Sick (Music) Center

Over the course of two months, Anna RG will be transforming Recess’ Session space into an experimental research, development, and community space exploring sick/disabled listening and music—of the living, the passed on, and the speculative. Sick (Music) Center seeks to gather a growing cohort of sick/disabled musicians, to collaboratively develop alternatives to the formal and systemic structures which guide prevailing ideas about what music can be, where music can show up in our lives, and for whom music is accessible. Sick Center explores the question, how do we seek Sick Musical forms–ways of making and worlds of sound that embrace our states of being and our states of desire?

Sick, as in having illness, working with illness, as in being disabled in its infinite forms. Sick, as in living Mad, in deep grief, in addiction. Sick, as in diagnosed, undiagnosed, or self-diagnosed. Sick, as in moving with–and belonging to–community and lineage of sick and disabled cultures. Sick, as in being sick of it, or as in, if society is “well’ then I don’t want to be that.

Music, as in transmission of sound, as in connective expressive tissue, as in joining or making traditions of rhythms and storytelling and ritual, and sonic waves touching our bodyminds. Listening, as in the directing, offering, misdirecting, wandering, flying, and finding of our bodily attentions, beyond ear-hearing.

Center, as in a place to convene, as in a reversal of capitalist geometry. What if sick/disabled people/ways were centered, not discarded to the outside? What if we push further into the center of our sick and disabled desires in our sound practices, as well as in our solidarities and support?