In other words, they could be conceived of as a reference to the raw and complex quality of everyday life, as opposed to the abstract intent of a minimalism continually concerned with “big” and “Human” (yes, with capital H) events. As he stated in a recording contained in Unjust Malaise addressed to an audience in Northwestern University in 1980, the names were meant to elicit a “basicness” that “eschews that thing which is superficial”. While there’s no doubt that most of his currently known oeuvre is permeated by vanguard dissolution of the aesthetics/politics divide, only three works within it (these two and “Crazy N-–”) are immediately abrasive ever from the titles, tied to contexts in which wielding certain identities was both an act of disruption and re-signifying appropriation. Interestingly enough, the two pieces that have been the subject of most new releases (whether as reissues or new interpretations) are among his most explicitly militant: “Evil N-–” and “Gay Guerrilla”. Thankfully, interpretations and recordings of his works are starting to become more common after a dearth of material ever since the release of Unjust Malaise in 2005, with an increasingly steady stream of versions of various pieces – which I hope keeps up – coming out since 2016’s stellar Femenine, under the Frozen Reeds label. Their points are now relatively well-known, and the composer is the epicenter of exciting developments in the disarticulation of the canon of minimalism. For the past couple decades, the figure of Julius Eastman has been fruitfully revisited by interpreters, composers, scholars, and media, producing important reconsiderations of 1970s-1980s US avant-garde history.
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