Erasure and Opacity (2018)

Rupert Residency, Lithuania

Interested in black radical aesthetics, technopoetics and what Alexander Weheylie (2005) refers to as ‘lower frequencies’ my time spent at Rupert explored the role and subsequent erasure of the black female body within popular music. Using Weheylie’s notion of ‘lower frequencies’ as a strategy for listening my residency project sought to explore the role of the black female voice as chorus and ‘pop’ technology. Thinking and working with the sounds of backing groups such as The Andantes (Motown) and The Blossoms (various) and several others the project sought to attend to the contributions of these subjects via a new mode of listening that attempts to acknowledge their invisibility without recourse to the dominance of visuality. Always in the ‘background’ these groups are constantly framed as below or beyond the central frequencies, narrative and performance of the music they are a part of.

Considering a pauline Oliveros’s ‘deep listening’ and Brandon LaBelle’s writing regarding the potentiality of invisibility and the acousmatic my time during the residency explored these themes to consider how the ‘invisible frequencies’ of such backing groups provide a counter history to popular culture and the black female body and to explore both the emancipatory potential and the problematic conditions of this invisibility. The project discussed and considered these ideas through different modes of inquiry including a series of seminars and listening events where participants discussed essential texts and listen to selected 45inch single recordings, developmental work such as scaled sculptures and explorative drawings and collage works.