“EXTR^CLUSION”

Julie Arlene Spencer composer/vocalist/
videographer Avi Béla Spencer-Blume composer/videographer/producer

EXTR^CLUSION” is a story of breaking out of the “Seclusion of hours and the inversion of days (that) sing still and slowly” during these pandemic times, and being carried “forward in a common wakelit haze” seemingly randomly, “but not really.”

Julie Arlene Spencer is a freelance American composer, musician and visual artist living in Germany. She studied Balinese and Javanese Gamelan, North Indian tabla, Ghanaian drumming, jazz composition, and classical percussion, and got her start writing music for a rock band, winning a radio song competition. Commissions have included new works and arrangements for conductors Lalo Schifrin, former music director of the Glendale Symphony, LA, Yu An Chang, former Asst. Conductor of the Boston Symphony, directing the Taipei Youth Orchestra, and most recently Laura Jackson of the Reno Philharmonic Orchestra.

Spencer has a life long musical collaboration with German composer and husband, Gernot Blume, and since 2020 with Avi Béla Spencer-Blume. New music, world music, jazz and percussion festival performances and premieres of Spencer’s music have been in Japan, Poland, Canada, the US, Germany, Croatia, Holland, and China, including Percussive Arts Society international conventions, the International Association of Jazz Educator’s national convention, the Green Umbrella Series of LA and the Stuttgart new music for percussion festival.

A graduate of Eastman and CalArts, Spencer is a recipient of private and corporate commissions, state, city and regional grants, and a National Endowment for the Arts jazz composition grant. 2021 premieres and recordings of music are scheduled for festivals in Poland, Taiwan and the US, and by Japanese, Chinese, and Canadian soloists featuring music for marimba and spoken rap lyrics. Spencer’s music has been recorded on more than a dozen CD’s and is published by Norsk Musikforlag of Oslo, Norway.

Avi Béla Spencer-Blume is active in freelance mixing, mastering, scoring, and EDM production. The diversity of his experiences come from a wide range of interests. He has cowritten and performed in a play with a theater group that was premiered in the Mainz Unterhaus, created theme music for an online business, worked as a DJ at a cultural festival, had a political internship in the EU Parliament in Brussels, worked as a professional event moderator, scored and produced music for video, done stand up comedy in a state poetry slam workshop performance, and written script for an educational political broadcast by Southwest German Radio and.

Current projects include a commission for 15 songs for an international meditation company and CD mastering. A student in American Studies and history at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Spencer-Blume has dual citizenship and is a language instructor for English and German at an international language institute in Wiesbaden, Germany.