Rhythmanalytics

Who is the Rhythmanalyst and what is his laboratory? Following on his spring 2023 project Speakers That Speak to You, artist DeForrest Brown Jr. returns to EMPAC to ask: what comes after techno? How do we imagine new models of the music studio and of distribution, and how might these feed back into ways of capturing and assessing the sonic profile of technology today? This program offers a demo and preview of Brown’s new project, Rhythmanalytics, intended to culminate in a new album as well as a book.

Rhythmanalytics finds sound tunneling through space, through the ear, and then linking back to larger infrastructures of post-digital futures. Using the studio space as a meta-instrument, Brown explores non-repetitive rhythms and tonal shifts, probing rhythm as both techno’s primary means and as a way of calibrating the material conditions of production and logistics.

In addition to a live listening session offered during the event, Brown joins music scholar Louis Chude-Sokei in conversation to explore questions raised by Brown’s new project and their shared interests around Black culture, music technology, and discourses of Afrofuturism and posthumanism. A key question in Brown’s new project is sonic compression: of live performance into recording, of dimensional sound into a file, acoustic into digital matter.