Decolonial Electronics

At the composer’s request, there is no further information on this work.

The composer writes:

‘Oblations Un-Muted is one of my Un-Muting. Sonic Restitutions compositions, inspired by the various African instruments I have obtained temporary access to. Neither played nor exhibited, these abducted instruments have been incarcerated in various ethnographic museums for more than a century. Un-muting brings past sounding forms into the present—namely, instruments whose original role, among others, is to communicate with the orishas and the ancestors, offering a lens of sonic repair to the trauma of Africa’s colonial conquest and its further inequities in the transnational African diaspora.’

The composers write:

‘Modified is a piece for self-engineered instruments and interactive electronics with manipulated acoustic percussion. Emphasis is placed on real-time playing and instrumental practice for a connected and embodied performance. The electronics system complements and modifies the performance of vocal improviser Fay Victor.’

The composer writes:

‘Electroacoustic music rarely contains any political or socially engaged messages. Point of Convergence is an electroacoustic music piece whose main element is the voice, but one that expresses no clear opinion in order to not provoke the establishment and trigger its wrath.

In this composition, the voices cannot be understood. They speak a language that nobody knows, a constructed language whose role is the opposite of a lingua franca.

Or, is it? Charged with emotions, can these voices express and transmit certain feelings and push listeners to engage in a conversation about the content or the emptiness of this piece?’

The composer writes:

‘Tonight, I extend an invitation to gather in community, to facilitate a space for us to consider and meditate on questions for enquiry: not for answering, but for observing that which is revealed. These questions revolve around Blackness, our place in the world and the universe as Black people, our relationship to our grief amid the chronic damage, destruction, and erasure that our endemic, racist societal systems wreak upon our lives as Black people, and how we activate efforts for freedom, dignity, grace, and sanctity for our Black lives. And how the physical vessels, the boats, throughout history to today, transport us, Black kin, from freedom, from oppression, to subjugation, to liberation, to life, and beyond.’