A live improvisation celebrating Chicago’s twin legacies of house music and jazz influenced by the black music of the American South.

Theaster Gates describes The Black Monks as “amateur historians, senior docents, and non-sponsored bootleg preachers”, situating them within both a tradition of black music of the American South, which includes the blues, gospel and wailings, as well as within the ascetic practices related most closely to Eastern monastic traditions.

With Furthermore, the collective celebrates their native Chicago’s twin legacies of house music and jazz in a powerful improvisation, filmed live at the Sprengel Museum, Hannover, back in 2018. Occupying a meditative space between Chicago’s history of soul and preaching and the experiences of lives lived in its streets, The Black Monks channel a polyphony of black voices from across a diverse array of black spaces. You can check out a short documentary about The Black Monks here.

A recording of Furthermore was released as the second project from Theaster Gates & The Black Monks on Black Madonna Press, Gates’s joint label with The Vinyl Factory, named after his 2018 Black Madonna exhibition at the the Kunstmuseum, Basel.

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