Speaker Music

DeForrest Brown Jr. is an outspoken theorist, journalist, curator, visual artist, and by necessity, a musician. He often collaborates with his partner Ting Ding who co-runs the sustainable gender-flexible apparel line HECHA / 做.

Raised in the deep South, DeForrest moved to New York a few years back and has been shaking things up IRL and online ever since. Brown Jr 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 music 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.”