Pitchfork Review of Funeral Doom SpiritualWith Funeral Doom Spiritual, the male soprano M. Lamar has pulled off another one of these stylistic escapes from all the previous, expected forms. And he has done so … by grabbing and juxtaposing vocal-production ideas from folk lamentation, European opera, and contemporary metal. This odd mix isn’t the product of an ironic mindset. Lamar is clearly aware, and respectful, of more typical approaches to the African-American religious songbook—including those by operatic sopranos. Though he also knows that exploration is part of the spiritual tradition, too.  Read More

A Goth Male Soprano Who Plumbs the DarknessThe hourlong “Funeral Doom Spiritual” … is fueled by the anger and sadness of the Black Lives Matter movement. But instead of explicit protest, this otherworldly, goth-tinged projection into the distant future of our violent, racially and sexually charged present offers a space of melancholic, alluring, ultimately stirring reflection.  Read More

Fully Cocked:
Provocateur M. Lamar Reclaims African-American Male Sexuality in New ShowAn African-American intellectual, composer, and artistic provocateur who analyzes sex and race in society, Lamar wears spiky leather jackets and gloves, heavy eye shadow and lipstick, and hair that is straight and shoulder-length. Lamar looks, sounds, and acts like few other people in the art world…  Read More

A Punishing Perspective: M. Lamar’s ‘Negrogothic’Negrogothic is epic, with videos, still images, sculpture and performance that engage in the way disenfranchised bodies intersect with power, social order and history. And the audience is a participatory spectator.  Read More

M. Lamar in the New York TimesWith Negrogothic, a Manifesto, the Aesthetics of M. Lamar, the composer M. Lamar offers a bracing alternative to the dispiriting traffic in blandly competent art clogging the New York gallery system these days. Surrealistic, campy and ferociously expressionist, Mr. Lamar’s multimedia work is a heady blend of music, performance, film and political allegory that grapples with the legacy of slavery in America.  Read More

The Plantation Is Still Here: Inside M. Lamar’s ‘Negrogothic, A Manifesto’“The plantation is still here. The slave ship is still here. It’s just now in prisons. My work makes these connections.” That’s how the artist, musician, and performer M. Lamar explains his provocative exhibition Negrogothic, a Manifesto: The Aesthetics of M. Lamar, which is currently on view at Participant Inc. in New York.  Read More

Exploring M. Lamar’s ‘Negro Gothic Sensibility’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.  Read More

Even though most music performers are referred to as “artists,” M. Lamar really earns the title. Lamar seems interested less in conventional songcraft and more with creating, for lack of a better word, “pieces.”  Read More

M. Lamar in The Huffington Post:Well I think the most important thing about me is that I am an artist… For me it’s all about what one does as opposed to what one might be oriented towards doing… I just want to speak to the truth of my experience. The truth I believe is outside orientation and it’s about behavior and ultimately sexual freedom outside of a label and, of course, being a practicing artist — living one’s life as art.  Read More

M. Lamar in The New Yorker: If there’s such a thing as a post-structuralist, transgendering singer, it’s M. Lamar. While songs are his métier, he’s ultimately a performance artist who celebrates and parodies the very idea of the chanteuse: he deconstructs the persona of the diva even as he wraps himself in divalike hauteur…  Read More

Lamar holds and trills his guttural utterances with the marvelous fortitude and surety of a Nina Simone or a Patty Waters. Wearing his blackademia on his form-fitted leather sleeves with equally tight-ass jeans, Lamar places the listener into often uncomfortable situations. I thought at times, bloody black fetuses might climb out of the piano’s guts, slither downstage, sit and stare accusingly at me. Like Kara Walker, or David Hammons, Lamar confronts with history, shuns with narrative, pricks our noses with shameless recall, all the while smiling, his eyes turned to the floor, waiting.

The singer and pianist M. Lamar, who is black and approaches gender through the lens of race and does it in a highly entertaining fashion.

His haunting counter tenor is reminiscent of the vocal stylings of Diamanda Galas, and the experience of listening to him sing about ‘white pussy for sale’ is rather unsettling.

The singular artist M. Lamar is a classically trained counter tenor whose brilliant original work is in the unabashedly political yet emotionally powerful tradition of artists like Diamanda Galas and Paul Robeson. He also has a sense of humor, and the songs, with titles like ‘That Obscure Object of Desire’ and ‘Exploitation Chic,’ can be sexy, funny, angry, and sad, often all at the same time.

This songwriter was born to appear in a David Lynch film, sounding like an operatic loon trapped in a piano.