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Pop Con 2020 Presents: POP TALKS - Moses Sumney
The Museum of Pop Culture's annual Pop Conference, first held in 2002, mixes together ambitious music discourse of every kind to bring academics, critics, musicians, and dedicated fans into a collective conversation. Pop Con 2020 is being reimagined as an online conference to be held in September 2020 (exact dates and times to be announced).
Leading up to the virtual event this fall MoPOP will host a series of teaser events. The fourth teaser event, POP TALKS: Moses Sumney with NPR Music, takes place at 6 p.m. PT on Thursday, July 23.
NPR Music x Pop Conference in collaboration with the Museum of Pop Culture present:
POP TALKS: Moses Sumney
Thursday, July 23, 2020
6 p.m. PT
Instagram Live: @nprmusic
POP TALKS is a new pop-up conversation series on Instagram live. Join NPR Music and Pop Conference for hourlong, thoughtful conversations with today's most intriguing musicians. First up is Moses Sumney at 6 p.m. PT on Thursday, July 23, interviewed by Jason King.
ABOUT MOSES SUMNEY
Moses Sumney evades definition as an act of duty: technicolor videos and monochrome clothes; Art Rock and Black Classical; blowing into Fashion Week from a small town in North Carolina; seemingly infinite collaborators, but only one staggering voice. A young life spent betwixt Southern California and Accra, Ghana - not so much rootless as an epyphite, an air plant. The scale is cinematic but the moves are precise deeds of art and stewardship. Sumney's new, generous double album, græ, is an assertion that the undefinable still exists and dwelling in it is an act of resistance.
There's probably a biblical analogy to be made about a person who just happens to be named Moses, who flees the binary, splits a massive body into two pieces, and leads us through the in-between - holy and wholly rebellious. By breaking up græ into two multifaceted, dynamic pieces, Sumney is quite literally creating a "grey" in-between space for listeners to absorb and consider the art. Not strictly singles, not strictly albums, never altogether songs or spoken word segments on their own. It's neither here nor there. "Neither/Nor," if you will.
ABOUT JASON KING
Jason King is a professor and the founding faculty member at New York University's Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, an innovative leadership training program for aspiring music entrepreneurs.
A journalist, musician, DJ, songwriter, curator and producer, Jason was the host and co-producer of NPR's Noteworthy, a series on the creative process of music superstars like Dua Lipa and Miguel, as well as the curator of NPR's 24/7 R&B radio channel.
He is currently working on a biography of Freddie Mercury, and producing and directing documentaries.
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