Encounters: Fred Moten & Brandon López

Encounters
Fred Moten: texts, voice
Brandon López: bass

Fred Moten and Brandon López make incendiary music for a burning world. Their infamous live shows explore a propulsive, relentless, and massively energetic large-scale developing form. Inimitable poet and cultural theorist Fred Moten creates new conceptual spaces that accommodate emergent forms of Black cultural production, aesthetics, and social life. New York-based composer and bassist Brandon López engages with work, improvisation, and finding new modalities and sonic possibilities on the double bass. Together as a duo, they concern themselves with the necessity for improvisation of navigating the ascending reign of long-institutionalized madness while simultaneously keeping humanity and sanity intact. In 2025, their synergistic mesh in duo was presented on record for the first time on ‘Revision’ (TAO Forms), following two acclaimed works on the Reading Group label in trio with Gerald Cleaver.

Fred Moten is a poet, cultural theorist, author, and 2020 MacArthur Fellow. Moten is a professor of performance studies and comparative literature at New York University.

Brandon López is a bassist, composer, and improviser living in New York City. In 2025, ‘Downbeat’ Critics Poll named him Rising Star Bassist of the Year. In 2019, he was a featured soloist at the New York Philharmonic.
The performance at West Den Haag will mark the duo’s premiere in The Netherlands.

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