Let Loose Thy Soul: A Liberated Imagination Divines (2024)
Jai Lasker (Seattle, WA)
Sound, digital audio visualization

This piece begins with the idea that free futures for Black folks do not exist within the colonialist framework of racial capitalism; as such, for us, the act of concretely imagining a fulfilled future and devising the spaces that would enable these futures to exist constitutes a radical act of ideological rebellion that steps beyond the bounds of our present reality. I see this as Black imaginative divination; using the major arcana of the tarot to root myself in this theme of divination, this piece aims to sonically decolonialize divinatory practice and mystic narratives by centering the essentiality of Black speculative storytelling and exploring the sacred meanings of numbers. Through a combination of soundscape composition, sampling from the Black musical archive, improvised performance, and accompanying visuals, this piece will invite both myself and listeners to leave this present world behind in search of alternative spaces and the hidden knowledge of other times.



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BLUE.WEAVE the INVENTOR

My work and artistic practice entails an embodied superposition of investigative archival research, imaginative world-building, and mythic storytelling through the mediums of music production, environmental sound design, and sonic improvisation. Framing my body as a site of generational, animated knowledge, I explore how the Black and queer creative, sensory intuitions of the body can grant us access to wisdom, consciousness, and ways of knowing otherwise inaccessible under the constricting logics of racial capitalism and oppressive normativity. Viewing hip-hop's tradition of endlessly revitalizing past sounds and ideas to reflect presents avenues of thought as a method of transcending time and space through our art, I work within and move without this approach to manifest seemingly unknowable past and future knowledge in the present to awaken and engage with listeners' connection to inner/outer worlds and tend the Black revolutionary flame.



︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎