Georgeis the Co-Founder and Director of the ARChive of Contemporary Music. The initial donation of 47,000 discs that began ARC came from his personal collection. Mr. George came to New York City in 1974 as a visual arts student at the Whitney Museum Studio Program. From 1975 to 1979, he co-directed performance artist Laurie Anderson’s stage show, and his record label, One Ten Records, released the first commercial compilation of audio work by visual artists, Airwaves, that included the initial recordings of Ms. Anderson and unreleased work by Meredith Monk. In 1980 he received a tiny National Endowment Grant to produce recordings by visual artists. He released Laurie Anderson’s first single “O’Superman,” on his independent One Ten Records, that reached #2 on the UK pop charts. He has produce singles and remixes for Dr. John, Orchestra Jazira (UK/Ghana) and Sonny Okuson (Nigeria).
As a consultant, Mr. George selected soundworks for the Paris Biennale (1981, 1983), New Music America (1984), Arts & Events at NYC’s World Financial Center (1985–1989) and produced an occasional survey of new American pop and experimental music for the BBC, UK, as part of “The John Peel Show” (1982–1985). He is the author of Volume, the first comprehensive discographical reference work on Punk and New Wave music, was a contributor to Goodtime Kings by Billy Bergman, the first American book on contemporary African Pop, has written very little for the Village Voice, Playboy, Creem, Elle, Spin, Saveur and Billboard, and was the music editor for Benetton’s Colors magazine. He has consulted or contributed to many film projects including Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ and Goodfellas, Tom Hanks’ That Thing You Do, Ken Burns’ Baseball and Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild, Beloved and The Manchurian Candidate. From 2015 – 2019 Mr. George worked with the Internet Archive in San Francisco as the Curator of sound collections and helped orchestrate massive digitization projects, including 3,000 music books, 150,000 78rpm discs and more than 250,000 CD from ARC’s collection.