Alternating Currents Live presents Fred Moten, Brandon López, & Ken Taylor

Join us for an interdisciplinary exploration of poetry and music with Fred Moten (voice/poetry) & Brandon López (double bass), and Ken Taylor (voice/poetry). Presented as part of both our Alternating Currents Live series for improvised music and our poetry series Through Lines, with support from the NEA.

Fred Moten works in the Departments of Performance Studies and Comparative Literature at New York University. He is concerned with social movement, aesthetic experiment, and black study, and has written a number of books of poetry and criticism, the latest of which, written with Stefano Harney, is All Incomplete (Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, 2021). In addition to his long-term collaboration with Harney, Moten is engaged in ongoing work with critic Laura Harris, artist Wu Tsang and musicians Gerald Cleaver and Brandon López. Moten is a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His book perennial fashion presence falling was published by Wave Books in 2023.

Brandon López is a New York-based composer and bassist working at the fringes of jazz, free improvisation, noise, and new music. His music has been praised as “brutal” (Chicago Reader) and “relentless” (The New York Times). From the New York Philharmonic's David Geffen Hall to the DIY basements of Brooklyn, López has worked beside many luminaries of jazz, classical, poetry, and experimental music, including Fred Moten, John Zorn, Okkyung Lee, Ingrid Laubrock, Tony Malaby, Tyshawn Sorey, Cecilia Lopez, Sun Ra Arkestra, Susan Alcorn, Mette Rasmussen, and many others. Recent highlight performances include opening the 2018–2019 season of the New York Philharmonic as a featured soloist in Ashley Fure’s “Filament” and a number of works with John Zorn, including Zorn’s 35th anniversary of “Cobra.”

Ken Taylor is the author of two chapbooks and three books of poetry, including variations in the dream of X, coming soon from Black Square Editions. He recently collaborated with Ed Roberson on found poem(s), a book of photos (Ken's) and poetry (Ed's), forthcoming from Corbett vs. Dempsey. He is the founder of selva oscura press, which he edits with Fred Moten.