DJ SPREADS THE MESSAGE: BLACK TECHNO MATTERS

Bernard Farley creates events to spark conversation, activism

It’s one of the more striking images taken during the June 2020 protests that erupted after the murder of George Floyd by police: a Black man in a black outfit and white mask, with a hint of sashay in his stride, tossing yellow flower petals at a phalanx of plexiglassshielded cops — an echo of the iconic “Flower Power” photo taken more than 50 years earlier.

“I felt like I was saying, ‘I’m not afraid of you guys, what are you going to do?’ ” recalls the subject of the snapshot, Bernard Farley, about the moment it was taken. “Seeing that photo changed me because I think I saw something in myself that I didn’t necessarily see before.”

In the days that followed that moment, Farley would go on to lead a march through Washington, D.C., soundtracked by techno music made by Black musicians. He recalls one track in particular, Bonaventure’s “Supremacy” — with its “Inception”-like swells of sound, metallic synthesizers and Sister Souljah samples — reverberating off buildings, as marchers chanted mottoes like “Black lives matter” and “Whose streets? Our streets.”

“It was a moment where I realized, (techno) is more than just parties, you know? We want to change the way society works, particularly how Black people are seen and celebrated,” he says.

Those tumultuous moments in the summer of 2020 crystallized a mission that Farley, a multidisciplinary artist who has made music and Djed under the names Outputmessage and B_X_R_N_X_R_D, had been thinking about since before the protests, before the pandemic. Black Techno Matters, the organization he founded, began when his Google searches for Black techno artists yielded little beyond information about the artists who birthed the sound in the 1980s.

Black Techno Matters seeks to reclaim techno as a manifestation of Black expression, in both URL and IRL spaces. For much of the early pandemic period, the organization had to forgo in-person parties, using its Instagram page and Spotify playlists to highlight Black techno artists around the world. As live events returned, the crew threw Techno in the Park events in D.C.’S Meridian Hill Park and planned a massive Juneteenth celebration in 2022.

Beyond Washington, D.C., Black Techno Matters — which now counts eight members — has hosted events in San Francisco and Los Angeles, with more cities planned in 2023. Twin events held in D.C. and Los Angeles around Martin Luther King Jr. Day sought to continue King’s work in new ways: by marching toward a future marked by decolonized communities and dance floors.

“I use this idea of ‘Black fire,’ and that’s really how I see it,” Farley says of growing the Black Techno Matters movement. “I just want it to feel out of control.”

To follow Black Techno Matters, visit blacktechnomatters.org.