DeForrest Brown, Jr.'s performance reclaims the Black origins of techno as a post-industrial Black folk music from Detroit. Techxodus [Live Prototype] is an improvised electronic rhythmanalytical performance that extends the myth-scientific narrative of DeForrest Brown, Jr.’s debut book, Assembling a Black Counter Culture, and encourages a reimagining of techno beyond the dance floor as a technologically optimized form of Black American Blues, Jazz, and Soul music. Stephanie Hewett opens with a DJ set focusing on the sonic, somatic, and spiritual manifestations of Black freedom.

DeForrest Brown, Jr. is an Alabama-raised rhythmanalyst, writer, and representative of the Make Techno Black Again campaign. As Speaker Music, he channels the African American modernist tradition of rhythm and soul music as an intellectual site and sound of generational trauma. On Juneteenth of 2020, he released the album Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry on Planet Mu.

Madre Guía (Stephanie Hewett) (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work emerges from a play-based movement practice within an investigative framework. As a queer, Black, Afro-Diasporic artist with roots in the Caribbean, her work is inevitably rooted in emancipatory practices. Hewett aims to deepen curiosity around the Black American experience by focusing on the sonic, somatic, and spiritual manifestations of Black freedom through a variety of improvisational structures and cross-disciplinary experimentation.

The Black Sound Symposium is a 4-day event full of concerts, talks, workshops, screenings, and interdisciplinary dialogue rooted in Black sound and Black sonic space. The symposium aims to create and sustain community; to celebrate curiosity, wonder, disobedience, collaboration, and play in artistic work; to expand anti-racist and activist pedagogy and methodologies in and outside of our institutions; and to honor the long and rich lineages of Black virtuosity that have been diminished and erased from artistic canons and social consciousness.

Born in Portsmouth Virginia and raised in Vallejo CA, Xavier Livermon has always had a curiosity about the other-worlds available beyond the waterways that abutted his childhood. This led him to seek out and live an eclectic set of life and work experiences culled from diverse places as far afield as Accra, Ghana; Thaba Tseka, Lesotho; and Detroit, Michigan.

After receiving his Ph.D. in African Diaspora Studies from UC Berkeley, Xavier worked at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Wayne State University, and currently serves as Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Xavier’s writing and research is interested in how music relates to the social and how minoritized communities imagine freedom.

His first book Kwaito Bodies: Remastering Space & Subjectivity in Post-apartheid South Africa was published in 2020 with Duke University Press.  He is also the co-editor along with Adrienne Davis and the BSE Collective of Black Sexual Economies: Race and Sex in a Culture of Capital published. He has published widely in the fields of African Popular Culture and African Queer Studies in journals including GLQ, Feminist Studies, and Black Music Research Journal.

Esoteric film, tennis, and baking are some of Xavier’s favorite diversions from academic pursuits.

The Black Sound Symposium is a 4-day event full of concerts, talks, workshops, screenings, and interdisciplinary dialogue rooted in Black sound and Black sonic space. The symposium aims to create and sustain community; to celebrate curiosity, wonder, disobedience, collaboration, and play in artistic work; to expand anti-racist and activist pedagogy and methodologies in and outside of our institutions; and to honor the long and rich lineages of Black virtuosity that have been diminished and erased from artistic canons and social consciousness.