Speaker Music

DeForrest Brown, Jr. works from New York as a theorist, journalist, curator, and multimedia artist and frames his Speaker Music project as "a digital audio and extended media praxis." The work draws upon urbanist philosopher Henri Lefebvre's essay collection Rhythmanalysis and the idea of the "chronopolitical" formulated by British-Ghanaian cultural theorist Kodwo Eshun; across releases such as 2020's Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry and 2023's Techxodus, Brown fuses jazz improvisation with continuously shifting electronic beat sequences and spoken passages that address race, class, and social/economic structures.

Originally from the Deep South, DeForrest Brown, Jr. moved to New York in the early 2010s. Since arriving he has exhibited at MoMa PS1, Cafe Oto, and Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art and contributed writing to Afropunk, NPR, Artforum, FACT, and other publications. In 2017 he became the inaugural Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow at New York's Issue Project Room. Brown has partnered with artist and musician Steven Warwick in the "cataloguing space and focus group" Elevator to Mezzanine and joined Kepla for the 2017 LP Absent Personae and the 2018 deadpan comedy mixtape The Wages of Being Black Is Death. He also joined the "Make Techno Black Again" campaign in 2018, creating a mix that traces the history of Detroit techno to accompany the campaign's line of hats.

Planet Mu issued the first Speaker Music album, of desire, longing, near the end of 2019. The live collaboration Sublime Language of My Century with Bergsonist followed in early 2020. The live recording processing intimacy and the EP Percussive Therapy appeared next, after which Planet Mu released Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry digitally on Juneteenth and later on vinyl with bonus material. PTP put out the mini-album A Bitter But Beautiful Struggle in November. The digital EP Soul-Making Theodicy arrived in 2021, the same year Brown published his first book, Assembling a Black Counter Culture. Techxodus came out on Planet Mu in 2023 with artwork by Abu Qadim Haqq, who produced the iconic imagery for Detroit electro duo Drexciya; the album serves as an epilogue to Brown's book while extending the Drexciya mythos.