About us
Nraakors is the brainchild of James Kasper, Joseph Norman, and Gigi Macabre. Their music includes aspects of grunge, prog, noise rock, thrash metal, jazz fusion, folk, neoclassical, and free improv. The result is a bit like the composers; weird, a bit roughhewn, somewhat sentimental, and equal parts sardonic and sincere.
Gigi Macabre
Lyricist and lead singer
Gigi Macabre is a singer/songwriter who has made their way to Iowa after a long journey from Arizona and South Dakota. Gigi grew up on a steady diet of classic rock, grunge, punk, and heavy metal, along with more classical training in piano and trumpet. Living a feral and nomadic life, Gigi has written about many of their experiences and chooses to explore life through song as often as possible, as they don’t recall a time when music wasn’t shaping their world. Gigi cares deeply about social equity, and many of the themes they explore involve the addressing of sociopolitical inequity, as well as explorations in the human experience, such as overcoming trauma, grief, loss, and overcoming barriers for personal development. Gigi enjoys the study of science, psychology, politics, religion, cults, horror, and true crime.
Joseph Norman
Composer and lead guitarist
Joseph Norman completed the Doctoral Degree in Music Composition at the University of Iowa in 2019. During his studies there he had been also Research Assistant/Composer/Sound Technician to the Department of Dance. In 2020 he was Visiting Lecturer at Grinnell College where taught digital music. His music has been performed at the Exchange of Midwest Collegiate Composers UMKC and University of Colorado in Boulder, the Midwest Composers Symposium in the University of Michigan and the Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music, SCI at the University of Iowa, and the Alba Music Festival in Alba, Italy. He has also had works read and premiered by the JACK Quartet, Accroche Note, LIGAMENT, Sonic Apricity, the Center for New Music at the University of Iowa, and LOUi, the Lap Top Orchestra also from University of Iowa. Additionally, he has composed collaboratively with actors, dancers, choreographers, and filmmakers. He is also active as a performer with experimental music duo Aligned at Variance and has taken part in IRCAM's Electroacoustic workshop in 2017.
Joseph's music explores novel formal conceptions that involve organizations/transformations of multiple strata. These layers differentiate, recontextualize, and evolve towards individuated trajectories. Each stratum can comprise one of myriad parameters from pitch, timbre, time, texture, space, register, to density. Aesthetically, he values music that evokes visceral reactions and exhibits sonically transformative qualities.
James Kasper
After spending the first half of his life trying to become a physicist, James Kasper spends the second half as a wood firing ceramist. Through all of this he has carried his love for music playing bass with bands when possible, playing acoustic guitar and singing at almost every party, and composing when not. Having taken piano and cello lessons in his youth, he was exposed to classical music before taking up bass and listening to rock. With that Pandora’s box opened, he moved on to listening to prog rock, jazz, klezmer, early music, and other genres, all of which show up in his playing and composing.
In 2019, facing the possibility of a terminal disease, he decided to take time to complete some of his original music and record it. Although his instrumental pieces were originally composed for piano, those works were always envisioned as small group pieces for acoustic instruments. His first roadblock was his lack of skill for doing this. And he realized that the second impediment was writer’s block to complete the music and lyrics for his rock songs. James happily connected with Joseph Norman and Gigi Macabre later in 2019. The three of them formed nraakors and with the help of local Iowa friends created the album “Hoppel Poppel.”
Jonathan Wilson
Composer
Jonathan is an artist whose works as a composer have been exposed to the public through national and international conferences in the US and around the world. Growing up in the Midwest, he has been devoted to electronic and classical music, with a love for improvisation that stems from his experiences as a saxophonist in jazz bands since the beginning of the century. He has reciprocated his warm affections for spontaneity not just through jazz bands, but also solo performances, duos, even laptop orchestras, more often than not through electroacoustic music. His music cannot entirely escape, however, the buoyant flair of 1960s-80s pop music that was always around during his childhood (e.g. the Beatles, the BeeGees, the Eagles, Huey Lewis and the News, Elvis, and Michael Jackson). It was, more so, his exposure just before college to Mahler, Stravinsky, and Bartok (especially Mahler) that spearheaded an everlasting quest to create worlds out of music.
Those worlds are not painted a single shade of color. They are dabbed sometimes with traditional harmonies and musical structures, and sometimes they are coated with enigma, music that is not so tightly rooted in the environs of common knowledge. What one piece of music or another is depends on the concept in the composer's mind, what the driving force or idea is behind it. Those very concepts are not excluded to music. They have flourished from interests in other areas of the arts, such as classical and Russian literature, films from the Golden Age of Hollywood, the theatrical works of Shakespeare and Ibsen, contemporary dance, and English poetry from the Elizabethans to the Romantics. This fascination with uniting multiple areas of the arts into musical self-expression is tied into his love for writing.
He has written a novel called Dreams of Chains (to be released in the near future) and 10 closet plays, most of them being introspective and philosophical in scope. They all play an important part in realizing the symbiosis of an individual's artistic identity, where an artist's oneness is the sum of all his interests.
Jonathan’s works have been performed at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, European Media Art Festival, the Experimental Superstars Film Festival, the Big Muddy Film Festival, ICMC, SEAMUS, NYCEMF, NSEME, the Iowa Music Teachers Association State Conference, and the Midwest Composers Symposium. He is the winner of the 2014 Iowa Music Teachers Association Composition Competition. Jonathan has studied composition with Lawrence Fritts, Josh Levine, David Gompper, James Romig, James Caldwell, Paul Paccione, and John Cooper. In addition, studies in conducting have been taken under Richard Hughey and Mike Fansler. Jonathan is a member of Society of Composers, Inc., SEAMUS, ICMA, Iowa Composers Forum, and American Composers Forum.