Music as Spectral Infrastructure

BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht proudly presents Music as Spectral Infrastructure, a two-day program of discussions, sound works, film screenings, and DJ sets organized in the framework of the festival Le Guess Who? 2021 in Utrecht. Taking place November 13–14, 2021, Music as Spectral Infrastructure features, among others: artist, scholar, writer, and DJ Lynnée Denise (London); artist and writer Laura Grace Ford (London); writer and researcher Edward George (London); artist and musician Paul Purgas (London); researcher and teacher Paul Rekret (London); artist, writer, and musician Xin (London); and occasional writer, editor, curator, and musician Ollie Zhang (London).

Part of a long-term research project “Spectral Infrastructure” by freethought collective at BAK (2020–2023), the program inquires into how the sonic, visual, and spatial modalities of electronic music hold today a key position along the intersections of culture, politics, and economics. The history of dub, house, hip hop, techno, jungle, grime, etc. not only forms a source of capital exploited by cultural industries, tourism, and gentrification projects, music itself has become, through streaming platforms, an electronic medium in which environments can be personalized and the desires of audiences can be tracked.

But what if music could become a medium of socio-spatial composition—a spectral infrastructure—opposed to the systems of digital individuation and financial accumulation cultured by racial capitalism? Or a spectral infrastructure that forms the invisible, undefinable, illegible, yet empowering texture of collectivity; an ephemeral glue that can hold us together in affective modality to ward off the regimes of capture deployed by the powers that be?  

These questions form the basis for an interconnected program of presentations, conversations, and DJ sets, reflecting on the different dimensions and histories of music and sound, in order to study the ways in which electronic music has and can continue to become not only a medium of collective experience, but also a mode of collective thought and political action. Musicians, artists, writers, researchers, and educators ponder this possibility and draft fragmentary genealogies of both resistance to neoliberal governance and propositions that go beyond the economies within which the music is conventionally considered.

Music as Spectral Infrastructure has been devised by Louis Moreno (lecturer, Department of Visual Cultures and the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London, London) for freethought and BAK in the context of the Le Guess Who? 2021, and is realized as part of an ongoing collaboration between BAK and Le Guess Who? in Utrecht.

For more information on the program and to get tickets, see here. 

BAK’s activities have been made possible with financial support from the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and the City of Utrecht.

BAK’s main partner in the field of education and research is HKU University of the Arts Utrecht, Utrecht.