CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/17/2022

DeForrest Brown, Jr “makes techno Black again” in 'Assembling a Black Counter Culture'

Featured spreads are from Assembling a Black Counter Culture, the highly anticipated new release from New York theorist, journalist, curator and musician DeForrest Brown, Jr and Primary Information. In this 432-page paperback, Brown provides a deep historical analysis of techno and adjacent electronic music, showing how the genre has been shaped by a Black American musical sensibility. Brown writes: "The primary intention of this book is to detach the term 'techno' from the electronic music culture industry and the British lexical standard of the hardcore continuum to reconsider its origins in the community of Detroit and its context within African American history. Formulated out of an intuitive response to the urban degradation plaguing Detroit and other cities around the United States in the late twentieth century, techno is evidence of post-Civil Rights Movement Black youth adapting to the industrialized Northern states, using the technology available; techno is not, as is widely believed, a generic component of the globalized drug-induced nightlife economy. At the same time, techno attests to a collective engineering of stereophonic intelligence, a modernized method of Black expression that would transform the African American musical continuum of the slave song, the Negro Spiritual, blues, and jazz, spanning several centuries, into a technologically optimized form of soul music."