The renowned musician and author is to give a talk on the history of Techno music as well as perform a live electronic music set in Galway this May.
DeForrest Brown Jr, the pioneering New York based author and DJ, will be in Galway on Saturday May 13 to give a talk on the history of Techno and to perform a live electronic music set. DeForrest Brown Jr, the rhythmanalyst, media theorist, and writer, will be in Galway to attend the opening of the exhibition by the Turner Prize nominated artist-led collective, The Otolith Group, at the Galway Arts Centre.
History of Techno Talk
On Saturday May 13 at 3pm in the Galway Arts Centre’s Nuns Island Theatre, DeForrest will give an illustrated talk on the history of Techno music, and the vital role played in its development by African-Americans. The talk stems from his recent book, Assembling A Black Counter Culture.
While the influence of German electronic music on Techno - via the work of Karlheinz
Stockhausen in the 1950s and 1960s and Kraftwerk in the 1970s - is well known, Germany did not
actually create Techno.
Techno and House were first created and developed in Detroit and Chicago in the early/mid-
1980s by pioneering African-American DJs, musicians, and producers inspired by George Clinton, Kraftwerk, Disco, and Hip Hop, and their impact would reverberate around the world, profoundly changing dance and electronic music forever.
Despite this, the role of African-Americans in birthing Techno has largely been written out of the genre’s history. However, DeForrest has been an important figure in reclaiming the Black origins of Techno. He is a representative of the Make Techno Black Again campaign, while his written work, which explores the links between the Black experience in industrialised labour systems and Black innovation in electronic music, has appeared in Mixmag, Artforum, Triple Canopy, NPR, CTM Festival, among others.
His talk in Galway will look at, and highlight, the genre’s Black, working class, origins in the US midwest.
DeForrest Brown Jr Live
DeForrest Brown Jr will play a live electronic music set in The Galway Distillery, Merchant’s Road, at 8pm, and will be a chance to see an innovate practitioner of the form in action. He releases music under his own name as well as Speaker Music. As Speaker Music, he channels the African-American modernist tradition of rhythm and soul as an intellectual site and sound of generational trauma. In 2020, he released the album, Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry, of which The New Yorker said: “Over the album’s fifty minutes, sonic booms coalesce into rhythms only to tear themselves apart, amid invocations of marching bands, the communion of a drum circle, free-jazz riffing, and the rabble-rousing clatter of a protest’s makeshift drumline.”
DeForrest has performed or presented work at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Camden Arts
Centre, UK; Unsound Festival, Krakow; Sónar, Barcelona; Issue Project Room, New York; and
elsewhere.
Admission to DeForrest Brown Jr’s History of Techno talk is at 3pm in the Galway Arts Centre’s Nuns Island Theatre. It will be part of an event which will also feature a talk by The Otolith Group. Admission to DeForrest Brown Jr’s live set set is at The Galway Distillery, Merchant’s Road, at 8pm.
Admission to both shows are free, but booking is advised through Eventbrite.
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