lovenloops: Time, Sound, Music and Black Girlhood

• In Event: Futuring Scholarly Expression Through Sound, Sound Design, and Music: A Listening Session with Liner Notes

Abstract

lovenloops is an experimental book-as-audio project that centers the sonic, musical, and digital creativity of Black girls and women in the intergenerational collective Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT). Comprising a 1,000-word introduction, four 30-minute DJ mixes, and
liner notes, lovenloops layers original beats, loops, found audio, field recordings, and narration to archive and extend SOLHOT’s decade-long practice of celebrating Black girlhood as a radical organizing framework. As a SOLHOT “homegirl” and DJ/producer in our girl band We Levitate, I approach DJing as both an archival and citational practice—sampling, looping, and mixing to create sonic anthologies that refuse perfection, center love, and enact what we call “doing digital wrongly” (Brown et al., 2018). This collective method embraces beginner experimentation, local sensibilities, and heartfelt promises. Drawing on Black feminist sound studies, DJ scholarship (Denise, 2023), and SOLHOT’s own music-making archive, lovenloops frames the DJ as archivist, time-bender, and sonic collage artist. It mobilizes sound—a medium historically used to discipline and control—as a tool for freedom-making, memory work, and world-building. lovenloops invites listeners, educators, artists, and scholars into a sonic experience of Black girlhood as an embodied, collective practice of love, refusal, and possibility.

Author

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