The work of each of these powerfully creative & exceptionally perceptive artists concerns itself with navigating the ascending reign of long-institutionalized madness while simultaneously keeping humanity and sanity intact. Poet and theorist Fred Moten joins bassist Brandon Lopez in a powerful and searching dialog of voice, text, and bass, where Moten’s incisive spoken word and Lopez’s deeply expressive playing fuse into an evocative exploration of Black cultural production, resistance, and creative solidarity.

Inimitable poet, cultural theorist, author, 2020 MacArthur Fellow, Fred Moten creates new conceptual spaces that accommodate emergent forms of Black cultural production, aesthetics, and social life. Moten is a professor of performance studies and comparative literature at New York University, concerned with social movement, aesthetic experiment, and Black study. He is also a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Moten’s writing and wording are characterized by a refined opacity and a musicality that is inspired by jazz and goes to the limit of noise: “what it is I want to say is subordinate to the sound, subordinate to a kind of feeling, a content that only that sound can provide”. His books include In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, the trilogy Consent Not To Be A Single Being, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study and All Incomplete, co-authored with Stefano Harney, as well as numerous poetry collections. https://tisch.nyu.edu/about/directory/performance-studies/3144950

“Moten is after nothing less than a full interrogation of the ways Black systems of knowledge have been strip-mined and cast aside, and yet have regrown.” New York Times: Best Jazz Albums of 2022

Puerto Rican-American bassist Brandon López is a bassist, composer, and improviser working at the fringes of jazz, free improvisation, noise, and new music. His music has been praised as “brutal” (Chicago Reader) and “relentless” (The New York Times). His exploration of new sonic possibilities on the double bass has led him to work with the luminaries of the contemporary avant garde like John Zorn, Nate Wooley, Mat Maneri, Tyshawn Sorey, Leila Bordreuil and Cecilia López, Ingrid Laubrok and many more. He was a featured soloist with the New York Philharmonic and has been the recipient of numerous awards.

“There are musicians who leverage their instrument’s conventional vocabulary to create works of art, and then there’s Brandon Lopez. The NYC-based composer and improvisor has crafted an entirely new language for the double bass. His is a sound rooted in many locations simultaneously, primarily those vast swathes that extend beyond tradition.” – Dusted Magazine