Alec Schachner is an experimental multi-genre musician, performance artist and independent researcher/translator. Alec currently resides in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, where he has been living and working for the past five and a half years.

 

During his undergraduate career in New York City, Alec’s studies were focused on cross-cultural shamanic practices, contemporary poetry/poetics and various other avenues towards exploring the limits of human expression/perception. He graduated Columbia College with a degree in Sociocultural Anthropology, Comparative Literature, Music Theory and Creative Writing.

 

Alec moved to HCMC in 2008, securing a position as lecturer for the Department of English Linguistics and Literature at the National University of Social Sciences and Humanities. He attained advanced fluency in the Vietnamese language, pursuing independent research in contemporary Saigonese poetry/poetics, underground print culture and deterritorialized social milieus. Alec was an active participant in the Khoan Cắt Bê Tông artist collective, directing several performance art pieces in the slums of Thủ Đức district. Recently, he collaborated with nomadic artist Blu Wasem in a performance piece at Sasa Art Projects in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

 

Alec has played music since the age of eight, when he first began to study trumpet. He is now a devoted multi-instrumentalist, currently performing with several Saigon-based music groups in a variety of genres. His main instruments of choice are bass and percussion. Through a recent epiphany regarding the inherent organic nature of technology, Alec delved into electronic music, versing himself in digital and analog synthesis.

 

Alec is intrigued with the potential to harness cross-discipline artistic expression in order to move our global community towards a rhizomatic, decentralized and polyglottic future.

 

https://soundcloud.com/tr-l-k-sch-ch/brakmology