JG Everest

Minneapolis-based Composer / Designer / Director JG Everest is a multi-disciplinary artist who has been innovating models of community engagement for decades, named a McKnight Composers Fellow in 2019. In 2016 he founded Wavelets Creative, an integrative community arts organization, and as Artistic Director has developed a new interdisciplinary immersive model for community engagement he calls "Sound Gardens". His integrative arts practice and community wellness initiatives have led him to the emerging field of NeuroArts, and a desire to explore and better understand the "how" and "why" his spatial sound and music compositions seems to have such profound neurological effects when applied in his work.

New technology such as wireless bluetooth speakers have allowed Everest to play with spatial composition and sound design in ways that weren’t possible just 10-15 years ago, and over the course of the past 10 years, he has designed a new “instrument” for delivering his spatial “symphonies” in outdoor natural settings, wirelessly immersed in nature. His complex, multi-layered approach springs from a desire to engage audiences in new, meaningful ways, and is rooted in a decades-long mindfulness meditation practice that illuminates the interconnectedness of all things. In 2023, he founded Sound Garden Arts, for the purpose of expanding awareness, access, and the reach of this new experiential healing modality, as a new kind of medicine for our times.

Sound Garden sound scores are composed spatially, "in 3-D", and played back through 70+ small, wireless speakers, each playing a different part of the whole piece of music, spread throughout 1-4 acres of outdoor, natural space, housed in a variety of handmade vessels (wooden birdhouses, felt sculptures). Live Sound Garden performances often feature site-specific dance, poetry, storytelling, visual art, and live roving accompaniment by the Free Range Orchestra and Choir. Everest collaborates with naturalists, historians, park rangers, librarians, educators, and other artists to design and assemble these site-specific placemaking events in a variety of communities, and has presented Sound Gardens across Minnesota and Wisconsin, as well as in California, Massachusetts, Canada, and the U.K.

He has been working with the Bakken Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota's School of Nursing in Minneapolis, in offering new healing and wellness experiences to the local community and local organizations.