Derek Baron’s Reading Group explores the line between text and music, the intimate and the public, the rehearsal and release. Founded in 2016 as a CD-R label, its focuses on experimental music, but ‘experimental’ is not here so much a genre description as a general, non-diomatic approach. Among the releases sampled here are archival soundtracks, music for plays, works of phonopoetics and spontaneous chamber arrangements of music by Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor Adorno.

X-Ray Hex Tet
“1”
From X-Ray Hex Tet (2024)

Involving musicians associated with the scene around Café Oto – Paul Abbott, Crystabel Riley, Billy Steiger, Pat Thomas, Seymour Wright – the key factor on this long, live recording is the vocal presence of Edward George, whose repeated, reverb-drenched question “do you know?” draws us through the post-punk references that give the band its name – The Fall, X-Ray Spex — to the history of transatlantic slavery and the murder of Black people in police custody in the UK, between the brutal facts of racial capital and a resistant alternative in which one can “rewind the hands of time, then fast forward.”

Fred Moten/Brandon López/Gerald Cleaver
“the abolition of art, the abolition of freedom, the abolition of you and me”
From Moten/López/Cleaver (2022)

With this album representing their first time meeting in the studio, the trio have since gone on to tour widely, generating a second album. This is very much a working band. And in this context ‘work’ means continuous change, reshuffling, improvisation. Over a loping bassline incorporating off-kilter harmonics, Moten’s “love song” about the abolition of racial capitalism unfolds with quiet determination. If music has been taken to be antithetical to thought, tracks like this show that thought and feeling can hardly be disentangled: “freedom is too / close to slavery / for us to be easy / with that jailed / imagining.”

Zara Joan Miller & Ute Kanngießer
“Side A”
From Blue Monday (2024)

Recorded at Cafe Oto, Blue Monday is a text/music collaboration of quite a different kind, between London based artists Zara Joan Miller and cellist Ute Kanngießer. In Baron’s words, “Ute lays down this continuous microtonal cello fabric, and then Zara brings these fragmentary shards of language that appear like street signs as you’re driving down the highway. I find it an absolutely magical record.” Structured around unreliable structures of telling, of describing and being described, the stable-unstable flow of music both offsets and undercuts the ambiguous fracture of text: “they didn’t know it was there, she said.”

Yan Jun
“plays samuel beckett”
From contradictions (plays lu xun, žižek, baudrillard and beckett) (2023)

Chinese experimentalist Yan Jun’s contradictions takes a counter-intuitive approach to text, interpreting texts by Lu Xun, Samuel Beckett, Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Žižek via “empty” field recordings, “audio feedback without a manual interface”, and a text recitation in which every reference to the first person is removed, in Jun’s words, “colliding and annihilating everything” in order to “deal with the limit of the form.” On “plays Samuel beckett”, Jun reads the Chinese translation of Beckett’s Texts For Nothing silently, to himself, speaking only the Mandarin character for ‘I, my, me’, 我 (‘wǒ’), at one articulating and emptying the self as – perhaps – a basis for a new collective understanding.

Carman Moore
“Tema 1”
From Personal Problems (2020)

Conceived of by writers Ishmael Reed and Steve Cannon and featuring the astonishing Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, the film Personal Problems is notable for multiple reasons: not least the presence of director Bill Gunn, best known today for his experimental vampire classic Ganja And Hess, which had a stupendous soundtrack by Gunn’s partner Sam Waymon (brother to Nina Simone). On Personal Problems, the job went to Carman Moore. A founder of the Society of Black Composers, his work floats easily past genre constraints, drawing equally on jazz, classical and popular forms. Like Moore’s Soul Musings, also on Reading Group, this beguiling music is at once lilting and sombre, tending towards the meditative and inward-looking, without neglecting the social world in which the film insistently locates its characters.

Ishmael Reed
“Bells For Basquiat”
From The Hands Of Grace (2022)

Writer Ishmael Reed has a long history with music, most notably in the band with Kip Hanrahan that recorded Conjure: Music For The Texts Of Ishmael Reed back in 1985. On The Hands Of Grace, he takes the role of composer and performer, accompanied by wife Carla Blank on violin, daughter Tennessee Reed on voice, flautist Roger Glenn and guitarist Ray Obiedo. Along with tributes to Lucille Clifton, Steve Cannon and daughter Timothy Reed, the album includes this solo piano piece from the music Reed composed for his play about Jean-Michel Basquiat, The Slave Who Loved Caviar.

Cop Tears
“Side A (Excerpt)”
From Theodor Adorno: Piano Works (2021)

Baron’s own band Cop Tears, with Andrew Wilhite and Cameron Kapoor, what they call “amateur chamber ensemble” interpretations of work by classical composers. Adorno – an amateur composer who studied with Alban Berg and took composition very seriously – writes awkward and strangely fascinating music, including a children’s suite. Taken from hours of lo-fi rehearsal recordings, the concept of play is central to this record: playing music, playing with music, improvising and inventing.

Read David Grundy's full Unlimited Editions report on Reading Group in The Wire 489. Wire subscribers can also read the article online via the digital magazine library.