Title: Dismantling The Hardcore Continuum (Futurythmic Dub)
Artist: DeForrest Brown, Jr.
Production: 2022-23

Dismantling the Hardcore Continuum (Futurythmic Dub) revisits the sonic legacy of The Eclipse, the UK's first legal inner-city rave club, between 1990 and 1992. DeForrest Brown, Jr. reimagines this legacy through an Afrofuturist lens, examining identity, community, and technological dynamics. This speculative soundwork employs rhythm to investigate the club's historical significance as a centre of cultural resistance, elevating rhythm as a key to social interaction and cultural innovation beyond conventional music limits. Presenting a sonic critique of the 'hardcore continuum,' a theory that connects Hardcore, Jungle, and Drum 'n' Bass with British working-class socio-economic realities. In doing so, Dismantling the Hardcore Continuum (Futurythmic Dub) challenges prevailing theories by offering a narrative that is both non-linear in time and spatially expansive. It promotes deterritorialisation and the rise of innovative rhythmic expressions, moving beyond traditional musical patterns of rave music from this era.

DeForrest Brown, Jr. is an Alabama-raised, Ex-American rhythmanalyst and writer, as well as the representative of the Make Techno Black Again campaign. Under the moniker Speaker Music, Brown, Jr. channels the African American modernist tradition of rhythm and soul music as an intellectual site and sound of techno-vernacular expression, and has released albums on Planet Mu: of desire, longing (2019), Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry (2020), and Techxodus (2023). Havaing written for a decade in the music press, their work examines the connections between the Black experience in industrialised labour systems and Black innovation in electonic music, featuring in ublications such as Artforum, Triple Canopy, NPR, and MixMag. Brown, Jr. performances and presentations have graced venues like Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin; Paris+ par Art Basel in Paris; Camden Art Centre in London; and festival including Unsound in Krakow and Sónar in Barcelona. Additionally, they have conducted courses on the history and contemporary uses of Afrofuturism in music at institutions like the Parsons School of Design at The New School and Princeton University. Their debut book, Assembling a Black Counter Culture was published by Primary Information in 2022.