Fred Moten, Brandon Lopez, Gerald Cleaver

Reading Group is thrilled to announce a new album from the celebrated trio of Fred Moten (voice), Brandon López (double bass), and Gerald Cleaver (drums). Following the release of their 2022 self-titled debut album, also on Reading Group (RG23), the trio has been developing their improvisatory language in concerts across North America and the UK. While growing from their first album’s perpetually restrained simmer, their infamous live shows explore a propulsive, relentless, and massively energetic large-scale developing form. López and Cleaver’s rhythm section maintains a pulsating, animating, and evolving groove, Moten’s improvised lyricism weaves together threads from his radical poetics, critical theory, snatches of song, and more familiar but floating signifiers, all while carrying and/or being carried by the self-perpetuating energy of the trio that is more than the sum of its parts. Their dynamic is summed up best by a phrase of Moten’s in the maelstrom towards the music’s climax: “quantum-mechanical reproduction.”

the blacksmiths, the flowers is a double-LP containing two live performances by the trio at 411 Kent in Brooklyn in the summer of 2023. Incendiary music for a burning world.