SPRING RESIDENCY SHOWCASE 2025

Rusty Colton is a musician and songwriter based in Charlotte, NC with a focus on subtractive composition and experimental and ambient guitar work.

Over the course of this residency, he has challenged himself to directly look at and draw from the grief of losing his mother– specifically the deep fear of slowly forgetting or losing confidence in the validity of one’s memories of the deceased, effectively losing them all over again. The work has manifested in three discrete musical pieces that illustrate not only the varied and complicated patchwork of sentiments that make up familial love and loss, but also his varied musical and creative interests. The time and physical space afforded by residency has allowed him to stay disciplined in the work and navigate these difficult emotions in an unmitigated way, promoting a free-flowing, emergent initial composition process, followed by an intentional and self-examinatory editing phase. The resulting pieces and their connected found object Bonfires are frank, bare, and occasionally harsh, but always informed by the love one can only feel when they can no longer deliver it directly to its recipient.