Theaster Gates, The Black Monks of Mississippi

Furthermore is the second release on Black Madonna Press, the label that Theaster Gates runs with The Vinyl Factory. It holds a single live jam by his collective The Black Monks of Mississippi, credited here simply as The Black Monks. It was recorded at the Sprengel Museum in Hannover in 2018. Gates had won the 2017 Kurt Schwitters Prize, an award that was to culminate in his first solo museum show in Germany, at the Sprengel. The record came out in March 2019 and was also tied to Amalgam, his exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, which had opened the month before. Gates is a Chicago artist whose practice runs from sculpture, ceramics and video to performance and urban regeneration. His projects create hubs and archives for Black culture, and the Monks are the part of that work that makes sound. Gates has led music since his teens, when he became minister of music in his church at fourteen.

The Black Monks are a rotating cast of Chicago musicians, often joined by local players where they perform, with Gates leading as what he calls the abbot. The Vinyl Factory names Yaw Agyeman and Kiara Lanier on vocals, Mikel Patrick Avery on drums and Ben Lamar Gay on cornet as regular members. The Hannover line-up, however, is not listed on the release. The piece, titled Furthermore Live Jam on Discogs, picks up where the 2018 Black Madonna EP left off. According to the label it joins the jazz-rooted spiritual leanings of the collective to the steady, groove-based pulse of house music from Chicago, the city the group calls home. FACT summed the release up as "fusing the twin legacies of spiritual jazz and Chicago house" (FACT, 2019). Gates has described the Monks' way of improvising as a monastic exercise, asking each night who plays first and how much ego to bring. In his words it is "a way of working out one's basic humanistic problems through sound" (The Vinyl Factory, 2020).

Pressed on 180-gram black vinyl in an edition of 1,000 copies, with one of Gates's mask artworks etched onto one side and images of the masks on the outer and inner sleeves.