Category Archives: theory

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson: Sometimes I think of the world as this network of relationships between humans and plants and animals and the natural world, spanning across time and space, and I think of my body as a hub in that algorithm, and that I’m made up of relationships, and I’m made up of communication and sometimes that’s physical and sometimes that’s spiritual, and sound is part of that.

And so sometimes I think songs are stories, sometimes they’re prayers, sometimes they’re ethics, sometimes they’re connectors, sometimes they’re healers, they have a power and it comes from a place that I don’t think that I can fully understand or articulate.

https://earwaveevent.org/article/discussion-with-leanne-simpson/
https://earwaveevent.org/article/discussion-with-raven-chacon/
whole magazine is really nice !!

“Latin America in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s underwent a profound and often violent process of social change. From the Cuban Revolution to the massive guerrilla movements in Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Colombia, and most of Central America, to the democratic socialist experiment of Salvador Allende in Chile, to the increased popularity of socialist oriented parties in Uruguay, or “socialist-leaning” movements, such as the Juventud Peronista in Argentina, the idea of a really possible social change was in the air.

Although this topic has been explored from a political and social point of view, there is an aspect that has remained fairly unexplored. The cultural, and especially musical dimension of this movement, so vital in order to comprehend the extent of its emotional appeal, has not been fully documented. Literally, people put constantly their lives at risk opposing authoritarian regimes and participating in rallies to support their political parties, all the while singing militant songs that gave them the courage to do so. “There is no revolution without songs” proclaimed the huge banner installed behind the stage where newly elected President Salvador Allende (surrounded by the most important members of “Nueva Canción Chilena”—Chilean New Song) first celebrated his electoral victory in 1970.”

from https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Militant_Song_Movement_in_Latin_Amer/kAaLAwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover

They party alone with the digital DJ. They lounge alone with the digital DJ. They mourn lost connections alone with the digital DJ. They console themselves about being alone, alone with the digital DJ.

– Damon Krukowski

In the Spring of 2013, [the band] Florist was finally given it’s name…For me it has come to represent the multifaceted identity of a flower arranger. Beautifying, preserving, composing, killing, and commercializing a natural and emotional thing [sound/music] which we probably know too little about yet encounter very often.

– Emily Sprague

Excerpt:

HENRY DUMAS: Inseparable from Sun Ra’s music is his mythology, a sol-based cosmology that stretches deep into the secrets of the ancient Egyptians. l asked him once about his role of Ra, the Egyptian sun god.

SUN RA: Everybody should try to be what they really are. They should search and find what they really are. That is what I really am. Some people are in the role of a diplomat or a congressman. I am in the role of Ra. To be what I really am, I must be on another plane of existence. On this stage of existence I am nothing. But on another I am in the role of Ra. It’s just like when you go to the theater and you look at a beautiful stage. It doesn’t stay that way. Pretty soon the next act brings you some different scenery.

HD: I asked him about Astro-Infinity music which he plays in the new Arkestra. “Is this a way of relating jazz to the atomic age and the future?”

RA: Astro-Infinity music is just one aspect of my music. It is heavenly, eternal, no beginning and no ending The highest aspiration for many on earth is freedom. Astro-Infinity music is beyond freedom. It is precision, discipline. It is not just freedom. It is coordination and sound interdependence. It is the design of another world. It has nothing to do with the traditions of yesterday, today or the future.

HD: What would you consider some of the possibilities of jazz in the future? I mean, considering the black man as the originator of jazz, considering the social revolution going on today and his attempts to resurrect some image of dignity for himself, where does jazz get into the picture?

RA: Well, you have to go back to some beginnings to talk about that. For one thing, the Creator gave the black man harmony in the beginning. And he tried to discipline the black man to use his gifts, but the black man was too unruly. Even the Creator couldn’t handle him, or at least he decided against it. So, l guess the Creator turned the job over to me. But the black man has been worshipping death instead of trying to understand the ways of his Creator. Yet he won’t make death his king. The equation doesn’t balance. In religion, he believes in the cross, which is an X. When you X something, you eliminate it, you axe it. In the same religion the cross is the symbol of life. Anybody following the cross winds up dead in the cemetery with an X for his crown.

HD: Are you talking about the spiritual death spoken of by Christians or the death of the body?

RA: Both really. The black man is under the name of death. He carries it around with him. The word negro. It is the same as the word necro. The g and the c are interchangeable according to cosmic mathematics. It is an equation. A negro equals a necro. The sound of one is in the other. In the Greek necro means dead body. Necropolis is a city of the dead. Once you accept the name without checking into things, then you are automatically a citizen of the city.

HD: lf the citizens of a necropolis are dead, how does one resurrect them? I mean, in the analogy you just made, how are the souls called forth?

RA: Mostly through music and myth. But it’s not just the black man who is in trouble. You can look in your newspapers and read how the whole planet is in trouble, in need of spiritual awakening. I am painting pictures of another plane of existence, you might say, something so far away that it seems nonexistent or impossible. ln infinite terms anything is possible. Nothing is impossible. People have always been looking for that world where nothing is impossible. A world of happiness, so they claim. But never have they been able to create it. All the great men on this planet have not yet come close to that world. They’ve tried everything and everybody. But people will have to have new mind-cepts. All the old ways will have to pass away. When people reach the stage when they can use their infinite mind power to concentrate and direct the truth in these cosmic equations I am talking about, then they will be ready for the grand experiment. There will be no more death in the next plane of existence. You might say that I am the bridge to the next plane of existence. When they reach that stage, they will be resurrected.

HD: What is the next stage and how will music be used?

RA: For the black man the first step will be toward discipline. Music is a force of nature. I am a force of nature. I am in the role of Ra because the Creator has left it up to me to give some order and harmony to this planet. Not everyone is in need of it. Many people are well developed spiritually and are growing. But most are not. So a force of nature gets them all. It’s just like when it rains, it rains on everything and everybody. You might say that I represent all the forces of nature. People don’t all know about this mind-cept, but in the Yoruba culture it is understood. In many parts of Africa this cosmic law is true among the people. If a man or a people reach a certain stage in their growth and development and then they just can’t go any further, a force of nature incubates among them. And this force, be it the wind, the sun, rain, lightning, or thunder, whichever is really needed for that particular kind of development, achieves what could not be done A force of nature gets under you and drives you to do what you thought you couldn’t. If I am in the role of Ra and I put some heat up under you, then you will move or burn up.

————————————————————————

The final question Dumas asks Sun Ra before the recording cuts out is what is the name of the supreme being? The tape ends abruptly like it’s fallen off a jagged cliff. About two years after this recording was made, Dumas is killed by the NYPD in a case of “mistaken identity.” On the night he is killed, Sun Ra convinces him to give up his gun, he disarms him. Dumas goes to the subway station in Harlem and he’s shot and killed by police. The secrets he wanted Ra to divulge by proxy he now knows as another stolen black life sent to the other side for vigilance, deliverance. The thief who stole Henry Dumas’s days, turned him into a saint who now guards our hidden legacies and this recording is evidence of where he was sent. In West African tradition, the griot or town crier, because he cannibalizes his people’s history in order to tell it, must assimilate it, eat it alive, is not buried with other members of the community when he dies but instead put in a tree to be consumed by maggots.

…

Sun Ra wanted us to acknowledge that there is no death, that life is endless. At concerts he would beseech enthralled spectators, asking will you give up your death for me? When, in this recording of his fireside chat with Henry Dumas, he assures we’re already complete in the realm of the dead he is saying, in a way, that eternity awaits, this plane is remedial in comparison to that knowledge, there’s nothing we lack but understanding of that.

He is explaining that death is a western concept we must outgrow if we really expect to be among those who see and hear and know how to listen to Sun Ra. He knows that the Egyptian Book of the Dead, as it’s mistranslated in the west, is really called the book of coming forth by day, of the boat that carries the sun, in its natal tongue. It is a book of endless revivification, it does not acknowledge the life/death binary the west obsesses over, but instead establishes that there is either sun or a limpid accursed sunlessness, enlightenment to the life-giving force or a forest of terrors, and we must seek the sun, Ra, Re, that ravening arrow on the way to never, the saturnine realm Sun Ra governs.

If body, mind, soul, and spirit were aligned on the same plane, language would reflect the eternal truths that belong to music and poetry and we would all be coming forth by day in harmonic unison. Beneath his matter-of-fact responses to Dumas’s naive but sincere questions, is the subterfuge of that mythos, its impatience with misinterpretation and its inability to be grasped without being experienced.

…

Even as the maggots eat the flesh of the griot, we keep talking, giving of ourselves defiantly, coming together furtively and unapologetically saying yes to yesterday, to accompaniment, to the disavowal of false curses, to being devoured by our own songs, transcending our haunts with our horrors until we become the heroes we seek in effigy. We, out here in the diaspora waiting to be cannibalized and lied on, are making conversations, new languages, and converting them to tone then song then eating the flesh of our music as this record.

-Harmony Holiday

https://www.blankforms.org/journal/brontomancy?fbclid=IwAR0xzFWVJ-UUm_t2Ri1NOXX-Gx_gYcAYGIcEoeeuEVsoZqUel2SNrufVTiw

Excerpt – 

RAVEN CHACON: We were talking about the warble as a technique—can you say more about that?

TIMOTHY ARCHAMBAULT: On the technical side, the warble is a multiphonic oscillation. It’s basically a note that is sounded, and reverberates between the low tonic note and the high tonic note, meaning the octave. A typical vibrato vibrates between one note and the second note closest to it. In the Western methodology, the warble is going up to its octave, eight different chromatic tones higher, and back down, in rapid succession, which is quite fascinating. Some instruments, like clarinets, can do it. I think bassoons or other different woodwinds can do it in the classical genre. For me, it’s a spatial thing and I’ve always been attracted to it. A lot of tribes, like some of the Ojibwe and the Algonquins, used to soak their flutes in water. They thought it made the sound better, because they were mimicking the vocalization of throat rattling, and they called it the horizon, which the melody would float off of. I’m drawn to it—I love the mechanized sound of it. I love the machine aspects of an acoustic instrument. It’s a usually a piece of cedar or alderwood, depending upon what’s regionally specific to each tribe. Each had its own culture, musical history, and geographical resources that contribute to the making of the instrument. I’m still shocked to this day at some of the tones that can come out of it, especially when you think about how it’s just a piece of wood. I think if someone heard it and didn’t know that, they might think it was a machine. It’s about the rapid succession of breath, and pressure, and a threshold in the instrument that together starts off this rapid fluctuation of sound. You can’t change the speed so much once it starts—it stays pretty constant. And then, it’ll shut off. This is not something I invented at all; it was always there. You can hear it going back to old wax cylinder recordings from the early twentieth century or even the late nineteenth century. Not all tribes used this, but a lot did, from the Plains all the way up to the Ojibwe. The sound can mimic different types of bird calls. It could be used at a lake and the sound would ricochet off the water and carry over tonally as a signal for different types of war parties. It’s a crucial component of the flute that I know. I want to see how far I can go with structuring music around that, as the ancestors did, while also bringing in new techniques.

RC: Can you explain more about this horizon of melody—are you talking about actually reading the landscape to inspire a melody?

TA: Sometimes. For me, the warble’s the ground, or the horizon—that’s the edge. The warble has to be on the instrument’s lowest note; it can’t be created on any other note. I can make multiphonics on other holes of the instrument, but it’s always the lowest note that is the warble. That sound is the ground, in some sense. Symbolically, it’s the foundation that everything else floats above. If I were looking at the earth, or a silhouette of a mountain range, for instance, the warble will be the stone or the rock, and the light would be the melodies.

RC: That’s really beautiful. I’ve been using a similar idea in a lot of my pieces, where there’s a fundamental note and then the partial ones are like stars. I actually draw them like that, as little harmonic diamonds above a line.

TA: With a mountain, you can think of it in terms of time versus pitch: A mountain peaks at different intervals, which could be compared to the rate of the warble, or like how a higher frequency or a higher pitch eventually goes down. Your base melodies could be based upon the ground, and the other ones float off of it, not unlike these natural forms.