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.

Who owns techno? For DeForrest Brown, Jr. the answer is quite simple: techno comes from the tradition of Black music, from the continuum of blues, jazz, hip-hop, and soul, combined with the utopian liberation fantasies of Afrofuturism, in a lineage with Miles Davis, Sun Ra, and Drexciya. White people who felt they were entitled to appropriate techno – like the pioneers of the scene in post-reunification Berlin – merely dispossessed Black people once again. In his book Assembling a Black Counter Culture, DeForrest Brown, Jr. expanded on this thesis as a theorist; under the name Speaker Music, he now brings his idea of purely Black techno to the stage.