Groove Tube with Cian O’Connell

This Saturday, the Galway Arts Centre will facilitate the launch of A Sphere of Water Orbiting a Star in Nuns Island Theatre; it’s an audio-visual exhibition conceived by arts collective the Otolith Group and composer Tyler Friedman. The former has been operating since 2002 under the stewardship of co-founders Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Saga, who, on the day, will be in conversation with American author, media theorist and DJ DeForrest Brown Jr.

Last year, DeForrest launched Assembling a Black Counter Culture – a book that chronicles the history of techno from its origins in Detroit, as well as critically investigating the whitewashing of electronic music as it was forcibly detached from the black DJs that pioneered the craft. He is also a member of the Make Techno Black Again campaign.

A lot of DeForrest’s research centres around Detroit – not only as the birthplace for a pivotal electronic genre, but as a symbol for the effects of capitalism and industrialisation in the US and beyond. As he explains, Detroit techno was, of course, regional by nature.

“Detroit techno was a site-specific practice,” DeForrest offers. “I think that’s something that’s been missed as the idea of techno was globalised.

“It’s specifically about the collapse in Detroit. If you look at that without the racial component, and just think purely economically about how industries form – how the auto industry reformed and the music industry reformed – you would still get this cultural specificity that is helpful to other peoples and other nations dealing with this global expansion of industry and capital.

“That’s kind of what I was trying to encapsulate [in the book] – what it means to be at Ground Zero of the beginning of the collapse of modern culture… Many of the techno producers grew up in this transition period called post-soul, in the moments after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and you see this integration after the Civil Rights’ Movement.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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