The following description comes from the event organizer.

w/ Be Present Art Group

Black Decelerant is an album guided by process and intuition. Since meeting in 2016, Lucas and Jazz dreamed of a collaborative album that could utilize formless music in both political and poetic ways. They eventually cultivated the project in 2020 across six months of remote sessions (living in South Carolina and Oregon respectively), communicating through improvised instrumentals and sample-based production as reflections of their inner and outer worlds.

“It felt like a remedy to some of the existential stress we were feeling during the time,” says Lucas. “Simultaneously being in the height of lockdown and thinking about encroaching fascism and anti-Blackness, in the US especially. The making of the record felt very meditative and offered a dimension to ground us.”

Listening and responding to one another in real time, the sessions became a vessel to channel ideas around Black humanity, primordiality and ontology, and slowness as a cumulative technology for protection against violence and extraction. The album’s ten compositions configure vast, resonant landscapes with signals, weathers and spirits, suspended in memory and distilled in time.

The Black Decelerant machine recalibrates archival relics and acoustic impulses into collages of amalgamated timbres, where harmony exists not without discordance. Across the expansive space of the record, cadent storms of modulated sound ascend beside serene melodic spells. Piano keys and bass lines tumble in free fall throughout the release, accompanied on tracks “two” and “eight” by the spectral trumpet improvisations of Jawwaad Taylor.

The duo arrived at their name upon reading Aria Dean’s Notes on Blacceleration, an article which explores Accelerationism within the context of Black being or non-being as a foundational tenet of capitalism. Coupled with the record’s intended effect, “Black Decelerant” references the music being an invitation to slow down, while hinting at the shared politics between themselves and the artists and thinkers who inspire them.