Speak My Language proposes to explore the sound of words and the music beyond it. Every month Jasmin Blasco brings a guest to investigate a specific world of sound through a curated playlist.

Jasmin Blasco speaks with artist Nikita Gale about the relationship of sound and body in her material processes.

On this month’s Speak My Language: Jasmin Blasco addresses the aural trope of “chill beats to study and relax to” by performing a spoken word text over chill beats to study and relax to.

Nikita Gale is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, California and holds a BA in Anthropology with an emphasis in Archaeological Studies from Yale University and earned an MFA in New Genres at UCLA. Gale’s practice is often structured by long-term obsessions with specific objects and the ways these objects gesture towards particular social and political histories. Gale uses ubiquitous consumer technologies as frameworks to consider how individuals potentially reproduce their relationships to objects within their relationships to psychic space and political, social, and economic systems. For Gale, the term “reproduction” is as much a mechanical, technical process as it is a process rooted in sex, biology and the organic.

On a more physical register, Gale’s work points to the ways that many technologies can be understood as instruments that extend or amplify the body through a relationship to touch. Reproduction connects humans to a desire for extension and amplification both biologically and through industrial processes. By engaging with materials that have properties that are simultaneously acoustic and protective, Gale’s recent work examines the ways in which silence and noise function as political positions and conditions.

Tracklist:
Ulla Strauss – Sister – Big Room
Pataphysical – Periphera – Potato
Heathered Pearls – Holographic Lodge – Body Complex
Laaraji – Essence Universe
Chris Watson – Vatnajokull
SPOKEN WORD [Excerpt
Visible Cloaks – Wind Voice –
Visible Cloaks – Lost Lake –
Black Thread – Running –
Fennesz – Agora –
NIKITA GALE – INTERVIEW
Kate Tempest – Hold your own

[Spoken Word: Chill Beats to Study and Relax too]