Releases April 11, 2025 / Pre-orders on now
[ TAO 17 ]
LP - Strictly ltd. LP edition of 500 on black vinyl // jacket printed on heavier-weight reverse board stock // includes full-res download card w/ 2 additional tracks.
CD - 4-panel digipak, on heavier-weight reverse board stock.
Fred Moten: texts, voice
Brandon López: bass
The work of each of these powerfully creative & exceptionally perceptive individuals concerns itself with how one might navigate the ascending reign of long-institutionalized madness while simultaneously keeping humanity and sanity intact.
The synergistic mesh of these two voices in Duo is here presented on record for the first time, following two acclaimed works on the Reading Group label in trio with Gerald Cleaver.
Inimitable poet, cultural theorist, author, 2020 MacArthur Fellow, Fred Moten creates new conceptual spaces that accommodate emergent forms of Black cultural production, aesthetics, and social life. Moten is a professor of performance studies and comparative literature at New York University concerned with social movement, aesthetic experiment, and Black study. He is also a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Puerto Rican-American bassist Brandon López is the son of a gravedigger who himself put time in doing the same, developing muscles that serve him well in his thorough command of the upright bass. On moving to NYC, López made himself indispensable within numerous realms of creative music. As the Cleveland Review of Books noted, “This is virtuosity as vocabulary, a total command of texture, subtlety, and a depth that can be reached into.”
They will be performing at Big Ears 2025, during a two-day Reading Group residency at Cafe OTO (London) April 26-27, and elsewhere.
On their previous work in trio with Gerald Cleaver:
New York Times: “Best Jazz Albums of 2022: Moten is after nothing less than a full interrogation of the ways Black systems of knowledge have been strip-mined and cast aside, and yet have regrown.”
Pitchfork: "8.0 – A conceptually rich, politically weighty album that asks timeless questions without over-explaining...breathlessly complex"
1. #14 (4:07)
2. #5 (13:37)
3. #3 (2:21)
4. #4 (6:31)
5. #6 (6:25)
6. #2 (3:59)
7. #8 (8:08)
8. #10 (4:47)
9. #7 (4:50)
10. #11 (6:13)
11. #9 (2:40)
LP features a different sequence. #5 and #6 not on vinyl, but included with DL card.
Recorded mixed and mastered at Greyfade Studios by Joseph Branciforte
Produced by Moten/López & TAO Forms
Cover photograph courtesy of TONE Festival (June 13, 2024).
Layout by Ming@AUM