It was the dangerous music of open rebellion. En masse they announced what had been endured, what they wanted, what they intended to destroy. Bawling, screaming, cursing, and stomping made the cottage tremble and corralled them together into one large, pulsing formation, an ensemble reveling in the beauty of the strike. Young women hung out of the windows, crowded at the doors, and huddled on shared beds sounded a complete revolution, a break with the given, an undoing and remaking of values, which called property and law and social order into crisis. They sought out of here, out of now, out of the cell, out of the hold. The call and the appeal transformed them from prisoners into strikers, from faceless abstractions secured by a string of numbers affixed to a cotton jumper into a collective body, a riotous gathering, even if only for thirteen hours. In the discordant assembly, they found a hearing in one another.
— Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals, “Riot and Refrain”, pg. 283
She begins, she begins, she begins by taking a single scrap of leather skin and seeds dots of acrylic paint on the surface — sizes and color vary in resonance like a musical score. Metallic mounds of color dot the landscape of the leather becoming a new sort of artist palette, one where the palette becomes the work. Silver paint neighbors neon green and down the road purple paint is around the corner from yellow and copper. The music turns on, and Alice Coltrane coats the cream colored room and wood vinyl floors. Eyes become closed and she sweeps her hands across the landscape to the tune of Coltrane chords — smoothing the acrylic mountains into rivers of sound and color. The landscape is destroyed and reborn through cosmic collisions of hue and reverb. Making way, making way, making way for…
“Generations of Black women improvisational musicians have woven together their own “fabric of the rhizome” with its “conjunction…and…and…and…” To say these women model for us “another way of traveling and moving: proceeding from the middle, through the middle, coming and going rather than starting and finishing” is to insist on a different theoretical point of entry for “exploring ourselves as subjects,” as Barbara Christian so famously encouraged Black feminist scholars to do all those years ago when she reminded us of “what Celie knows that you should know.”
— Daphne A. Brooks, Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound1, “Introduction”, pg. 12
Why does she only play with her eyes closed? What is she listening for? And what does she know that you should know? What does she know that she should make sure you never know? Together the Black femme chorus casts a shadow over the abstracted surface. Over the fertile ground, riotous sonic landscape, the wild beyond, the space where nothing is named and nothing is owned they create a web, a lattice, a breathable net2 protecting the next world in incubation. Bitmapping all over the suspended floor they refuse a culture of domination and choose something beyond human instead. Why does she only paint with her eyes closed? Eyes closed she transcends from being one to being the many. Inside the hurricane of color she listens for the sound then moves toward it and beyond it — finding herself somewhere new, somewhere ancient. Darkness behind eyelids grants access to a continuity, a space erotic and eternal. Listening with only her fingertips and ears the body becomes an instrument as she terraforms with liquid sound on top of discarded animal hide.
“These expressive practices were technologies of the body, emanating from the throats, the fingers, and joints of artists who invented sonic works through the complexity of their own exquisite performing selves, through their own “resonance chambers” and felt listening that created conditions of possibility for the modern that which exceeds the modern.”
— Daphne A. Brooks, Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound, “Introduction”, pg. 17
It turns out world building was all she was good for and world building was all she needed to be good at. Finger tips create new ridges on the surface the combined tenor of orange and gold, meeting at the valley where blues turns to midnight black and the sonic landscape became a refuge. Thick, thunderous swirls become evidence of a collective storm of their own making. A fuchsia lake is hit and the song changes entirely, lightning strikes providing energy for change3 and the chorus remembers. Bitmapping across the suspended floor, providing coverage for the soundscape of otherwise in incubation the ensemble revels in the beauty of the strike. They dance to the dangerous music of open rebellion with great pleasure, aware of the world being built under their feet. With closed eyes she becomes aunties and dykes, big ma and queen undoing and remaking values — a beyond human swarm, a collective body in colorful discordant assembly. Painting makes a sound and sound makes a world. Hands vibrating with color, leather scraps coated with the sound of utopia…she opens her eyes and is pleased.
“Let us listen, then, to the sisters who were listening to each other and making big things out of what they heard, making new arrangements for living and curating entirely new sounds out of their encounters.”
— Daphne A. Brooks, Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound, “Introduction”, pg. 15
I purchased Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound AS SOON AS I saw Annika Hansteen-Izora reference the text in relation to their Archival Study on the Hands of Jazz. Thank you Annika for all the generous ways you share your work, references, and ideas with us.
The web, the lattice, the net…here I am still and forever thinking about Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo’s work and their latest exhibition at Printed Matter / St Marks, we web keepers. You can purchase the catalog here. This 11 x 17 in., 20 page catalog features a collection of poetic strokes of color and text with a new essay I wrote for the occasion titled, We Web As Rehearsal, Every Web Needs a Window. Lukaza thank you for the invitation that is your language and work.
“In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change”. — Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power published in Sister Outsider in 1984.