Due to technical issues, I couldn't get my Ableton Live to work on OBS/ twitch, so my set changed from field recordings to "dub-noise" at the very last minute. I usually attribute solo noise, drone, ambient, beat based performances to eXU-9. eXU-9 takes it's machine name from Exu, Papa Legba, Cybotron, Model 500, UR, X-101, X-102. Sound inspired by MF BASS, Wave form Transmissions I & III, Interstellar Space, Space is The Place, Pulse Demon, Butoh, Great Black Music and Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi Projects. It is both a machine and a hyper-sygil for liberation, disobedience, transformation and self-care/acceptance. It also gives me space to explore sound beyond logic and language. This set was improvised with real time frustration with my set up. In the end this was just me showing up, dealing with setbacks and performing anyway. I prefer listening to this set on headphones.
After participating in this year’s World Listening Day programs this weekend I began to reflect on what lead me to my involvement. I rarely talk about what exactly lead to my interests in soundwalks, soundscapes and composition, because I felt they were too personal. Especially when I’m talking about practices in sound art and acoustic ecology many deem as esoteric and inaccessible. But the roots of my practice came from a toxic climate of race, economics, violence, politics and place that we experience today. I moved from Chicago to Oakland, California in 1998 to study art in San Francisco at the height of the first dot-com boom. I was there to have time and space to be a better artist and for self-recovery. Unfortunately, most people I had dealings with there treated me as if I was there to take their spot in the art scene, take jobs, housing and opportunity away from them. All this, while still being treated as a degraded other, in particular being harassed by the Oakland Pol...
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