Speaker Music / Isabella Koen & Rachel Devorah / ehrdz
Photos: DeForrest Brown Jr: Ting Ding / Isabella Koen & Rachel Devorah: Tim Bugbee / ehrdz: Lexi Liu
Speaker Music / Isabella Koen & Rachel Devorah / ehrdz
Thursday, december 5, 2024, at 8pm
The Foundry
STEAM set performance space
101 Rogers Street
Cambridge, Mass
Music at 8pm (7:30 doors)
Admission: $18 / $12 for members and students (suggested donation)
Pay what you can / No one turned away for lack of funds
For information about accessibility call the Foundry at 617-998-2063 or email susanna@nonevent.org.
Non-Event presents a night of experimental techno featuring sets by Speaker Music, Isabella Koen & Rachel Devorah and ehrdz.
About the artists:
DeForrest Brown, Jr. is an Alabama-raised, Ex-American rhythmanalyst, writer, musician, and curator. As Speaker Music, he channels the African American modernist tradition of rhythm and soul music as an intellectual site and sound of techno-vernacular expression. He has released three albums on Planet Mu; of desire, longing (2019), Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry (2020) and Techxodus (2023). His written work explores the links between the Black experience in industrialized labor systems and Black innovation in electronic music. Brown’s debut book, Assembling a Black Counter Culture was released on Primary Information in 2022. In 2023, he co-curated HOPE, an international group exhibition presented by Museion Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Bolzano-Bozen as the final installment of the TECHNO HUMANITIES trilogy. Brown, Jr. is currently collaborating with Tresor Records on the meta-narratives for Cybtron’s Maintain the Golden Ratio (2023), Parallel Shift (2024) and beyond. Brown, Jr. is a current lecturer at Simon Fraser University in the Department of Sound Art and Sound Design. He has also taught courses and lectured on new media, Black history and music at The New School, NYU, Columbia University, Harvard University, Brown University, and Princeton University.
Isabella Koen is a sound artist, DJ, and composer based in Providence, RI. She is best known for her hard-driving, all-hardware live sets and off kilter releases. Her practice incorporates the dual role of artist and researcher rooted in broad-ranging experimentation, while simultaneously extracting sonic signifiers from rave, hard techno, trance, and drum ‘n’ bass.
Rachel Devorah is a sonic artist, technologist, educator, and labor organizer. She is interested in superhuman prolongation, opaque complexity, the re-signification of archaic tools and materials, and parallels between the physical properties and social meanings of spaces. Her improvisations utilize bespoke electronics and the French horn.
ehrdz (Jessica Hernandez) is a DJ, sound artist, and curator broadly interested in repetition and continuity, the sounds of industrial objects and materials, and visceral percussive arrangements. Using approaches including hardware synthesis and sample manipulation, Jessica often creates erratic sequences and experimental drum patterns. In doing so, she pulls together the various elements that draw her to electronic music while constructing her own particular vision of brooding experimental techno. In 2024, she and Aaron Michael Smith founded Transporter, an experimental music series located at the Boston Cyberarts Gallery. She also hosts a mix series/radio show Project One on 102.9FM and serves as the Managing Director of Unbound Visual Arts, a non-profit art gallery.
