From 'Oogie Boogie' to 'Saecularhythmia–The Rhythmanalyst relates to semiocoustic reason.': the distance between the album's most playful title and its most scholarly one holds the entire Speaker Music project. Synoptic Audio is DeForrest Brown Jr.'s final album under the alias, as The Quietus reported, closing a run with Planet Mu that began in 2019 with Of Desire, Longing and continued through Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry and Techxodus. It is a farewell that never looks for middle ground: it speaks in extremes.
The first is speed. 'Oogie Boogie' and 'Teleoplexy' crawl at 96 BPM, barely half the 148 of 'Sense-Datum Volumetrics', also one of the record's most compressed stretches. The deeper contrast, though, is in how those tempos behave: six pieces run between 140 and 148 yet act like drones, floating matter rather than functional rhythm. That makes sense given the source material: live recordings of electronic improvisation — drones, hand-played keyboards and drums — with the Live Electronic Orchestra of Don Lewis, the Black electronic music pioneer, as a declared reference.
From boogie to treatise
The second extreme is one of register. Brown is also a theorist and writer: his book Assembling a Black Counter Culture reframes techno's history as Black cultural production born in Detroit, and he describes himself as a rhythmanalyst — a figure that literally surfaces in the ninth track's title. That double life is audible at the tracklist's poles: 'Dhalgren (Nihilism is Not Enough)' opens at 128 BPM in Db minor, and the same key returns to close with 'Techno-Vernacular Expressionism', the longest cut at 9:48 against the lean 5:32 of 'Saecularhythmia'. Between the playful and the academic, the slow and the urgent, the miniature and the near-ten-minute finale, Synoptic Audio refuses to choose: it lets both extremes sound at once, and that friction is how the alias says goodbye.
Sources: The Quietus · Primary Information · Bandcamp