CDJs Are Instruments: Gavilán Rayna Russom and quest?onmarq

Join us at e-flux on Saturday, September 9, at 5pm for the third edition of CDJs Are Instruments. This series explores CDJs as tools for storytelling and live music sets: While traditionally used for storytelling, CDJs are placed outside of the “live music” category. For each edition of the series, the artist(s) are invited to perform outside of the club (and alcohol industry) setting and experiment with CDJs using individual techniques that place them adjacent to a sampler or to any other electronic instrument used for a live performance. Together, we try to explore new ways to DJ and to listen to music. CDJs Are Instruments is an ongoing series at e-flux, and this edition will feature music sets by Gavilán Rayna Russom and quest?onmarq, followed by a Q&A moderated by Sanna Almajedi, the e-flux Music curator. 

Gavilán Rayna Russom is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York City. Over the past two decades she has produced a complex and compelling body of creative output that fuses theory with expression, nightlife with academia, and spirituality with everyday life. Rayna’s renowned prowess with analog and digital synthesizers as composing instruments locates itself within her larger vision of synthesis—an artistic method of weaving together highly differentiated strands of information and creative material into cogent expressive wholes. The central thread of this practice is the exploration of liminality as a healing agent, a phenomenon she has been engaged with since childhood and has researched at an astounding depth. Her work is cumulative and experiential. It requires time and attention to take in, and it powerfully rewards those who bring their time and attention to it. Russom’s visionary career in music reverberates expansively at the multiple intersections between experimental and dance floor sounds. Rayna’s creative arc began when she was still in high school—DJing dance parties and distributing home-produced drone and noise tapes—and has carried her through a long-standing relationship with New York’s DFA Records, and critically acclaimed releases for LIES, Nation, Curle, LuxRec, and Ecstatic Recordings. In March of 2020 Rayna founded Voluminous Arts, a creative network for trans artists experimenting with electronic music and sound.

quest?onmarq is a New York-based amorphous and adaptable artist. A living interrogation, quest?onmarq rejects any reductive definition of their style, questioning status quo and the relationship between sounds from all corners of the global underground. Their music sets explore a global palette of genres across continents and are infused with infectious and unbridled energy and raw precision. quest?onmarq was one of Mixmag’s top 25 to watch in 2022, and is celebrated as “one of NY’s most fearless” by FACT Magazine. When guiding the vibration of a dancefloor, the “spiral effect” takes place—a collective state of inhibitory submission sculpted by frequency manipulation often in the form of triple-channel blends that incorporate turntablism and sharp technical prowess as well as their own productions, remixes, and savvy selecting skills. In July 2023, quest?onmarq launched a new label under the name Vortex Imprint. You can hear them play by tunning in to their bi-monthly show on the Paris arm of Rinse.FM that airs on the first and third Wednesday of the month at midnight CET.

e-flux Music is curated by Sanna Almajedi.

For more information, please contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.

Accessibility           
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.        
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.