Emerging from dialogues, research, and experiments conducted during BADS_lab 2024 and subsequent Futurhythmachines workshops, Fugitive Erotics is a book that explores erotic desire as a dynamic, world-making force that resists containment and (re-)creates sensuality and intimacy in the break.

Rejecting the reduction of desire to mere individual longing, it reframes desire as àṣẹ — a force that makes things happen — arising at the crossroads of systemic violence, relational entanglement, and the in-/re-surgences of the flesh.

The book also considers how Black electronic dance musics — house, techno, and jungle — inherit and extend Afro-diasporic spiritual practices whose subliminal and sublime forces persist within, and insist upon, the sonic. Formed within urban and digital landscapes, these musics diffract ancestral African rhythms, producing new patterns of pulse and participatory antiphony (call-and-response).

Fugitive Erotics features cover art by 2024 BADS_lab fellow Letaru Dralega, and an accompanying mix (below) by 2024 BADS_lab fellow Jared Brown (a.k.a. girly***) that interrogates and extends the book’s meditations on Black electronic dance musics.