is only the imitation of life.”
— Anthony Paul Farley
M. Lamar, referring to himself as a "devil worshipping free black man in the blues tradition," holds a BFA from The San Francisco Art Institute and attended the Yale School of Art, sculpture program, before dropping out to pursue music. Lamar’s work has been presented internationally, most recently at Participant Inc., New York; New Museum, New York; Södra Teatern, Stockholm; Warehouse9, Copenhagen; WWDIS Fest, Gothenburg and Stockholm; The International Theater Festival, Donzdorf, Germany; Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, New York; Performance Space 122, New York; and African American Art & Culture Complex, San Francisco; among others. Lamar has had many years of classical vocal study with Ira Siff, among others; and is a recipient of the Franklin Furnace Fund Grant 2013–14 and a Harpo Foundation grant 2014-15.