Speaker Music - Synoptic Audio (2026)

The inimitable DeForrest Brown, Jr. caps off his Speaker Music project with a final set of expressionistic technoid evolutions, editing live improvisations into studio-corrupted projections of his musical mind map that runs through jazz, trap, shoegaze, dub and drone. Essential listening whether you're into Miles, Drexciya or Autechre.

Primarily used to mean a "summary" of sorts, the word synoptic is often found in connection with Biblical scholarship, grouping the New Testament gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke together because of their similarities. And on 'Speaker Music', Brown attempts to isolate comparable harmonies between various Black musical strands, examining the marching band music he grew up playing, Sun Ra and experimental jazz, and realising how all this factors into the development of electronic music, steering its course even now. Brown calls the project "theory first", an analysis of rhythm in Black music as it pertains to his landmark text 'Assembling a Black Counter Culture'. And it's run its course at this stage; if you've heard 2023's excellent 'Techxodus' or its predecessors, you'll already know the general theme - a sonic space where free jazz, footwork, gospel and noise exists at once in spiritual harmony.

Brown's final act as Speaker Music is to take recordings from his residencies at Troy's EMPAC and Vancouver's Libby Leshgold Gallery and sculpt them into dense "studio-as-instrument" snapshots of his theory. He starts with Don Lewis, the musician and engineer (and nuclear weapons specialist) who developed a pre-MIDI sound controller for analog synthesizers that he called the LEO, or Live Electronic Orchestra. Brown uses this methodology to guide his own setup (on iPad, MacBook and mixer), using software modules, effects units and drum machines to simulate Lewis's arsenal of vintage boxes, then transports the results to the studio for "post production editing, overdubbing and spacial manipulation." He ends up with a sound that's constantly changing, on the one hand driven by the skittering techno-to-trap drum sequences that powered his other records and on the other zeroing in on the sonic density and physicality of set texts like A Guy Called Gerald's 'Black Secret Technology' and Miles Davis's ornery and prophetic masterpiece 'On The Corner'.

On opener 'Techno-Vernacular Expressionism', Brown makes the direction clear by ducking the whirring hi-hats and syncopated kicks deep beneath elasticated and saturated dub-echoed chords. Even when the rhythms are moved closer to the spotlight on 'Saecularhythmia...' they're muddled with remnants of those same chords, spliced alongside Brown's own decelerated half-human monologs. These experiments open the floodgates for a sequence of punk-ier experiments that consider the impact of sound on the body itself, taking into account not just rhythm but tone, timbre and distortion. On 'Chaosmosis', Brown's obsessively edited beat sequences are set, 'Amber'-like, against a single growling synth note and on the title track, he uses rhythmelodic hits and coarse feedback to herald a psych-jazz pivot into oscillatory mayhem in the third act. It's a record that constantly collapses and rebuilds itself, turning Drexciyan electro sequences into chiming church bells on the brilliant 'GLO//A' and day zero techno into euphoric nu-gaze on the crushing finale, 'Dhalgren (Nihilism is Not Enough)'. We're gonna miss Speaker Music, but we've got a feeling this isn't the last we'll hear from Brown.