“Mr. Lamar plumbs the depths of all-American trauma with visionary verve.”
The New York Times

“Through his music, he has commented on the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, slave ships, and lynching.”
Vice Magazine

“Lamar’s Goth-postpunk-diva affect is fused with his operatic style to create a mélange that cannot be named.”
– KQED

“M Lamar….one of my top three most-goth-who-ever-lived.”
Ron Athey

“When talking about his art, Lamar is an intellectual powerhouse, but his work is informed by that thinking — not constrained by it. It is as emotional as it is thoughtful.”
– Out Magazine

“as though not content with selling his soul to the devil, in the manner of the blues guitarist Robert Johnson, [M. Lamar] is the devil.”
-Wall Street Journal

“M. Lamar, performs songs that are a cross stylistically between operatic excess, old-fashioned Negro spirituals and demonic possession”
-Ottawa Citizen.

“[H]e deconstructs the persona of the diva even as he wraps himself in divalike hauteur.”
– Hilton Als, The New Yorker
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M. Lamar is a composer who works across opera, metal, performance, video, sculpture and installation to craft sprawling narratives of radical becomings. Lamar 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 The Rewire Festival in The Hague, Trauma Bar Berlin, Atrium na Žižkově Prague, The Manhattan School of Music, Wellcome Collection London, The Cloisters at The Metropolitan Museum Of Art, Funkhaus Berlin Germany, Kunstgebäude Stuttgart, The Meet Factory in Prague, National Sawdust New York, The Kitchen New York, MoMa PS1’s Greater New York, Merkin Hall, New York, Issue Project Room New York, The Walter and McBean Galleries, San Francisco; Human resources, Los Angeles;Wesleyan University; 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.

Mr. Lamar continues to study classical and bel canto technique with Ira Siff, and is a recipient of a 2016 Jerome Fund Grant for New Music (JFund), a 2016 NYFA Fellowship in Music and Sound and grants from Material Vodka 2016, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation (2015), Harpo Foundation (2014-2015), and Franklin Furnace Fund (2013–14).