Kepla & Deforrest Brown Jr. Absent Personae

Collaboration between Liverpool-based sound artist, Jon Davies aka Kepla, and New
York-based media theorist and music writer, DeForrest Brown Jr. Following in the style
of verbatim theater, Brown - through private recordings in various urban public
environments - recalls a palpable though unseen trauma while wading amidst Davies'
digital processing of found social media audio. The result is a psychopolitical meditation
on Black America as a (de)territorialized subject. Absent Personae was commissioned
by Electronic Voice Phenomena as an interstitial spectre in transition, resonating with
the sinister politics of pseudo-science histories, while speculating on identity as evasion
and persona without orientation.The piece is a post-industrial Dérive considering the
psychological liminal zones between old and new industry and urbanity, the changing
landscapes of labor: a fractured genealogical memory trace obscured by intercepted
signals and the liquidating flux of late capitalism.