Hood Vibrations

Stationed behind a long table, on which were gathered laptops, a MIDI synth, microphones, and oodles of cables, VCR (initialism de guerre of Veronica Camille Ratliff) cradled her electric violin against her torso. Cody Perkins sat quietly at her side, waiting for a cue. “Close your eyes,” the former coaxed the sizable crowd, some slumped in beanbags, “and let yourselves begin this aural journey with sounds and voices washing over you.” The two sound artists then launched into what had been billed as a “riot” but turned out to be a series of gentle drones and delicate tonal shifts. VCR’s violin and synthesizer formed a layered sonic tapestry, while Perkins’s voice provided a perfect rhythmic accompaniment.

The forty-five-minute improvisatory performance, which drew on storytelling traditions, Southern gospel, and both classical and techno music, coincided with architect and educator J. Yolande Daniels’s solo exhibition To A Future Space-Time, at the California African American Museum’s Art + Practice (A+P) exhibition space. Her video installation 3 Meditations + Riot + Corpse (2025) served as a backdrop to the cosmic soundscape, its dense visual compendium bespeaking consequential events in Los Angeles’s history. Images of Biddy Mason (a former slave who obtained her freedom in a landmark 1856 court case) and the Brick Block settlement (a flourishing center of African American businesses in the late nineteenth century) were intermingled with depictions of the Chinese Massacre of 1871, the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943, and the 1965 Watts revolt, along with Daniels’s wire-frame diagrams. Each note and beat that issued from VCR and Perkins seemed to reinforce the structural violence visited upon these marginalized communities. But this riot also prefigured the healing potential of a vibrationally Black space-time—a futurist orientation that resonated across the exhibition. Plotting strategies of survival onto aesthetic experience, both show and performance charted pathways toward renewal and liberation—perhaps even transcendence.