DeForrest Brown Jr is an American journalist, artist and sound curator that is deeply involve with the Make Techno Black Again. This campaigns seeks to recognize and reattribute that techno music is Afro-american by origin and to white wash the modern electronic club scene. A few weeks ago, we had DeForrest as one of the visiting practitioners. He talked about his support to the movement and how his comments caused him to loose his job in Mixmag. Now DeForrest is writing a book about the origin of techno and it’s relationship with Afro-futurism, a term that I hadn’t encountered before the lecture. He explained us how techo was born from dystopian thoughts of the future and the general suffering and history of Detroit. He argued that techno was being appropriated by white culture and that it was destroyed the original concept of techno.

I found his lecture very compelling and I thought he was right in a lot of his arguments. It made me think how appropriation works in different matters and why, until an extent, should be stopped. I also want to read his book because I felt curious of some of the ideas he mentioned but did not explain in depth.

Below is a video of DeForrest performing a sound piece exploiting the concept of black sonic warfare, where he collage samples and sounds that evidence racial injustice and then combining them with music to do a very powerful performance.