Absent Personae

Collaboration between Liverpool-based sound artist, Jon Davies, aka Kepla, and New York-based media theorist and music writer, DeForrest Brown Jr. Following in the style of verbatim theater, Brown - through private recordings in various urban public environments - recalls a palpable, though unseen trauma while wading amidst Davies's digital processing of found social media audio. The result is a psycho-political meditation on Black America as a (de)territorialized subject. Absent Personae was commissioned by Electronic Voice Phenomena as an interstitial specter in transition, resonating with the sinister politics of pseudo-science histories, while speculating on identity as evasion and persona without orientation. The piece is a post-industrial Derive considering the psychological liminal zones between old and new industry and urbanity, the changing landscapes of labor: a fractured genealogical memory trace obscured by intercepted signals and the liquidating flux of late capitalism. "Lost My Head" features Embaci.