Suzanne Thorpe is a performer, composer, educator and arts-activist who strives for breakthroughs in understanding via sonic signals.

From 1989 to 2001, she was a founding member of Mercury Rev, an internationally acclaimed band with which she composed, performed, recorded, produced, and toured, earning critical praise and a gold record for 1998's Deserters' Songs. Upon leaving the band, Thorpe continued her work as an electroacoustic flutist, extending her instrument with an increasingly diverse set-up of analogue and digital software components while partnering with a variety of musicians. Her recent compositions, multi-channel works that employ psycho-acoustic phenomena, aural harmonics and tuned filtering systems, have been performed at Issue Project Room (New York), Diapason (New York), Activating the Medium Festival (San Francisco), Anne St. Gallery (New York), Megapolis Festival (Baltimore), among other venues.

As an improviser she has performed with Chris Brown, Annette Krebs, Maggie Nicols, Fred Frith, Pauline Oliveros, Gino Robair, Zeena Parkins, Ulrich Krieger, Miya Masaoka, Zbigniew Karkowski, Anti-Matter, Chris Cogburn, Mike Bullock, Bonnie Jones, Bhob Rainey, David Dove and more at venues such as The Stone (NYC), No Idea Festival (Austin, TX), Pyramid Atlantic Center for the Arts (Silver Spring, MD), L'envers (Montreal, Canada), White Box (NYC), LMAK (NYC), 21 Grand (Oakland, CA), The Luggage Store (San Francisco, CA), Greenwich Music House (NYC), and Albany Sonic Arts Collective (Albany, NY) to name a few.

Her research in telematics, developed while earning her MFA in Electronic Music and Media at Mills College, was presented at ARTECH 2008 in Porto, Portugal, and earned her the Frog Peak Collective Award. She was a participant in ResoNations, an international telematic concert-for-peace performed by twenty-six renowned musicians simltaneously at United Nations Headquarters in New York, University of California San Diego, The Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada, Queens University Belfast, and Dongguk University in Seoul, on November 21, 2009. She has received grants and fellowships from Meet the Composer and NYFA.

Thorpe has released over 20 recordings on labels such as Sony, V2, Beggars Banquet, Geffen, Specific Recordings, and Tape Drift. Currently she is one half of the duo thenumber46 with feedback artist Philip White. Together they released Bleach & Ammonia and perform whenever they can. Upcoming Thorpe can be heard as 1/4 of an exciting new quartet, Volume, featuring Shelley Burgon (electroacoustic harp), Maria Chavez (turntables) and Stephan Moore (laptop), and on J Mascis' solo recording, Spring 2011.

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