Listen to “Trouble…” by Tony Cokes: Spotify, Apple Music

Trouble… started as a meditation on some of my interwoven listening and media production, mostly from 2018 to the future. Some of the collected tracks go back to my media installation Could You Visit Me in Dreams? (2018) in Vienna, through subsequent works like SM BNGRZ.03.01–03 (2021), also in Vienna; Some Munich Moments 1937–1972 (2022) in Munich; the more recent DFAI.01-05 (2023) at Dia Bridgehampton; as well as individual works such as Evil.13.5 (4 OE) (2022) in between these. A few tracks suggest future projects or sounds for which I’d like to develop new contexts.

The overall playlist is framed by material explicitly related to the two-channel installation DFAI.01-05, where the selected sounds largely investigate what I consider to be the conceptual parameters, or implied futures of “gospel” music, but then this playlist takes several detours into other genres that inhabit my recent listening practice: grime, dubstep, disco, techno, pop remixes, footwork… I often develop playlists for my media projects and usually commit to the music first, as a way to structure, expand, or even contradict the textual and visual aspects of a work. I took a similar approach in developing this playlist. Usually, I have tended to take a more generically centered approach, whereas in this particular case I open and close with tracks dealing with possible legacies of gospel (and directly reference the DFAI installation), but then veer into tracks from other popular music genres that I have deployed in the past or want to deploy in the future. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the chance to jump-cut my way through this rather large corpus of material, but that’s what I often do in the videos.

— Tony Cokes

A Conversation with Tony Cokes and Andros Zins-Browne