"Offering a new way of thinking about black soundwork as an understanding of text, Anthony Reed makes a deep theoretical intervention in black studies by opening up the role of recordings in the black aesthetic avant-garde. The beauty and appeal of Soundworks lies in Reed's fresh focus on the records that allow us to hear the more ephemeral and unrecordable situation of blackness."–Margo Natalie Crawford, author of "Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics"