“Love Sleeves”: A Sonic Introduction to Love and Loops

• In Event: Loving Wholeness Together, With Grief: A Listening Session With Liner Notes

Abstract

This performance presentation is focused on an expert and sonic introduction from a working multimodal book tentatively titled Love and Loops: Memory, Time, Sound and Black Girlhood. This project engages poetics, sound, and music making with Black girls and women as a site of knowledge. I demonstrate Black feminist genealogies of collective artist practice and theories as a framework not only to study experiences of Black girls in relationship to Black women and each other, but to challenge capitalism and individualistic notions of knowledge and knowledge production in preference for more coalition (Reagon, 1983) and intuitively creative ways of being and knowing. To challenge these notions, this research is intentionally embodied and based in everyday Black girl artistic practices including sampling, beat making and DJing. I use sound and music-making methods to reimagine how we learn and create knowledge together with Black girls (Brown, 2013), homegirls and self.

The purpose of this presentation is to explore my scholar-artist practice, lovenloops, as a methodological tool. As lovenloops, I am concerned with a sound art and writing practice that remembers where I came from sonically and politically and making sense of self in relation to doing Black girlhood with Black girls. Lovenloops, as a practice, has been a way to write and sound myself into places/spaces I call and co-curate home and coalition. The sound and music process and production evolves and changes as I continue to change and shift in work and creative practice with Black girlhood, building upon visionary Black girlhood soundings of AuthorX (2019), Brown (2014), Brown et al., (2018), and others.
This performance presentation draws upon research I am doing, as lovenloops, on Black girlhood as a sound artist, homegirl with SOLHOT and lover. I focus on lovenloops as a way to remember SOLHOT and Black girlhood. As a methodological tool, lovenloops allows me to sonically and creatively reflect on my relationship to time, Black girlhood, and prepare my heart, mind and sound for being in coalition with Black girls, others, and myself, on good and bad days.

This work is significant for its contribution to the growing study of Black girlhood, feminist, sound and performance studies. Significantly, my work thinks with other panelists about the generative potential of making hip hop sounds that lean into Black girlhood and feminist sensibilities. I am most interested in ways lovenloops is evolving as a method/practice always, made in love, with others, and most certainly coming from the heart.

Author

• Blair Ebony Smith, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign