On Tuesday, April 29, we present our second collaboration with Stoffel Debuysere as part of the research project Echoes of Dissent, exploring the intersection of politics, aesthetics, and sound. This edition focuses on the duality of voices within the organisation of language and sound—its morphology, juxtaposition, and ephemeral relation within improvisational music practices.
In vitro #25
Fred Moten & Brandon López
Fred Moten and Brandon López have been playing music together since 2018. They have released two remarkable albums with drummer Gerald Cleaver on the Reading Group label. Their first duo recording is due to be released on TAO Forms. “It’s poetry as music and music as poetry. Moten’s words lead, lyrically, timbrally, poetically – but the bass and percussion loosen the grammar. Associative inflections elevate the raw sound of each player, which at root – even if they were stripped of meaning or mood – runs each part in a constantly moving triangulated constellation of sound and meaning, evolving and repeating; stretching, infilling, and expanding.” (Jennifer Lucy Allen)
Fred Moten is a cultural theorist and poet creating new conceptual spaces that accommodate emergent forms of Black cultural production, aesthetics, and social life. Moten's writing and wording are characterised 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.
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, Tyshawn Sorey, Leila Bordreuil and Cecilia López. He was a featured soloist with the New York Philharmonic and has been the recipient of numerous awards.
https://readinggroupcompany.bandcamp.com/album/moten-l-pez-cleaver
https://readinggroupcompany.bandcamp.com/album/the-blacksmiths-the-flowers
https://taoforms.bandcamp.com/album/revision
Zara Joan Miller & Ute Kanngießer
Zara Joan Miller is a poet and artist working across film, performance, and print—her practice often orbiting the limits of language and its entanglement with rhythm, image, and movement. Ute Kanngießer is a cellist and improviser whose playing resists formal structures, favouring an intimate, tactile approach to the instrument. Her sound drifts and unsettles, attentive to texture and silence, unfolding through spaces rather than over them.
Their collaboration grew from Miller’s poetry collection Blue Monday (JOAN Publishing, 2022), a book tracing the strange poetics of daily life—where domestic mundanities, memory fragments, and emotional dissonances are held together by the dry logic of signage, interrupted telephone calls, and birds overhead. This written work later took on new form in a live performance with Kanngießer at London’s Cafe OTO in 2023. The result—a performance that hovers between reading, concert, and cinematic slide lecture that was later released as an LP on Reading Group. At its heart, the work dwells in the in-between—a space where cello and voice intersect and diverge, where perception thickens, and language trails off into the static of thought.
https://readinggroupcompany.bandcamp.com/album/blue-monday
https://earshots.bandcamp.com/album/ge-der
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20h00 Performance at Les Ateliers Claus
Entrance: €12
Preceded by
14h00 Talk with Fred Moten and Brandon López at Pianofabriek
(*An extended conversation about their thought and practice, music and language, improvisation and politics, jazz and study)
Entrance: Free
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In the context of the research project Echoes of Dissent (KASK & Conservatory / School of Arts Gent), in collaboration with In vitro.
With the support of Flanders State of the Art, KU Leuven Commission for Contemporary Art & Royal Conservatory of Brussels (EhB).
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Graphic design by Ran De Vos.
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