Speaker Music (DeForrest Brown, Jr.)

DeForrest Brown, Jr. is an Alabama-raised, Ex-American rhythmanalyst, writer and was the representative of the "Make Techno Black Again" campaign. As Speaker Music, he channels the African American modernist tradition of rhythm and soul music as an intellectual site and sound of techno-vernacular expression. He has released three albums on Planet Mu; Of Desire, Longing (2019), Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry (2020) and Techxodus (2023). His written work explores the links between the Black experience in industrialized labor systems and Black innovation in electronic music, and has appeared in Artforum, Triple Canopy, NPR, CTM Festival, Mixmag, among many others. He has performed or presented work at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Paris+ par Art Basel, Paris; Camden Arts Centre, London; Unsound Festival, Krakow; Sónar, Barcelona; Roulette, New York; and elsewhere. He has also taught courses on the history and new media uses of Afrofuturism in music at The New School and Princeton University. Brown's debut book Assembling a Black Counter Culture was released on Primary Information in 2022. In 2023, he co-curated HOPE, an international group exhibition presented by Museion Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Bolzano-Bozen as the final installment of the TECHNO HUMANITIES trilogy.

Wem gehört Techno? Für DeForrest Brown, Jr. ist die Antwort ganz einfach: Techno stammt aus der Tradition der Schwarzen Musik, aus einem Kontinuum mit Blues, Jazz, Hip-Hop und Soul, verbunden mit den utopischen Befreiungsfantasien des Afrofuturismus, in einer Linie mit Miles Davis, Sun Ra und Drexciya. Weiße Menschen, die glaubten, sich Techno aneignen zu dürfen – wie die Pioniere der Szene im Berlin der Nachwendezeit – haben lediglich Schwarze Menschen ein weiteres Mal enteignet. Diese These hat er in seinem Buch Assembling a Black Counter Culture als Theoretiker auszubreiten versucht; unter dem Namen Speaker Music bringt er seine Idee eines rein Schwarzen Techno nun auch auf die Bühne.