Cashmere Radio and Triple Canopy present a series of conversations, listening sessions, and performances devoted to minor histories and radical resonances of Black electronic music with Ryan C. Clarke, in partnership with the New Orleans-based Rivers Institute. Clarke, a New Orleans-based tonal geologist, writer, and co-founder of Dweller Electronics, will be joined by an assortment of musicians, artists, DJs, and writers. Moving between DJ mixes,
discussions, archival recordings, and personal histories, Clarke and his collaborators will trace the migrations and mutations of Black music, emphasizing the role of terrains and waterways in forming and circulating the cultural traditions that birthed techno and house. They’ll treat Black music and speech as “equipment for living,” to quote the critic Albert Murray: “stylistic codes for representing the most difficult conditions, but also … a strategy for living and triumphing over those conditions with dignity, grace, and elegance.”
Clarke and his collaborators present six public programs at venues across New York City in March, then continue the series in New Orleans in May. They will address the preindustrial roots of electronic music and audibility of ecological crisis; the architecture of clubs and mathematics of sequencing; the feedback loop between dancing and DJing; and the parallels between sampling and quilting. The events served as the foundation for the radio broadcasts that you hear below, broadcast on Cashmere Radio in Berlin on 88,4fm and online.
Ryan C. Clarke is a tonal geologist from the southeastern banks of the Mississippi, and a co-founder of Dweller Electronics. His work has been published and presented by Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art and Thought, e-flux journal, Rhizome, Burnaway, Terraforma, Harvard’s Hiphop Archive & Research Institute, and MoMA PS1. With Dweller, Clarke produces festivals and publications that center the perspectives of Black electronic musicians.