Dr. Nat Grant is a sound artist and producer working on unceded Wurundjeri country in Melbourne, Australia, with more than 15 years experience across live performance, recording, digital arts, and community arts: a drummer, percussionist, and composer with a focus on creating multidisciplinary, long-form musical compositions, performance events and installations using traditional and graphic notation as well as improvisation.
Nat works, and has worked, in a wide range of mentoring and teaching roles that both inform and are informed by experiences as a composer and performer. Nat is involved in a number of community networks and forums that help strengthen connections between different communities, and particularly those that increase the presence of women and gender minority artists and musicians. Nat’s Hey Drums project has featured interviews with more than 160 Australian female and gender diverse drummers since 2016, and the six season strong Prima Donna podcast, winner of a Victorian Community History award, features sonic portraits of pioneering Australian female artists from all disciplines, in their 60s and older.
As a composer Nat has created original chamber music, durational sound art works, has composed and created sound design for theatre, dance, film, and live art, and in 2018 received the Age Music Victoria award for best Experimental/Avant-Garde Act. As a teaching artist Nat has been involved in projects with a number of community groups including the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, Footscray Community Arts Centre, and the Crashendo! Sistema program. A podcaster and programmer for 3CR community radio, Nat is interested in the power of sound and music as storytelling tools, and invested in creating and maintaining community around sound making.
Nat performs regularly at venues around Melbourne and has also presented creative and academic work internationally, at the Sound: Gender: Feminism: Activism conference in Tokyo, in Hong Kong and China with fellow sound artists the Amplified Elephants, the Percussive Arts Society’s Annual Convention and two Y2K live looping festivals in the US. Nat has attended artist residencies in Melbourne and Mexico, and has had work presented in galleries in Australia, New Zealand, and Norway. Collaboration is key to much of Nat’s work, including previous and current partnerships with Jolt Arts, the Adam Simmons’ Creative Music Ensemble, and Liquid Architecture.
Nat works, and has worked, in a wide range of mentoring and teaching roles that both inform and are informed by experiences as a composer and performer. Nat is involved in a number of community networks and forums that help strengthen connections between different communities, and particularly those that increase the presence of women and gender minority artists and musicians. Nat’s Hey Drums project has featured interviews with more than 160 Australian female and gender diverse drummers since 2016, and the six season strong Prima Donna podcast, winner of a Victorian Community History award, features sonic portraits of pioneering Australian female artists from all disciplines, in their 60s and older.
As a composer Nat has created original chamber music, durational sound art works, has composed and created sound design for theatre, dance, film, and live art, and in 2018 received the Age Music Victoria award for best Experimental/Avant-Garde Act. As a teaching artist Nat has been involved in projects with a number of community groups including the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, Footscray Community Arts Centre, and the Crashendo! Sistema program. A podcaster and programmer for 3CR community radio, Nat is interested in the power of sound and music as storytelling tools, and invested in creating and maintaining community around sound making.
Nat performs regularly at venues around Melbourne and has also presented creative and academic work internationally, at the Sound: Gender: Feminism: Activism conference in Tokyo, in Hong Kong and China with fellow sound artists the Amplified Elephants, the Percussive Arts Society’s Annual Convention and two Y2K live looping festivals in the US. Nat has attended artist residencies in Melbourne and Mexico, and has had work presented in galleries in Australia, New Zealand, and Norway. Collaboration is key to much of Nat’s work, including previous and current partnerships with Jolt Arts, the Adam Simmons’ Creative Music Ensemble, and Liquid Architecture.
"Diversity of sound is an important ingredient in the work. Sound designer Nat Grant has the Midas touch, making each moment count."
Alex First - The Blurb
"The flame of intrigue starts to burn at the half way point of the recording, and what was hinted at so subtly in the first fifteen seconds begins to emerge. It’s a slow reveal, and it gradually increases in speed. It becomes more than just the dialog of a drum set. The dialog achieves a richness that has subtlety as its foundation, where the addition of textures, though dramatic at times, burn brightest as nuance, and are best viewed not in how they drive the conversation, but, instead, how they surround it."
- Bird is The Worm
"What truly brings the play together is the music. Sound designer Nat Grant knows exactly how much to play: when there should be silence and when a soundtrack could bring it all together."
- Irene Bell in The Music
Cover image by Yunis Tmeizeh
I respectfully acknowledge the wisdom of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and their custodianship of the lands and waterways.