Soundworks

In <i>Soundworks</i> Anthony Reed argues that studying sound requires conceiving it as process and as work. Since the long Black Arts era (ca. 1958-1974) intellectuals poets and musicians have defined black sound as radical aesthetic practice. Through their recorded collaborations as well as the accompanying interviews essays liner notes and other media they continually reinvent black sound conceptually and materially. <i>Soundwork</i> is Reed's term for that material and conceptual labor of experimental sound practice framed by the institutions of the culture industry and shifting historical contexts. Through analyses of Langston Hughes's collaboration with Charles Mingus Amiri Baraka's work with the New York Art Quartet Jayne Cortez's albums with the Firespitters and the multimedia projects of Archie Shepp Matana Roberts Cecil Taylor and Jeanne Lee Reed shows that to grasp black sound as a radical philosophical and aesthetic insurgence requires attending to it as the product of material technical sensual and ideological processes.