Freaky Belladonnas: Permission, Risk and Movement in Experimental Music

Talk by softchaos

00:00

Free entry

This presentation, consisting of a lecture and reading, will explore the fundamental question of who is permitted to be experimental? In extension, it is an investigation into the aesthetics of the black radical tradition. Through the prism of radical black thought and culture, the lecture extends the work of Lorraine O’Grady, Tony Cokes, and Hannah Black in asking about modalities of consent, affect, and risk in music making and more generally, who gets to be loud? Who is heard when they are being honest about the world in their music?

Drawing from softchaos’s own study of black trans/black femme music history and theoretical practice of those writing about how sound moves, the lecture will focus on the history of discourse of sound politics and attempt to re-position and reclaim black art as a force of social generative power. For softchaos, improvisation in lecture/performance provides a unique epistemological standpoint from which to investigate the provocative connections between black aesthetics and Western music making. As the critical, lyrical, and disruptive performance of the human, softchaos’s concept of lecture experimentation also brings such figures as Lil’ Kim and Sylvia Wynter, Jeff Mills and Slim Soldedad, Moor Mother, and Immanuel Kant into conversation with each other.

During the lecture, they will read excerpts and present visuals from two of their previous (and ongoing) works. »Where did these plants come from and other ontological stress« (2021), first staged at Matadero Madrid Centro de Creación Contemporánea explores the critical dissonance between black culture’s trans-continental generative power and how it’s valued. »voice works 5: WAKE IT UP WITH SALT« (2024), first shown at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, draws from works by Édouard Glissant and Fred Moten and personal sound archival materials to recreate a spiral telling of the body.

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