King Britt is a producer, composer, performer and curator of electronic music.
As a producer/composer, he fuses his knowledge of music history from many cultures and genres with electronic compositions, which redefine and re-contextualizes the past into the present.
He has remixed and produced many diverse artists including Miles Davis, Curtis Mayfield, Radiohead, Alison Moyet, Everything But the Girl and Chic, as well as scoring commercials for Rolex and L'Oreal Paris.
As a curator, he has done events for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Knitting Factory NYC, The Getty Museum and most recently an entire day at the MoMA PS1, which was a historic gathering around the subject of Afrofuturism.
"Afrofuturism became a very famous term amongst Afro-American musicians to embrace science fiction, realities of space and time. We tend to look at other worlds - comic books and that sort of thing - as a way of escape.
I remember growing up as a kid in Southwest Philadelphia and going to school with only a few African American kids. I kind of felt alien. The music I was hearing at home were sounds of Sun Ra and Parliament Funkadelic. I saw how they dressed, the things they loved, the whole "Space is the Place" thing, I really gravitated towards that. Every kid loves Star Wars, but it takes on different meanings for a lot of African American children.
Then, over the years, you start to see that there's a whole subculture of kids like you - who listen to the same things, who embrace the same ideas, and have this love for science fiction. this sense that the artists are trying to transcend their physical space - but also pushing boundaries in terms of traditional music."
King Britt interviewed by Tracy Tanenbaum in the podcast Noise From The 18th Floor, episode A Sonic Journey into AfroFuturism, 2012