FUTURHYTHMACHINES
Infopoiēsis
Colonial Science brutalizes us into bits of data to be collected and analyzed, seeking to rationally represent phenomena by reducing our complexity to visual and symbolic abstractions.
Drawing upon the (re-)creative methodologies of Black electronic dance musics, this workshop invites participants to experiment with decolonial practices of signal sampling and synthesis — methodologies that move against the grain of colonial data extraction and analysis. The aim is not to represent phenomena through reductive models, but to intuitively sense phenomena that elude representational and analytical frameworks. Using the layered polyrhythms and participatory antiphonies characteristic of Afro-diasporic musics, the practices we explore engage with phenomena dynamically, attuning to their resonances and relational patterns.
Participants explore how the break beat, the blue note, and the ring shout offer sonic paradigms for rethinking knowledge production beyond colonial control. The polymetric break beat resists the monometric, affirming the generativity of dissensus. The polyphonic blue note bends the boundaries of correctness, challenging the symphonic demand for harmonic unity. The improvised participatory antiphonies of the ring shout dissolve the authority of the composer and conductor, transforming knowledge into a collective, call-and-response practice.
THE Workshop
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Wave-Table Oscillators as Signal Synthesis
We begin by translating numerical datasets into wave-table oscillators with Max’s gen~. This shift literalizes a movement from analysis to synthesis: from abstraction to embodied sense-making. Participants will sonify “brutalized” data, rendering waveforms not as mute graphs but as audible and affective signals—either directly as sound or indirectly as control signals driving beat slicers and sequencers.
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SP-404 as Machine for Spectral Drift
These signals are then gathered into the Roland SP-404. Its architecture of resampling and effects invites intentional misalignment—pitch, time, harmonic expectation—echoing the expressive “offness” of the blue note. Participants will “play the error,” bending signals into spectral textures that drift across convention, discovering resonance in dissonance
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TR-8S as Machine for Metric Dissensus
From these errant fragments, we construct break beats on the Roland TR-8S, refusing the metric consensus of gridlocked time. Here, we operationalize dissensus: building polymetric sequences in which divergent meters clash and converge. Multiple time signatures overlap, rub, and drift. Participants sequence breaks that disorient expectation, shift rhythmic emphasis, and generate emergent, relational grooves.
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Feedback Loops as Ring Shouts
As the system unfolds, we entangle Max, SP-404, and TR-8S in a feedback ecology. Audio, modulation, and control-rate signals circulate between nodes. MIDI and CV connections transform the performance into a ring shout structure: participants respond to a signal (call) by transforming it through filters, LFOs, pitch effects, or spatial modulation (response). As these gestures accumulate and rebound, roles dissolve—listener becomes player, player becomes modulator, and knowledge emerges through relational resonance.
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Naming the Data Otherwise
Drawing upon Kodwo Eshun’s More Brilliant Than the Sun, each session will include a collective effort to generate new languages for describing the datasets in play. Just as Eshun identifies breakbeat producers, instrumental turntablists, and mixadelic engineers as already-operating sonic theorists—activating thought at the speed of sound—we approach our datasets not as fixed objects to be analyzed, but as conceptual engines to be misused, mutated, and magnified.
These datasets are not neutral substrates but “thoughtprobes,” pregnant with potential, waiting to be switched on and re-coded through the languages of our own making. Participants will draw on the vocabularies of Black sonic innovation—skratchadelia, loopdelics, machine funk—as conceptual technics, as names that refuse empiricism’s closure and invite diffraction, drift, and misuse. Like track subtitles or stolen sleeve-note manifestos, these names will misrecognize the data in productive ways, distorting and bending it until it becomes a device for drilling into emergent sensory and epistemic states. Theory, here, does not impose from above—it is conducted from below, by way of machines, signals, samples, and the speculative vocabularies they demand.
Footage from Workshop | May 24th 2025 | 12:00pm - 4:00pm | Co-Prosperity Sphere, Bridgeport, Chicago
Thanks to drum machines, sound systems, and repurposed warehouses and basements, 1980s Chicago House Music opened up a future that was Black, brown, and queer. DJs invented new ways of keeping and marking time in community. In the years since, computation has made music-making more accessible. What kinds of collectivities are still to come?
Combining complementary modes of thinking, making, and performing, Futurhythmachines: House (FRM:House) was a daylong public event organized during BADS_lab 2024. It featured a DIY synthesizer workshop, a panel discussion, and a DIY synth performance with reception.
FRM:House reflected on social forms, expressive technics, and musical experience through Chicago House Music—discovering therein an art of forming fugitive publics and a science of probing sonic ecologies.
In preparation for the event, BADS_lab director Muindi Fanuel Muindi interviewed three critical thinkers about Black Electronic Dance Music in general, and Chicago House specifically.
- Dhanveer Singh Brar is a researcher focused on histories of Black diasporic culture and politics from the mid-twentieth century onward. His work approaches these histories through artistic experimentation with sound and the politics of intellectual production, attending to the relationships between popular and experimental music, art practice, cinema, publishing, and political organization. He is the author of Beefy’s Tune (Dean Blunt Edit) (The 87 Press) and Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski: The Sonic Ecologies of Black Music in the Early Twenty-First Century (Goldsmiths Press / MIT Press), along with numerous articles in journals such as Social Text, South Atlantic Quarterly, and New Formations.
- Ryan Clarke is a tonal geologist based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Along with Frankie Decaiza Hutchinson and Enyo Amexo, Clarke is a co-curator and organizer of Dweller Festival, a Brooklyn-based platform centering Black electronic artists. He also co-edits the affiliated Dweller Electronics blog.
- RA Judy is Professor of Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of [Dis]forming the American Canon: African-Arabic Slave Narratives and the Vernacular (Minnesota, 1992)—which included the first translation of the early nineteenth-century Ben Ali Arabic manuscript—and Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiesis in Black (Duke), recipient of the 2023 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. His essays include “Kant and the Negro,” “The Question of Nigga Authenticity,” “Fanon’s Body of Black Experience,” “On W.E.B. Du Bois and Hyperbolic Thinking,” “Sayyid Qutb’s fiqh al-wāqi’ī, or New Realist Science,” “For Dignity: Tunisia and the Poetry of Emergent Democratic Humanism,” and “Restless Flying: A Black Study of Revolutionary Humanism.”