Consider your summer of radio jams and corporate-sponsored streaming playlists officially over, because the fine folks at PTP (f.k.a. Purple Tape Pedigree) have snagged the latest and greatest collaboration in the world of spoken word/field recording fusion, and it’s just the thing to ring in your post-summer highs. That’s right: it’s an LP from sound artist Jon Davies, a.k.a. Kepla, and music writer/media theorist/curator/TMT contributor DeForrest Brown Jr. called Absent Personae.
Here’s a full breakdown on what to expect from the project:
Following in the style of verbatim theater, Brown — through private recordings in various urban public environments — recalls a palpable though unseen trauma while wading amidst Davies’ digital processing of found social media audio. The result is a psychopolitical
meditation on Black America as a (de)territorialized subject.Absent Personae was commissioned by Electronic Voice Phenomena as an interstitial spectre in transition, resonating with the sinister politics of pseudo-science histories, while speculating on identity as evasion and persona without orientation.
The piece is a post-industrial Dérive considering the psychological liminal zones between old and new industry and urbanity, the changing landscapes of labor: a fractured genealogical memory trace obscured by intercepted signals and the liquidating flux of late capitalism.
If that thorough description somehow left you wanting (and especially if it didn’t), make sure to check out the video for bonus track “Absent Personae Postscript” below, and then look for Absent Personae September 29 on vinyl and digital formats, just in time for you to forget your stale summer soundtrack and enjoy the contemplative-yet-flagrantly-political air of autumn, just like our forefathers intended.
Absent Personae tracklisting:
01. Crowding and Bubbling Landscapes of Deposited Bodies Suite I
02. Crowding and Bubbling Landscapes of Deposited Bodies Suite II
03. Crowding and Bubbling Landscapes of Deposited Bodies Suite III
04. Lost My Head (feat. Embaci)
05. Crowding and Bubbling Landscapes of Deposited Bodies Suite IV
06. Crowding and Bubbling Landscapes of Deposited Bodies Suite V
07. Crowding and Bubbling Landscapes of Deposited Bodies Suite VI
08. Reflex And Bone Structure
09. Crowding and Bubbling Landscapes of Deposited Bodies Suite VII
10. Crowding and Bubbling Landscapes of Deposited Bodies Suite VIII
11. Absent Personae Postscript [vinyl bonus track]
More about: DeForrest Brown Jr., Kepla
