slow and soft and righteous — Listening Session Featuring sonia louise davis, L’Rain and Akeema-Zane

Premiered Thursday, June 3, 8pm
Hosted by: Brown Up Your Feed & Co—Conspirator Press

This collaborative event, convened by Sonia Louise Davis and featuring L’Rain and A²Z, brings together three NY-based artists and friends for an hour of close listening on the occasion of the release of Davis’ book, “slow and soft and righteous, improvising at the end of the world (and how we make a new one),” published by Co-Conspirator Press, which operates out of the Feminist Center for Creative Work in Los Angeles. The event is generously hosted on Mandy Harris Williams’ monthly “Brown Up Your Feed Radio Hour” on NTS Radio.

A²Z, also known as Akeema-Zane, is an Afro-Caribbean artist and researcher from NYC who centers the literary, cinematic and sonic traditions in her practice. She has been an artist-in-residence, student, fellow and performer at Groundation Grenada, Cave Canem, The Maysles Documentary Center, Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism. She is a thought partner, collaborator of many peer artists/luminaries of which her work is featured. One of her formal spaces of collaboration is with a working group known as “Rotten Spring” and is affiliated with The School of Making Thinking through which she has co-taught “Consensual Collaboration and Micro-culture,” this past spring and was an artist-in-residence of Immersion 2.0 Creation Lab (virtual reality) for which she was also slated to co-facilitate May 2020’s Immersion 4.0 (postponed). Some published writings include: “Nonsecular Non sequitur,”  “There’s a Monopoly on Change,” and  “Basil Grows from Mother Earth.” A²Z is the umbrella for which some of the artist’s deejaying, sound design, playlists, original mixes and compositions live.

Under the mononym L’Rain, Brooklyn native Taja Cheek has become an acclaimed figure in New York experimental music. A multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and vocalist, her songs are equally rooted in r&b, jazz, noise, and pop: at once visceral, spiritual, ethereal, and urgent.