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ZIQ416_SPEAKER_MUSIC
06-12-2019
Speaker Music
of desire, longing
ZIQ416
  • Buy at the Planet Mu store
  • Buy at the Planet Mu bandcamp

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

Raised in the deep South, DeForrest moved to New York seven years ago and has been shaking things up IRL and online ever since. He asks difficult questions that make us reconsider how we think about race, class, historical events and social/economic structures in America. His work defies narrow definitions. He’s a unique cultural polygot who was the inaugural Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow at ISSUE Project Room, booking artists like Felicia Atkinson and Quantum Natives. When he’s not presenting audiovisual works in esteemed art contexts, he’s in the streets representing the “Make Techno Black Again” hat and campaign.

His music project Speaker Music was inspired by Rhythmanalysis, a book of essays by urbanist philosopher Henri Lefebvre as well as considerations of vibe, momentum and the “chronopolitical” in Black music  as defined by British cultural theorist Kodwo Eshun. Speaker Music mobilizes 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 gestural sonic portraitures of sonorous and cybernetic ensemble energy music. of desire, longing is a time-based release meant to fill both sides of the vinyl completely, working against the quick turnover rate of the current track-based standard of the streaming economy. Through his empathetic “touching of frequencies,” DeForrest unveils a romantic abstraction of sonic narratives that recalls previous innovations by electronic and jazz musicians such as Les McCann, Urban Tribe and James Stinson. of desire, longing encodes the listener with an encrypted heat, made “with empathy” and “without excess.”

Side A
with empathy

Side B
without excess

Releases
ZIQ470 PLANET MU 30
09-05-2025
Various Artists
Planet Mu 30
ZIQ470
  • Buy at the Planet Mu store
  • Buy at Bandcamp
Untitled Artwork
08-09-2023
Speaker Music
Techxodus
ZIQ457
  • Buy at the Planet Mu store
  • Buy at the Planet Mu bandcamp
soul
26-03-2021
Speaker Music
Soul-Making Theodicy
ZIQ434
  • Buy at the Planet Mu store
  • Buy at the Planet Mu bandcamp
ZIQ425_PlanetMµ25
06-12-2020
Various Artists
PlanetMµ25
ZIQ425
  • Buy at the Planet Mu store
  • Buy on the Planet Mu bandcamp
ZIQ424 SpeakerMusic-BNSW
19-06-2020
Speaker Music
Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry
ZIQ424
  • Buy at the Planet Mu store
  • Buy at the Planet Mu bandcamp