Sat. 22 Oct. 2022 | 3-8pm

4:00: Raven Chacon

5:30: Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste followed by Centennial Gardens

7:00: L’Rain

For this series of performances, KinoSaito presented the premiere of Raven Chacon’s American Ledger No. 3 (2020), a composition devoted to the journalist and anti-lynching campaigner Ida B. Wells. Like many of the Pulitzer Prize-winning artist and composer’s works, American Ledger No. 3 is a graphic score to be interpreted, in this case, by an ensemble of vocalists. (American Ledger No. 3 includes a flag emblazoned with the score and a newsprint publication that connects Wells’s writing to contemporary police violence.) 

L’Rain, a Brooklyn-based musician, whose discography ranges from pop to R&B to sound collage, performed solo and in a duo with her bandmate Ben Chapoteau-Katz. L’Rain, who was an artist in residence during the exhibition, had recently released Fatigue (2021), which Pitchfork called “a graceful record whose wearied landscapes of synth, air horn, strings, and saxophone distill a suite of low moods—depression, regret, and fear—into resilience and hope.” In the past year, L’Rain has toured with Animal Collective and Sharon Van Etten, and her music has been praised by the New York Times, New York Magazine, the Wire, the New Yorker, and the Fader, among other publications.

Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste performed a composition for an unmarked police car that he has turned into a sound system and instrument: … and Drive Far Away (2022), his contribution to the exhibition. (The work will be installed in KinoSaito’s garden throughout the exhibition; visit this page in the coming weeks for information about additional performances.) After the performance, Toussaint-Baptiste spoke about the work and his relationship to bass, Gulf Coast rap, car-audio culture, and policing.

Centennial Gardens is the duo of the New York City-based musicians, Dreamcrusher and King Vision Ultra. The group’s debut, SPLIT (PTP), was released in 2021. Dreamcrusher is a moniker of the musician and artist, Luwayne Glass. Glass began Dreamcrusher in 2003 while living in Kansas as a means of self-discovery and release, and of addressing the experience of being queer and Black through various forms and personas, none of them static or stable. King Vision Ultra is an alias of the musician and artist, GENG PTP, founder of the collective Purple Tape Pedigree, which releases music and publications as well as organizing community gatherings and actions. Since 2017, King Vision Ultra has produced music that deals with the relationship between memory, archives, self-actualization, and trauma.

This event is co-presented by the magazine Triple Canopy, which is edited by Alexander Provan, the curator of Signaling.

Thank you to our sponsors: HIATUS Tequila and Captain Lawrence Brewery.