Rinse FM Podcast - Total Freedom - 13th March 2015

Using both sculpture and musical performance in his practice, Kevin Beasley explores the physical materiality and cultural connotations of both objects and sound. His sculptures typically incorporate everyday items like clothing, housewares, or sporting goods, bound together using tar, foam, resin, or other materials. Often they also contain embedded audio equipment that warps and amplifies the ambient tones of their surroundings. For Storylines, Beasley has created two new works specifically for the Guggenheim’s Frank Lloyd Wright–designed building. Within this vast and open sonic environment, Strange Fruit (Pair 1) and Strange Fruit (Pair 2) (both 2015) offer an experience of intimacy, absorbing and reflecting the sound of the crowd at the scale of a personal conversation. Each work embodies this spirit of dialogue in its two-part structure—at its core are two athletic shoes, one merged with microphones, the other with speakers. Suspending these objects in space, Beasley compounds their technological interchange with additional layers of meaning, bringing to mind the urban phenomenon of shoes hanging from overhead wires or poles (itself an open-ended form of communication). At the same time the works’ titles refer to history of lynchings in the American South memorialized by Bronx schoolteacher Abel Meerepol in the 1937 protest song “Strange Fruit.” In these contexts, the hanging forms of Beasley’s sculptures resonate not only with his body, which molded them by hand, or with the bodies moving through the museum, but also with those inscribed in the problematic history of race and class in the United States.

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For this recording- the right ear holds Strange Fruit (pair 1) and the left ear holds Strange Fruit (pair 2). These were recorded at the Guggenheim museum while each sculpture is installed across the rotunda facing eachother. The microphone's are connected to the speakers of the opposite sculpture so as a performer speaks and touches one sculpture the audio comes out of the other.

This recording is actually a mixdown of two separate recordings I performed with each sculpture- one after the other. In time, in space, in question.

Strange Fruit Mixdown 1 (Guggenheim Installation)

1. LOUP, Ode to S (x Human Boys synth)
2. Essex Olivares, Office Riddim
3. The Screamers, 122 Hours of Fear
4. Jooklo Duo & C Spencer Yeh, Set the Fire
5. Harry Partch, Yankee Doodle Fantasy 
6. Eve Essex
7. Dan Fox, Moonlighting
8. Goblin, Oblio
9. Eve Essex & Dan Fox
10. Akio Suzuki, K7
11. Eve Essex
12. Conrad Schnitzler, Coto
13. Aby Ngana, Diop
14. The Homosexuals, Mecho Madness
15. Eve Essex
16. Blue Gene Tyranny, Leading a Double Life

Listening Room Mix for ALLGOLD/PS1 Printshop

tf x sugarshane

artwork by amber nicole bradford

hunters ha

Taking inspiration from Jamaica's conflicted history with obeah, this piece will serve as an excavation of past traumas in an attempt to create a better understanding of the ongoing paradigm of power we're currently trapped in.
Performed live @ Fridman Gallery as part of Kevin Beasley's series, The Listening Room

SETLIST
SETLIST

MC Holocaust - Hijack in Effect
Metropolarity - You Have 4 Messages, Message 1 
Elysia Crampton - Spiral Flex aka endless time slide W/Money Allah
8ulentina - allahallah
FAITHFUL - lash around my palpitating heart
Black Quantum Futurism - The Afterlife of Events - Time Distortion
Chino Amobi - White Metal (plus c signal drop)
Gaika - Enoch’s Drone
Chino Amobi with serpentwithfeet - calcified
Moslem Priest & Mysteriz - Skeletal Banshee (Death Percussion VIP)
Lil Island - MAPPAMARCELLINEMANTRA
Morton HD - throw dat in the trash please
Rabit - Artemis (obeah edit)
False Witness - Cataclysm Track 1 (Lord of the Sirens)
DJ Rashad & DJ Spinn - Broken Hearted
Elysia Crampton - Ax Amores Edit
Black Lives Matter - Black Brunch South Carolina

Guzzum Power

Horror vacui. I can't fall asleep anymore.  We should have burned the boats.

twitter.com/rizzla_dj
youtube.com/watch?v=XQF0BNrDhNE

Strange Fruit Mixdown 1 (Guggenheim Installation)

Kevin M Beasley

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