Everybody has at least fifty voices, minimum. They splinter out from our hypocenters, just like Rhythmatic Music for Speakers, essentially, necessarily, quaking, shaking like the throats that hold them and the bodies that mold them.
To be in active communication with the world we want to see means to adapt (the hows, whens, whats, whys) to the grounds of various metronomic situations to avoid establishing monotonous beats. Speaker Music’s growing library of rhythmic investigations works to counter this tedium with a spirited pace framed, among other writings, by Henri Lefebvre’s texts in Rhythmanalysis and inspired by percussionists such as Rashied Ali, Max Roach, and Steve Poindexter.
Speaker Music, who has made sound works, often in collaboration, as DeForrest Brown Jr, does so here via profusions of drum machines and intimate recordings (including a cheeky and comedic monologue affected into something akin to the timbre of text-to-speech) with an expeditious pulse that challenges the even and opens up the even possible. He uses drums as if they are talking styles. With stumblings and repetition, rants and stutterings, bursts and lulls, breaks, waggles, neologisms, and all of that kind of untapped improvising that happens with words, thought or expressed, layered into a dialect.
This set was aired on Half Moon Radio, which is quickly becoming an indispensable hub for showcasing live and DJ sets from a wide array of New York artists. Click through the audio player to read the artist’s own words about the Speaker Music project and this specific piece.
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