Arthur Jafa

This record is the art edition of the Listening Session that Arthur Jafa staged on 9 September 2017. It closed A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions, his exhibition at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London, open from 8 June to 10 September 2017. Jafa trained as an architect and works as a filmmaker, cinematographer and artist. He shot Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust (1991), and his own work keeps asking how a Black visual aesthetics might match the power, beauty and alienation of Black music. His 2016 film Love is the Message, The Message is Death was shown in New York and Los Angeles. The Serpentine show was a site-specific assemblage of film, photography and found footage. For its final weekend he brought the question back to sound, with an event presented by The Vinyl Factory and the Serpentine. While the music played, the performance artist Okwui Okpokwasili devised a time-based piece in the gallery in front of the audience.

The Vinyl Factory described the line-up as a dismembered jazz ensemble. Its members improvised at the same time but in separate places, secret 'Black Sites' across London. Jason Moran played at The Dirty House, a renovated 1930s warehouse in Shoreditch that houses artists' studios. Saxophonist Steve Coleman and vocalist Kokayi Issa performed in a fashion boutique in St James's, while Micah Gaugh, Melvin Gibbs and Morgan Craft played at the Serpentine Galleries. Each feed was streamed into the Sackler Gallery and the combined result was cut direct to disc on the VF mobile lathe as it happened. The first side carries that live recording, which the label itself calls a discordant soundtrack. The second side is titled Guide Track. The session followed the lathe recordings the label had made at the 2015 Venice Biennale, where Moran had also performed.

Limited edition of 300 copies, hand-signed and numbered by Jafa, pressed on 180-gram black vinyl on the EMI 1400 in Hayes, Middlesex. Jafa conceived the gatefold sleeve, designed by OSK Studio in UV litho on silver Mirri board, and the inner sleeve is hand screen printed with clear gloss foil on black Popset.