Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production

In Soundworks Anthony Reed argues that studying sound requires conceiving it as process and as work. Since the long Black Arts era (ca. 1958-1974), intellectuals, poets, and musicians have defined black sound as radical aesthetic practice. Through their recorded collaborations, as well as the interviews, essays, liner notes, and other media that accompany them, they continually reinvent black sound conceptually and materially. Soundwork is Reed's term for that material and conceptual labor of experimental sound practice framed by the institutions of the culture industry and shifting historical contexts. Through analyses of Langston Hughes's collaboration with Charles Mingus, Amiri Baraka's work with the New York Art Quartet, Jayne Cortez's albums with the Firespitters, as well as the multimedia projects of Archie Shepp, Matana Roberts, Cecil Taylor, and Jeanne Lee, Reed shows that to grasp black sound as a radical philosophical and aesthetic insurgence requires attending to it as the product of material, technical, sensual, and ideological processes that allow critics to hear it as reflection and fugitive articulation of black freedom.

Binding Type: Paperback
Author: Reed, Anthony
Published: 12/18/2020
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9781478011279
Pages: 280