Mixology 2022 / Night Three: Kamau Patton presents new and evolving sonic transmissions. Speaker Music (AKA DeForrest Brown Jr.) presents new music and a talk that follows the release of his book Assembling a Black Counter-Culture.
Set one: Kamau Patton (electronics).
Set two: Speaker Music (DeForrest Brown Jr.)
$50 Festival Pass! See all three nights for $50
Roulette’s annual Mixology Festival of electronically engaged artists returns with purveyors of the multidimensional. Taking inspiration from the great multi-instrumentalist Jerome Cooper’s description of his extended drum kit performances as “multidimensional drumming,” Mixology 2022 brings artists working in similar multiplicities, layers and multi-rhythms, for whom instrumentation, medium, and even genre—from techno to noise to hip hop beat tapes to synth folk blues—are, utilizing Cooper’s words, “…synthesized into one instrument.” Guest curated by artist and arts-worker Matt Mehlan.
Kamau Patton is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work examines history and culture through engagement with archives, documents, stories, and sites. Patton’s projects are dialogic and take form as expanded field conversations. Patton received his MFA from Stanford University in 2007 and received a degree in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. His work was shown in 2012 as part of Pacific Standard Time and in 2013 as part of the Machine Project Field guide to LA Architecture. Patton has completed projects in soundscape studies through support provided by the State University of New York at Buffalo, the Mellon Elemental Arts Initiative, and the Tang Teaching Museum. He presented research in 2016 at the ABF house in Stockholm, Sweden, as a part of The Shape of Co- to- Come symposium and exhibition. Patton participated in a series of performances as part of Projects 107: Lone Wolf Recital Corps at the Museum of Modern Art in August 2017. In September 2017, he installed an iteration of his ongoing project, Tel, at the Tang Museum. In 2019, Patton’s public art commission with the Bowman Montessori School in Palo Alto, CA, was open to the public.
DeForrest Brown, Jr. is an Alabama-raised, Ex-American rhythmanalyst, writer and representative of the Make Techno Black Again campaign. He produces digital audio and extended media as Speaker Music. His work explores the links between the Black experience in industrialized labor systems and Black innovation in electronic music. He has lectured at Spotify for Artists: Co.Lab, Brown University, Yale University, and has written for Artforum, NPR, Mixmag, and Afropunk. He recently taught a studio course titled (alt) reality at Parsons School of Design | The New School with Jazsalyn Nachelle of black beyond. He was also the inaugural Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow at Issue Project Room, and an artist-in-residence at the Rauschenberg Residency. On Juneteenth of 2020, he released the album Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry on Planet Mu, and Primary Information will soon publish his first book, Assembling a Black Counter-Culture.
