Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry

A surprise release by Speaker Music in response to recent events. A twelve track album with 60 page PDF booklet designed by Make Techno Black Again, powered by HECHA / 做. Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry is an album of street-level fire music exploring poet Tsitsi Ella JajiI’s concept of “stereomodernism,” or as she describes: “dubbing in stereo for solidarity.” Rhythmanalyst DeForrest Brown Jr.’s second release for Planet Mu as Speaker Music channels the modernist Black tradition of rhythm and soul music as an intellectual site and sound of generational trauma, bursting through the frames of Western music and thought. A PDF booklet of collected writings by Black theorists and poets provides further context featuring “Amerikkka’s Bay” written and spoken by Maia Sanaa, and remixed by Brown, Jr. As Amiri Baraka saw it and Tsitsi Ella JajiI expanded, a Black music explores different perspectives and approaches to living in trauma within a prescribed future. The systematic displacement of Black communities in conversation with a linear consideration of Black music (from blues to rock to jazz to soul to funk to techno) shows a kind of communication emerging from a people learning to speak the way they would like to within a set of societal confines. The scope of JajiI’s “stereomodernism” evokes writer Amiri Baraka’s call for a Black “unity music” towards an “imagined community” for a newly constructed ethnicity. As Black people engage with White technologies powered by fractured European ideologies, the meaning and sound of “soul” for African Americans extends beyond genre classification and encapsulates a perennial situation of being considered categorically inhuman in the eyes of American governing bodies and people. Techno and its romantic qualities of Hi-Tech Soul come from a long history of endurance and adaptation to a future that is designed to systematically exploit and oppress Black bodies and lives. Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry arrives as a mobilization beyond the savage free market capitalist industrial system, and towards a future that isn’t indebted to the fictive and failing socio-economic “progress” imagined within the frames of White American techno-utopianism.

DeForrest Brown Jr.’s most ambitious release yet is a 49-minute suite that brings together fractured, shuddering drum programming with spoken-word poetry, collage, and noise.