A network of listening paths presented by Hildegard Westerkamp at the International Conference of the World Forum of Acoustic Ecology in Corfu, Greece in 2011. 

Acoustic Ecology is the research field created by the World Soundscape Project, an international research project founded by Murray Schafer, at the Simon Fraser University in Vancouver (CA) in the 1960s. As one of the core members of the project, Westerkamp developed her research about attention and listening awareness within soundscapes, and her educational approach through sound walks, field recording and radiophonic works, as well as her long-standing compositional practice.

In this talk she guides through the following questions: 'How can we find focus and balance in such a vast interdisciplinary intercultural field? In a field that has listening as its very core of study, and educational action, and therefore naturally touches on all aspects of life?'

Hildegard Westerkamp - Exploring Balance & Focus in Acoustic Ecology

OTOROKU is proud to present the first vinyl reissue of Blue Notes for Johnny - a defining statement by one of the greatest ensembles in the history of jazz. Recorded in mid-1987 by Blue Notes - then reduced to the trio of Dudu Pukwana on alto sax, Louis Moholo-Moholo on drums and Chris McGregor on piano - it encounters the band 25 years after their founding embarking on an inward meditation through collective music making dedicated to Johnny Dyani, their former bandmate and friend. 
Blue Notes were founded in Cape Town in 1962, and stand among the most important ensembles in the history of jazz. Artistically brilliant and groundbreaking - gathering, within a few short years, a devoted following that includedDon Cherry, Steve Lacy, Abdullah Ibrahim, Dexter Gordon, Kenny Drew, Keith Tippett, Evan Parker, John Stevens and numerous others - they were also the first widely visible multiracial band in South Africa.

As a mixed race band under apartheid, this group of friends and like-minded artists - Chris McGregor, Mongezi Feza, Dudu Pukwana, Nikele Moyake, Johnny Dyani and Louis Moholo-Moholo -  existed within a context that viewed their mere existence as a dangerous and subversive act. In 1964 they joined an exodus of musicians leaving for Europe and eventually settled in London the following year. Sadly, not long after arriving and facing continued economic peril, the group buckled. Johnny Dyani left to join Don Cherry’s band. Moholo-Moholo and Dyani followed suit and joined Steve Lacy on tour, and the remaining members morphed into a number of ensembles that eventually grew to become Chris McGregor's Brotherhood Of Breath.   

Following the death of Mongezi Feza in 1975 the remaining members of the group had come back together to record Blue Notes For Mongezi, reigniting a sporadic period of activity over the coming years. Following the untimely passing of Johnny Dyani in late 1986, the last three members of the original line-up - McGregor, Pukwana and Moholo-Moholo - reformed to pay tribute to yet another of their fallen brothers. 

Blue Notes for Johnny, the group’s second musical memorial to a band member, incorporates a considerably broader range of touchstone and practices than its predecessor, nodding toward the band’s foundations in be-bop and post-bop without abandoning where they had journeyed along the way. Internalising equal elements of hard-bop, modalism, and free improvisation, it is a startling creative statement, imbued with a tension that renders an equally radical and sophisticated challenge; a furious tide - slow in pace and it slow to reveal itself - masquerading in gentler forms. 

A celebration and a memorial. Joyous and tragic. A real time resurrection of personal experience, Blue Notes for Johnny dodges, dances, and transforms across its two sides, refusing to be nailed down. As the trio pushes against each other, bristling tonal and rhythmic collisions leave the impression that something is bound to explode, without ever fully letting go. 

Blue Notes for Johnny’s memorialisation is unwittingly doubled by capturing the final time that the Blue Notes would come together in the studio. Both Dudu Pukwana and Chris McGregor would pass away three years later in 1990, leaving Moholo-Moholo - who continues to carve a groundbreaking trajectory across the world of jazz - as the last surviving member. The album remains as a journey between an imaged future and the beginning of it all. Six friends meeting and communing through sound. Six friends who had triumphed against the odds, becoming some of the greatest creative voices of their generation. Six friends who were five, then four, and then three, before they were done. Friends who never failed, in whatever form, to come together and play. It is a story begun 60 years ago that remains just as prescient today.

---

DUDU PUKWANA / alto sax

CHRIS McGREGOR / piano

LOUIS MOHOLO / drums 

---

ROKURE006 - Blue Notes "Funk Dem Dudu - To Erico"

Long awaited third album from experimental Afghan-American outfit Naujawanan Baidar. Available 7/8/2022 digitally or on limited cassette from Radio Khiyaban (Eindhoven, Netrherlands)

Order: https://radiokhiyaban.bandcamp.com/album/khedmat-be-khalq

Naujawanan Baidar - Mosaheba

Conversation with artist, writer and curator Hamja Ahsan on the support campaign he organized for his brother Syed Talha Ahsan, his groundbreaking book Shy Radicals, his project at documenta fifteen and the hate campaign that he is receiving  from some of the German media.  Hamja talks openly about mental heath issues, islamophobia  and the crucial support that he got from Anne Tallentire while he was studying at Central Saint Martins.

SD37 - w/ Hamja Ahsan - From Aspergistan to documenta fifteen

We are back with Maryam with a second mix all about the beautiful anguish of love and loss through distance.

TRACKLIST:

tara el lail - mustafa ahmad
bagaya jrooh - khaled abdulrahman
alhob asrar - 
ya naba’at el rehan - asil hamim
el bariha - al ekhwa band
al bariha nom - ouda al muhanna
to ham boro ey bivafa - hayedeh 
makhloogh - googoosh
sadeg el neya - karama mersal
naar el neshama - al ajras band
shilina ya bu jnahain - abubakir salem
ya ama - toyoor dejla

ROSVÂA x MARYAM I bi vafa

سوار کره اسبم

Electronic part of the performance piece "Ask my Ash" for Saxophone, Cello, Percussion and electronic!
Premiered by Blackpage Orchestra in June 17.

Ask My Ash (ELectronic part)

Black radicalism [consequently] cannot be understood within the particular context of its genesis. It is not a variant of Western radicalism whose proponents happen to be Black. Rather, it is a specifically African response to an oppression emergent from the immediate determinants of European development in the modern era and framed by orders of human exploitation woven into the interstices of European social life from the inception of Western civilization. . .Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism (79)

How do we map the Black Radical tradition? How can we understand its praxis? If we are to truly to refashion the world…to make it better…to remake its institutions…to address its systemic inequities. Find justice. Seek peace. What language can we use to transmit it once we are able “see” it? What are the concepts that it will produce that will allow us to see the world differently? How can we codify the thoughts and practices in an effort to create a new vision of the world while simultaneously resisting the present? 

What questions do we need to ask that begins to provide insight, and foresight to muddle through the Man vs. Human conflict explored in the work of Sylvia Wynter. 

Aimé Césaire argues that we cannot look to Western notions of “man”, as this man has been forged out of an arrested understanding of humanity. A narrow conception which consistently depends on the systematic degradation of non-European men and women. He writes in Discourse on Colonialism: “At the very time when it most often mouths the word, the West has never been further from being able to live a true humanism—a humanism made to the measure of the world” (73).     

More than this…Where do we look?  Fred Moten and Stefano Harney suggest that we pay attention closer attention to the undercommons. It is the space in between space that we should look to study blackness. 

According to Jack Halberstam in Chapter 0 of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study:  “If you want to know what the undercommons wants, what Moten and Harney want, what black people, indigenous peoples, queers and poor people want, what we (the “we” who cohabit in the space of the undercommons) want, it is this – we cannot be satisfied with the recognition and acknowledgement generated by the very system that denies a) that anything was ever broken and b) that we deserved to be the broken part; so we refuse to ask for recognition and instead we want to take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the places that we know lie outside its walls” (6). 

In this episode, we present a recent conversation I had with Professor Fred Moten where we explore the ideas set forth by radical thinkers ranging from anti-colonialist such as Sylvia Wynter and Aimé Césaire to scholar-activists such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Amiri Baraka. 

Professor Fred Moten is currently Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, where he teaches courses and conducts research in black studies, performance studies, poetics and literary theory. He is author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Hughson’s Tavern (Leon Works, 2009); B. Jenkins (Duke University Press, 2010). Moten is also co-author, with Stefano Harney, of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study.

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. 

Enjoy the program.

Music:
J Dilla--African Rhythms
Tribe Called Quest--Vibes and Stuff
A Tribe Called Red--The Virus Feat. Saul Williams & Chippewa Travellers 
De La Soul--Drawn ft Little Dragon

Fred Moten, the Undercommons & 21st Century Resistance

From TCS​-​Various Artists (TCS-001)
Purchase at:
https://tcsberlin.bandcamp.com/album/tcs-various-artists

B1. Long Day's Journey Into Night

Pre-Order available now via imprec.com 
Cassette edition of 100 via Cassauna/Imprec

“Rupture” was inspired by the southern Italian folktale of Tarantism,
which is said to be an epidemic provoked by the bite of the tarantula.
It causes extreme spiritual possession. 
Aki Onda composed these tracks using the traditional folk music of the region as underlays, mostly in indirect ways but occasionally directly sampled. 
The tracks were recorded with musicians Tatsuya Nakatani, Gareth Davis and Clifton Hyde. The artwork features eerie and uncanny images of the Japanese
photographer Daisuke Yokota.

1. Rupture 
2. Betrayal

3. Rebirth
4. Growth 

Aki Onda : electronics, field recordings (1-4)
Tatsuya Nakatani : percussion, gongs, bells (1-4)
Gareth Davis : bass clarinet (4)
Clifton Hyde : mandolin (3)

Soundtrack for “Rupture” by Aki Onda
Recorded by Tatsuya Nakatani, Gareth Davis, and Aki Onda 
Edited and mixed by Aki Onda 
Mastered by Michael Fossenkemper



Photography by Daisuke Yokota

Aki Onda - Rupture - Cassette - August 3, 2020

Anthéne, the music of Bradley Sean Alexander Deschamps. He is based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and also curates the Polar Seas Recordings label. His compositions are primarily created using electric guitar and synthesizers, with field recordings and occasional acoustic instruments. Over the past few years his music has been released on Home Normal, Constellation Tatsu, Past Inside the Present, among other labels.

Anthéne - the slow wave [GRFTPS006]
available for pre-order on giraffe tapes bandcamp exclusively limited edition cassette / digital -
https://giraffetapes.bandcamp.com/album/the-slow-wave

Giraffe Tapes - Anthene Live [19.02.2021]

Africa World Now Project is a multimedia educational project that produces knowledge about the African world through a series of methods that include: radio, podcast, publishing, film festivals, webinars, social media, etc.

Africa World Now Project is, in essence, a multimedia open-access 'classroom' that provides actionable information that explores continuities and discontinuities in the history, culture, and politics of the entire African world.

AWNP does this by engaging in organic discussions with scholars, artists, journalists, activists, organizers and others who are intentionally disruptive in assessing the various issues that exist in the entire African world.

Fred Moten, the Undercommons & 21st Century Resistance

Africa World Now Project

Recent comments

Klearance

Related tracks