Fred Moten + Brandon Lopez

Fred Moten is a Professor of Performance Studies at New York University and a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Riverside. He has had a large number of poetry collections published and is a MacArthur Fellowship winner for his “new conceptual spaces to accommodate emerging forms of Black aesthetics, cultural production, and social life.” Brandon Lopez, meanwhile, is a New York-based double bassist, an instructor of improvisation and double bass at the New School for Jazz and celebrated for his improvisational work, which is very much in evidence throughout Revision as he unlocks new sonic territories while his instrument simultaneously leaves room for Moten to weave a magical dialogue. Both artists trade in idiosyncratic assemblage, putting together something infinitely elaborate, and then somehow making it look so easy, impossibly natural, like primordial ooze descending. For the hour of Revision, they sound bound to one another, locked into something bigger than mere collaboration - a conclave of sheer art. Just as Moten has been pushing against the stodgy walls of academia, so has López been against musical composition. Their collaboration was a display of activism, a celebration of civil empathy and unrest.