Of Desire, Longing

DeForrest Brown Jr. is an outspoken theorist, journalist, curator, visual artist and musician. Raised in the deep South, DeForrest moved to New York a few years ago and has been shaking things up IRL and online ever since. He asks difficult questions that make us relook at how we think about race, class, post-racial ideas, historical events and the social structures in America. His work defies narrow bags and he's truly a unique cultural polygot comfortable booking an artist like Felicia Atkinson at Issue Project Room or shaking up people on the street with his "Make Techno Black Again" hat line. His project Speaker Music was inspired by Rhythmanalysis, a book of essays by urbanist philosopher Henri Lefebvre as well as considerations of momentum and the "chronopolitical" from British cultural theorist Kodwo Eshun. Mobilizing freely improvised electronic percussion and stereophonic audio recordings, Speaker Music yearns to caress, engineer and sculpt sentiment into a multi-textural rhythmic body, quivering moments into a collapsed "nonpulsed time." His debut for Planet Mu centers around weary sonic portraiture of sonorous and cybernetic energy music - a music encoded with an encrypted heat but made "with empathy and without excess." His "touching of frequencies" unveils a romantic abstraction of sonic narratives that recalls previous innovations by musicians such as Les McCann, Urban Tribe and James Stinson.01 With Empathy02 Without Excess