Deep red earth and lush green vegetation: the road to Ouidah, an hour or so out of Cotonou, Benin, takes you past the most incredible colours.
In the historical city of Ouidah, the power of nature mingles with the tragedies of modern history and the resilience of the sacred.
We at Modern Moves know about the sacredness of pythons. I have devoured, from cover to cover, many times over, Katherine Dunham’s account of her complex relationship with Damballa, serpent god, which first started during her fieldwork in Haiti. In Ouidah, I saw the same coiled and terrifying beauty, the same egg yolk stains proclaiming sacrifice and offerings.
Our tour companions from Nigeria and Ghana were both drawn to and terrified by the pythons. I have not heard a grown man scream so loudly as when the python was draped around one of their necks, and yet– he did not reject it! The python, coiled around his reluctant yet eager neck, radiated the uncanny presence of mystery in the midst of deep historical rupture.
The journey through the Route of Slaves, through the heart of contemporary Africa, had begun for our group of dancers, visiting Cotonou as part of the Benin International Salsa Festival.
TREES: OF MEMORY, FORGETTING, AND RETURN
Trees: the tree under which future slaves were paraded to be sold; the Tree of Forgetting, and the Tree of Return. These are now part of the structured journey of memorialisation that has been created by the postcolonial State of Benin in reparation for the complicity of the Kingdom of Dahomey in the transformation of human beings into commodities.
The lieux de memoire combine mercantile and sacred dimensions. Can the sacred ever come to us unmediated in modernity?
The sacred can confront and defeat banalisation. Of this I am convinced, as we drive past statues whose obviously recent vintage does nothing to diminish their strange and disquieting power.
Perhaps this strangeness is merely a product of the distance between the belief systems they belong to, and what I know. But having grown up India, I am comfortable with the idea of syncretism, of the mingling of one God and many gods, of many possible manifestations of the sacred. I am a believer and an atheist, a lover and a sceptic. What I respond to in Ouidah is an accretion of strange sacrality, the confusions of modernity, and the power of the human imagination to contort, distort, resist, and reclaim.
This is the same aesthetic that is so powerfully present in Haiti. In the car the radio bombards us with a combination of African salsa and zouk, including retro zouk numbers that clearly sound out the debt to Haitian kompa. In the haze of monumentalisation, a fresco-ed wall flashes past us. I read the magic words ‘Bois Cayman’. Stop! I implore. This petite escale is not part of the tour we have paid for. But the guide recognises the urgency in my voice. ‘Why did you want to stop here? What is Bois Cayman to you’? I look at him in amazement. ‘are you joking? This monument recognises the most important moment in the history of slave rebellion in the Americas and we are not stopping here?’ We are now complicit spirits.
We walk around the Memorial Zomachi. Panels on the walls depict in painful detail the departure of the slaves, their captivity, their degradation, and their rebellion in Haiti, the world’s first Black Republic. We enter through the gate, but the panelled walls enclose only nothingness.
INTERMISSION: ‘BLACK C’EST LE SWAG’
The void asks us to meditate, to commemorate, to reflect. This is also what the State asks us to do. But the void’s request is easier to heed.
…. for some of us.
My companions are busy posing. Their postures are those of hip hop, of swag, of attitude- new incarnations of Black Power. They have come on this tour to discover a shared history, they tell me. What kind of discovery involves noisy, even celebratory posturing? Then it strikes me: theirs is an act of collective reparation in and through the body.
Melancholia comes in many colours. What we feel in response to a history that we did not shape but yet feel as ours can require words that are beyond European lexicons. As postcolonial subjects we feel the European words in our mouths and reshape them with our tongues . Our bodies play out different affective trails. Memory is physical, its burden lightened through laughter, through movement. Through posture. Through swag.
Beyond the sepulchral, monumental, cavernous lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) of French metropolitan historians, can we not posit the possibility of ‘mouvements de mémoire’ (movements of memory)?
(Salsa: when this dance of the African diaspora returns to Africa, it is precisely the movements (in multiple senses) of memory that take place).
The void elicits from us our own methods of commemoration .
THE MERMAID CALLS
Portals: The Door of No Return. A vast number of Africans left the shores of Dahomey for the plantations of the Americas. The final monument in Ouidah that we are led to is, fittingly, the Door of No Return.
I note the now-familiar routine. The guide intones the horrors of the slave trade. The visitors strike their poses. Elina and I wander around, taking pictures. The sand is hot beneath our feet. The sea is out there- it seems close, but the sand is far too hot to walk to the water.
The guide is talking about Mami Wata. She is the water goddess. I say, in the Brazilian way, ‘Iemanja’. He spins around. Once again, he is surprised by me. ‘How do you know of her? Where are you from?’ I’m just an Indian woman who lives in the world and loves to know about everything. Oh and I dance. And like to think through dance.
We stand by the shore. I hear the guide describe the mode of worship appropriate to Mami Wata. ‘Are there temples to Mami Wata here?’ I ask. He peers into my face and his voice drops. ‘She doesn’t need temples. She is here, she is everywhere.’
My own voice drops in synchronicity. I feel we must speak low. ‘Do you see her then?’ The guide looks at me. ‘I sense her presence everywhere. At night, I see her here, on the beach. She is a mermaid…. she has no legs, just the body of a fish….’ Then…. ‘she is like you.’
Prufrock has ‘seen them riding seaward on the waves/ Combing the white hair of the waves blown back/ When the wind blows the water white and black.’ Trapped in the modern dichotomy between reason and enchantment, he (or possibly the poet himself here) declares, sadly, ‘We have lingered in the chambers of the sea/ By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown/ Till human voices wake us, and we drown.’
In Ouidah, however, we linger (unable to stop taking photographs), touched by some secret knowledge of the sacred that still persists on that sea shore– on the other side of which so many thousands woke up to be drowned- but also survived through the persistence of cultural resources.
Africa shows the way. Ex Africa aliquid semper novi.
All photographs by Ananya Kabir.
Thank you Elina Djebbari for being such a perfect travel companion, Thank you, Ines Ahouansou and Steve Deogratias Lokonon, organisers of the Benin International Salsa Festival, for arranging this memorable visit to Ouidah.
In February I was invited to be a “celebrity guest judge” at the “Tit Bit Ball” in Berlin, which you might think of as a vogue ball for everyone. The major house in Berlin is the House of Melody, founded by Georgina Leo Melody, an Afro-German girl who learned voguing in New York with the masters of the form. In general the House of Melody is responsible for most of the voguing events in Berlin, though I learned there are other houses and balls throughout Germany, from Dusseldorf to Hamburg.
Whereas the Berlin Voguing Out Festival is remarkable for its extremely high production value, the “Tit Bit Ball,” though no less spectacular, was held at Südblock, a reasonably sized gay and lesbian bar in the center of Kreuzberg. I had been to Südblock before but mostly for drinks or lunch, so the way the space transformed from a café/bar into a cabaret-style performance space was really interesting. Tables were pushed out of the way, a short runway popped up, and a black curtain slide open to reveal the main stage where the judges sat in specially designed chairs for the occasion.
The ball began with a public workshop of the elements of vogue. Anyone could participate. We did a catwalk performance where we were taught the elements of voguing, hand motions and how to position yourself on the catwalk. I was surprised by all the people who participated from the audience, some of them dressed to the nines in crazy looks but who did not necessarily want to compete in the ball itself.
Once the ball began my task as a judge was to evaluate the competitors’ runway performance and the creativity that went into their looks. Judging creativity is a hard task because you want to give everyone an “A” for effort, as the saying goes, while at the same time being discerning. In order to advance to the next round a competitor needed to score a “pass” from all the judges. One single “chop,” or “no,” from one judge meant you couldn’t advance to the next level.
Courtesy of Berlin Voguing Out
The performances were beautiful. People of varying levels of expertise competed, and even folks who had not signed up to compete popped out of the audience and took over the catwalk when they felt the urge, often to much applause. There was a competition for designer shoes, for instance, where people from the audience (with no expertise or knowledge of voguing) with the right shoe size did their fiercest runway walks and won the pair of shoes based primarily on audience response.
The most interesting thing I learned about voguing in Berlin is how powerful the culture is for fostering a sense of community and belonging for queer and/or brown people. For some, voguing could be seen as an aesthetic form, a spectacular dance form, full stop. But for the brown and queer bodies who do voguing in Germany, there’s an additional layer of meaning, one centered on the message of self-love invented by ballroom. This is especially relevalatory when thinking about the origins of voguing and ballroom culture as a space created by brown gays and transgender people responding to racism, homophobia, transphobia, and other social exclusions.
The connection between music and sex is undeniable. Maybe there’s a playlist of songs you put on during your time with that special someone, or maybe on the dance floor itself you experience a level of intimacy with a stranger for a few moments before moving on to the next dance. Either way you slice it, music can be the glue that connects bodies together during those moments of passionate bliss. In July 2015, Modern Moves postdoctoral researcher Madison Moore will appear in a Sky Arts-produced documentary about music and sex. During the taping he was asked to play one of his favorite sex songs and talk about what makes it so good. The track was “Numb” by Andy Stott, and you can listen (and practice!) to it above!
Modern Moves postdoctoral researcher Madison Moore delivered a standing-room only lecture titled “How To Be Beyoncé: An Interpretation of an Icon” on the pop star and her cultural relevance. The lecture was part of the Turl Street Art Festival, a week-long cultural extravaganza organized by Exeter College, Lincoln College and Jesus College on Turl Street in Oxford.
Moore’s unique brand of public scholarship regularly pushes the boundaries of traditional academia by taking seemingly insignificant topics (i.e. items from pop culture) and unraveling their multiple layers of complexity. Focusing on the intense fervor surrounding Beyoncé and her red-hot, nearly religious fan base, and moving to discussions of the black body and the pop music industry, the lecture approached Beyoncé as just one cultural text to explore issues of race, sexuality, media, stardom, and long-running depictions of the black female body.
On Monday, March 16th, Moore will do a repeat of the lecture at University College London. Stay tuned for further details!
Modern Moves director Prof Ananya Kabir and postdoctoral researcher Dr Elina Djebbari are en route to Cotonou, Benin, for nearly two weeks of research on the circum-Atlantic life of Afro-diasporic social dance, popular music, and Voudou heritage tourism. While in Cotonou they will attend the Benin Salsa Festival http://https://www.facebook.com/events/537689389669910/537689393003243/?notif_t=like, track down and interview musicians from legendary Funk and Afrobeat groups such as Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou and Les Volcans de la Capital and research Vodou heritage tourism. All trails will converge at the Salsa Festival where, much to Dr Djebbari’s excitement the guest of honour will be Boncana Maiga, the only surviving member of the salsa group Les Maravillas de Mali, whose Cold War Cuban tracks she was pursuing just a couple of months ago in La Habana…. such are the joys of research! Look out for the travellers’ dispatches from the field!
Korzo Theater, The Hague: sunny afternoon outside, total darkness inside. Out of the dark emerge footsteps and the faint outline of bodies. Slowly six bodies, sitting cross-legged in a circle, are revealed. An Indian soundscape– tablas, Sanskrit chants— makes itself audible. A South Asian sacred ambience is unfolded through hand gestures that combine mudras, Islamic ablutions, and Hindu rites. We are in a meditative memorial space. Gestures that have become hegemonic in a majoritarian context are here, in double diaspora, as fragile and precious as a rose.
The bodies rise, their writhing movements around a single central box-like frame. The minimalist prop (which will stay on stage throughout the performance) is complemented by the outfits of the six dancers—short kurtas and dhotis of white homespun cotton—the signature garb of South Asian migrant labour down the ages. Beneath them we can glimpse the black stretch tops and leggings—the uniform of contemporary dancers. We are in a layered world. Here, bodies, space, sound, and movement bear witness to migration and mixing, to the subaltern’s labour that laid the bricks of modernity. This is the history commemorated in Shailesh Bahoran’s magnificent piece, Lalla Rookh.
Lalla Rookh was the ship that transported the first Hindustani emigrants from colonial India to the Dutch colony of Suriname. As the flyer accompanying the show reminds us, ‘the first group, consisted on 399 emigrants, came to shore at Fort Nieuw Amsterdam on 5 June 1873.’ As elsewhere throughout the imperial world, they came to fill the labour gap left after the abolition of slavery in 1863. ‘Between 1873 and 1916, over 34,000 Hindustanis chose to leave their homeland to go to Suriname to work as a field labourer or to work in the factories’. Bahoran and at least some of his multi-ethnic cast claim this history as their own. At the end of 50 minutes, Lalla Rookh leaves the audience with the realisation that all of us, subjects of late modernity, are also part of that history.
Lalla Rookh’s six dancers move from the particular to the universal through a versatile dance style with global reach: hiphop and associated kineasthetics (b-boying, breakdancing, funk, popping, locking). Afro-diasporic dance heritage here tells the story of the pagal samundar: Hindustani for ‘the mad sea’ that the ships encountered as they turned the Cape of Good Hope. Popping and locking suggest the ship tossed on high waves, and the dislocation of a body and mind in extreme agony. Whirling movements executed on the knees suggest incapacitation, even dementia. Two dancers lock their bodies; their crouching, swaying, and headstands remind me of capoeira. Battle steps forged through resistance on the slave plantation now enact the birth of the jahaji-bhai—the new camaraderie of the ship-brotherhood.
In this twilight of passage from the old to the as-yet-unknown, a young woman is wrapped in a sari and disrobed by her ship-companions. This extremely powerful sequence draws on the myth of Draupadi from the Indic ‘epic’, the Mahabharata. Draupadi’s kinsmen had tried to rape her in public by disrobing her, even as the god Krishna came to her rescue by merging his infinitude with her sari that consequently never left her body. But this is a new world; there is no Krishna here; the woman writhes as her sari is ripped off. A male dancer whirls it around his body in a mad frenzy; the sari becomes the ship’s sail. New myths for old: Rape, brutality, and the violence born of violence constitute the jahaji-bhai’s baggage.
Darkness.
Landfall.
The remainder of the production uses hiphop and urban dance to evoke the complete transformation of the new arrival to what, in the Fijian context, was called the ‘girmitiya’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girmityas: the subject of Empire whose body is worth the labour it is contracted to deliver, measurable in years, months, days, and hours. The soundtrack highlights this extreme measurement of human worth by capitalist time through the predominance of a metronomic ticking clock and the dancers’ breathtakingly accomplished body isolations. These movements peak into a long sequence of body shudders to a percussive line that becomes increasingly industrial and machine-like. These are the Robots of the Plantation and the Factory, the zombies of the Caribbean imaginary, the cogs in Capitalism’s monstrous wheels.
Periodically, melodies and chanting voices revive a sense of the sacred. Fragments of a thumri in a minor key are interspersed with atmospheric crackles. An existential problem emerges: how to heal through these fragments? Can the trauma of Lalla Rookh and kala pani (black waters)— the dark passage that robbed one of identity and moorings—ever recede? The box-frame that signified the ship is viciously and urgently rejected. But it never leaves the stage. The suggestion is of identities lost, but new ones born— without amnesia. This is why a New World dance vocabulary, forged through the embodied experiences of those who had been displaced earlier by slavery, makes such poetic sense here.
Yet Indian-ness persists in the little traditions that Lalla Rookh lovingly celebrates. The ritual gestures of meditation and prayer return. The labourer who dies after an all-consuming burst of physical rebellion and exhaustion is anointed on top of that same white box-frame. His companions consecrate his body with drops of water shaken from fresh leaves dipped into small ritual vessels, in the same way as his ancestors would have done in the plains of India’s great rivers. As the five remaining dancers circle the prone body in course of the ritual, their sobs mingle with the already layered soundtrack. I wonder—is this the end? Let there be something else. Please.
Suddenly, thankfully, we get the release we crave. A series of shudders unite the group and transform into a burst of triumphant movement. There are many deaths in the piece, but there are rebirths, too. And what is reborn is a new creolized body— with Indian hand mudras and b-boying lower bodies, with relentless metronome of Capitalist time overlain by the lovely notes of the wooden flute—Krishna’s flute— carrying the essence of Indic sweetness across the mad seas. As I resurfaced in the minimalist foyer of the very Dutch Korzo Theater, blinking away my tears, my understanding of the Netherlands’ inner history and its hidden connection with my own postcolonial Indian-ness was once again expanded— in a process that started when I visited Suriname a few years ago.
From the CaDance Festival brochures, banners, and website, an arresting figure has been watching us. It is Shailesh Bahoran himself, a contemporary Amazonian river-deity rising from the edge of where Plantation meets Rainforest (or so I imagine); painted blue like Krishna, wreathed with feathers and grass like a mythic figure from a Wilson Harris novel; sunglasses jauntily proclaiming his swag, and body arrested in a ribcage move that is typically Afro-diasporic. This palimpsest of a body is what Suriname, one of the most culturally and demographically mixed up places in the world, brings to our consciousness. We are all more or less like that body. It is the labours of that body to which we owe the modern world. The search for culture is now conducted through a creole language. And we all must learn to speak it, recognise its fragments within us, treat it with love and respect. That’s what Lalla Rookh‘s visionary director and its superbly talented dancers teach us.
Thanks to the dancers and director for a wonderful and moving theatre experience!
All photos of the Lalla Rookh performance courtesy of Shailesh Bahoran
All photos of Paramaribo, Suriname, and final photo of the CaDance brochure courtesy of Ananya Kabir
No matter what genre(s) you play, to be a DJ you need to have a ravenous, unending passion for music. Sure, most people can admit to having at least some sort of passion for or interest in music, but I think to be a DJ you really have to be obsessed with finding, collecting, and sharing music with an eager and willing audience. I buy dozens of vinyl and digital music files every month, and you should see my Beatport Hold Bin: there are hundreds of tracks in it and I keep adding more.
My love of music started at an early age when I was first exposed to classical music. I remember being in 3rd grade and everyone in my year had to learn an instrument. I guess that was supposed to make us culturally well-rounded. You either went with the woodwinds or brass, which typically put you in band, or you picked a stringed instrument, which means you would be in orchestra. I chose violin for two reasons: 1. because I didn’t want to be a “band geek,” that horrible nerdy trop you still see in Hollywood movies about American school kids and 2. because I liked the way it looked. I thought it sounded prettier than all the other instruments and, ever the esthete, I chose the prettiest thing on offer.
When you first study a stringed instrument the teacher puts little pieces of masking tape on the fingerboard to help you learn where to naturally place your fingers to make the right kinds of sounds. Nothing too complicated, just simple notes in first position. Our string teacher taught us notes not by telling us what the notes were — we couldn’t even read music yet. She taught us with numbers. So “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” was not A-A-E-E-F#-F#-E, as it is notated in real music, but A0-A0-A0-A0-E1-E1-0 — the “1” indicating where you should put your first finger on the E string, the “0” indicating an open string.
I didn’t know that picking up a violin in the 3rd grade would turn into years of violin lessons, orchestra rehearsals, recitals, sectionals, auditions, competitions and hours and hours of practice. More than that, I was always the only black guy in the orchestra, a joke my grandmother just loved to point out every time an orchestra I was in took a group photo.
“Where’s’ Madison,” she’d ask. “There he is!” pointing right at me, the brown spot.
The lack of black orchestral musicians and recitalist is why I thought that I wanted to be a concert violinist, or an international artist who makes a living simply by performing as a solo artist in recitals and with orchestras. I’m talking along the lines of Anne Sophie Mutter, or Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg or Joshua Bell, all of whom are white. I wanted to be one of the first black concert violinists and I was steadily towards that goal if I might say so. I loved the idea of being an artist and making a living doing something I loved to do.
I stopped playing violin after nearly 15 years for reasons I won’t go into, but because music was such a big part of my life it’s hard for me to imagine not doing something musical.
I always describe myself as being of two minds: the first mind is deeply intellectual, loves ideas, theory, high art and the like while the other is seemingly superficial, loves nightclubs, popular culture and dance music. This was even the case when I was in the violin world. So at the same time that I was dealing the classical music world I was also going to nightclubs and loving dance music.
One summer I was a fellow with the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C. It was a position that brought together the best high school string players from around the country for an eight-week apprenticeship. There was a lot of trying to “out play” one another. They put you in a dorm and you had a member from the NSO as your private teacher for eight weeks. We were also given a pretty nice stipend, almost all of which I used to buy CDs from Tower Records. Seriously. We got our allowance of $200 per week which was meant to cover food and other expenses but I probably used $100 of it on CDs every week, everything from techno and electronica to my favorite concert artists performing Bach, Shostakovich and Rachmaninoff.
I told you I loved music.
II. Hey Mr. DJ
When I stopped playing violin I needed another outlet to express myself musically. I can’t sing at all so that wasn’t an option. The only thing I loved as much as music was going out to nightclubs. I was so drawn to the fantasy the club offered, to how loud the music was, and to how a nightclub was a similar social situation as an orchestra concert: people gathered together to hear music. Though, admittedly, there are more people asleep at an orchestra concert than in a nightclub which makes an orchestra concert a very expensive nap.
I had my first DJ lesson in New York in 2009. I learned on a vinyl emulation software program called Serato, which allows you to play digital music files with a special piece of timecoded “vinyl” that’s virtually indistinguishable from traditional vinyl. The nuts and bolts of the software is that you can take the traditional DJ set up — two vinyl turntables and a mixer — and play all of your digital music files straight from the time-coded vinyl, as if you were playing a “real” record. You can control the digital music with the timecoded vinyl.
Probably the most exciting thing about DJing is the ability to touch the music. It’s not just pushing “play” on a CD player or on iTunes. You actually pick up the needle and place it where you want it to go on the vinyl. And then there the music is, spinning right in front of you.
I took lessons for a few weeks before my tutor told me I knew everything there was to know. All I needed to do now was practice.
But as with any new hobby, you have to invest in the materials if you want the best results.
Courtesy of Love United.
All budding DJs know that it is a fairly expensive affair. You need turntables, which can easily run from 200 to 1000 dollars a pop, and you need two of them. That’s at least 400 dollars right there. Then you need two cartridges to play the vinyl. You need a mixer, some type of sound system, and, if you’re going the Serato route, you need to also buy the software and required equipment.
The cost to entry for beginning DJs can be as much as 1,200 dollars for a basic set up.
As a graduate student living in New York City I just didn’t have the extra resources to dedicate to such an expensive hobby. So I tabled my DJing, knowing it was definitely something I wanted pick up again later if I had the chance.
Now, as part of my work with Modern Moves, I’ve been studying DJing and music production at the London Sound Academy in Camden and have made my first two mixes, Hexagon and Suprematism, and I’ve even had my first performance at Roadtrip in Shoreditch on Friday, February 27th.
III. Nuts and Bolts
When I first learned to DJ I learned on vinyl emulation software, but this time I’ve been learning on CDJs or digital turntables that play digital music files from a CD or USB stick. If you’re a tech geek like I am, standing in front of a CDJ 2000 Nexus, standard equipment for the industry, is really exciting. You’re in the DJ booth! You’re touching some very expensive equipment that is meant to set the tone for the evening.
One of the things we did during my first lesson at the London Sound Academy was beat matching. Beat matching is tricky because you are essentially trying to play two tracks at the same speed but in a way that is imperceptible to the audience. While one song is playing you’re trying to sneak in a brand new track and you have to make it go the same speed as the one that’s already playing. If you don’t it will sound like a train wreck and is very noticeable.
Beat matching, for what it’s worth, is in some ways a lost art in the age of the digital DJ. Now it’s possible to use the “sync” button on your DJ controller or software program in a way that the computer’s algorithms will actually match up the waveforms for you so that the music automatically plays at the same speed.
Is that cheating? Some might say yes, but I think it’s all about your own taste and what you’re aiming to do with the music. Some people prefer to use the “sync” button so they are free to play with effects and do all sorts of crazy things to the music.
By the second lesson we were covering musical phrasing, which is essentially about how you mix one track out of another in a way that makes musical sense. Usually when you mix you lower the high, mid, and low frequencies of both tracks and essentially swap them out as the new musical material is brought in. But when you mix by using phrasing you’re actually trying to match up the musical phrases of the song going out with the phrases of the one going in and blending them together in a way that no one will notice what you’re doing.
So first you’re attempting to beat match or play two records at the same speed, and while you’re doing that you’re also thinking about how to bring in a new musical idea in a way that makes sense and won’t clear the dance floor. This is essential in techno and house music because there isn’t usually a break in the music over the course of the night, whereas with other styles of music there is often a perceptible end of one track and a beginning of the next.
It’s really hard work.
For what it’s worth, there are different styles of DJs and different styles of mixing, and each musical scene can require a different kind of DJ technique. With turntablism, for instance, it’s about the art of playing music but additionally using the record to make radically different sounds. “Cutting” allows you to drop the bass in and out in a way that “shapes” the musical content.
The DJ, who works with prerecorded material, uses the equalizer settings, filters and other effects to shape the musical content to make it his or her own. The bass can be dropped out entirely or swapped so that you are hearing track A but hearing the bass line from track B. These materials make it possible to shape even pre-recorded content to make it personal so that the DJ doesn’t just play song after song but takes your track and mixes and distorts it in an interesting way.
IV. Improvisation
It’s easy to think that a DJ has a list of songs he or she wants to play, cycles through them in that order and then the night is done. Part of the magic of DJing, for me, is the improvisatory quality of the form. Not only does the DJ attempt to reflect a musical personality but she or he also usually tries to respond to the demands of the crowd or what the crowd seems like it wants at that time of the night.
When I made my first mix “Hexagon” I had no idea what I was going to play. Actually, I didn’t even know I was recording a mix that day. I went into the studio and my tutor told me, “Okay, you’re making a mix today.”
I knew which two songs I wanted to start with, and I knew which songs were in my playlist, but that playlist had probably 60 songs in it and I was only making a 45 minute mix. I wasn’t going to play 60 songs in 45 minutes.
Choices had to be made. Are the tracks in similar or related keys? Is one grossly faster than the other? Would they mix well? These are the questions that preoccupied me in the mix.
My tutor told me that all of the tracks you have in your arsenal, whether that’s 200 or 20,000, these are the tracks that make up your sound. Between gigs you might play the same 10 songs but you might play them differently or in unexpected ways. Figuring out which tracks work together is part of the fun.
V. Style
When I was asked to record my mix, on some level I was just trying to do the exercise and get through the thing. But as soon as I realized I would be recording something I wanted other people would hear I began to think about the kinds of sounds I’d put in my mix.
I love the droning, driving, relentless sounds of techno that can sometimes seem nonmusical and without a sense of melody. I love this style because it is so focused on rhythm and to me it is a much more difficult to access and much more difficult to like than music that has a defined melody or a singable chorus, or something else a bit more tangible to grasp. With this style of music you really do have to focus on the rhythm itself and allow yourself to be entranced by it completely. For me, droning, minimalist, rhythmic music is powerful because of its connections to ritual and that even without drugs or artificial substances you can lose yourself in just the undulating drum line alone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHCsK68hr9Y
But I also love the powerful gospel techno of Robert Hood/Floorplan, an interesting style of music that still punches with relentless drum lines but has the highs of gospel.
In the heat of my mix – that is, once the record button flashed on and off – something interesting happened. In my practice sessions I’d stop and start if I made a mistake, or else I would try to rewind the track and start over. The thing is, you can’t do that on a dance floor. If you mess up you don’t get to shrug it off and press “do over.” You have to keep going.
Each time I’ve recorded a mix — and there are two mixes now — I’ve essentially improvised but with a template in mind. One thing I’ve learned, then, is that the DJ is really a careful improviser. She or he has a crate or crates of tracks they usually play, tracks that make up that particular DJs “sound.” My tutor told me that a DJ might have a certain number of things in their library and those tracks become their “sound.” They might have 3 gigs in a month and they might play some of the same songs in a different order at any given gig that month. Those tracks index a particular DJs taste level and interest in certain kinds of sounds.
The style of music I play is techno and I don’t mind being a relatively “niche” DJ. There are a couple types of DJs: wedding DJs, DJs who play requests, DJs who have a specific style or who dabble in a few different genres. I got into DJing to play my favorite music and to share my specific musical taste with an audience to make a connection with them over a night. To me, that’s where the artistry of DJing lies.
As the postmodern theorist Nicolas Bourriaud has observed, the DJ is essentially a copy and paste artist, the crux of postmodernism, a selector who copies preexisting musical content and pastes it together in a brand new context over the course of the night. Part of the excitement of DJing is how you surprise yourself by pasting songs that fit together in ways you didn’t anticipate.
VI. The Night Of…
I had my first DJ performance in the basement at Roadtrip, a popular bar in Shoreditch. Part of the reason I chose the DJ school I did is because it’s relatively inexpensive, compared to other DJ schools anyway, but mostly because they have tight relationships with many of the major music venues in London and do well with getting their students gigs. I hadn’t even finished my 3rd lesson before my tutor told me that he would like to book me for a gig at Roadtrip!
Out of the bedroom and into the bar.
My set was scheduled from 4am to 5pm on Friday, a time that is really perfect for playing the dark style of music I love. To prepare I thought carefully about the first couple of songs I wanted to play because it was my first night performing and I wanted to announce myself with a specific sound. When you’re a DJ you are your sound, and hopefully people book you not because they want some random DJ but because they want you to play your style.
I spent hours in the studio trying to figure out which tracks went together and how I would play them, and the first track I went for was “Breathe” by Answer Code Request. It’s big and boomy and doesn’t have a four on the floor bass line right away. But that was part of the point for me. I wanted to play this abstract, slightly track before I punched the room with with another track that was big and beefy.
I was so nervous about the first three tracks. Not nervous about playing but nervous about the fact that my tutor told me at the last second that the mixer and the turntables were different than the ones I’d been used to practicing on in the studio. In general a mixer is a mixer and a turntable is a turntable, but for a new person performing I was already anxious about messing up and now I had to think about how different the mixer and turntables were.
All told, once I hit the DJ booth I don’t really remember much. I didn’t see anyone. I stopped feeling nervous/nauseous and, thankfully, nothing went wrong. I had a playlist of tracks on my phone I knew worked together and that I knew I wanted to play, but somehow by the time I reached the 6th track I was so into the music that I completely forgot to look at the my playlist and improvised as I went along. As one track was going out I sampled different tracks in my headphones and listened to what worked or what I wanted to play next.
As I played, supporters who knew it was my first time stood by me and cheered and others watched me in the DJ booth to see what I was doing. At the end, a few people came up to me to say how good I was and they were really encouraging me, telling me how much they liked my set.
But there were also naysayers, as there are with any performance. My friend who was in the room told me that someone said they didn’t like the music and wondered when “the real music” would be coming on. Apparently the person was expecting a bit more commercialism from the music that night, and it is true that at a certain point the room cleared — the DJs worst nightmare. My goal for the night though was to have fun and to play the music I love. I didn’t get into DJing to be a crowd pleaser. I got into it to share my love of music.
VII. What’s Next
My tutor told me that I don’t really need any more DJ lessons. He told me that now I should be focusing on production because today DJs are also producers of their own music. They mix their own tracks with those that already exist. Being a DJ producer puts you in charge and further amplifies your brand.
Now I’m on the lookout to start my own dance party at a basement venue in London. Most of the influential DJs got their start by igniting their own musical movement or party and building buzz around it slowly but steadily. So that’s what I want to do next: find a small, dark basement in London, fill it with smoke and find two other DJs to play dark, booming music.
I imagine a small art collective of five people: three regular DJs, a lighting designer and a graphic designer and we would be the brains and the machinery behind this party. The DJs would show off their specific sound and style, the lighting designer would use light sculpture to create a unique visual experience, and the graphic designer would be in charge of all image aspects of the party itself. It’s a party that aims to attract a small art audience, an art crowd, or a crowd interested in a deep sensory experience.
To me, this party is the antidote to commercial nightlife. 15 pounds to get in, 10 pound cab to get there, 8 pounds for one drink in a small cup. Before you know it you’re in the red. People often go out because it’s Friday or Saturday night, not because they want to have a unique experience or do something new or hear cool music. With my party I want to try to change that. I want to create a nightclub that’s as much a movement as it is about clubbing itself.
My DJ tutor told me that I was a bit “chin strokey,” meaning the kind of person who is interested in things that make you think. He was probably kidding when he said it but actually I think he’s right. I want to use music, sound and space to get people to think through their bodies. That’s why I want to DJ and it’s the connection I want to make to clubbers.
A guest post for the Moving Blog by DJ John Armstrong, who selected the tunes for our Moving Conversation 2 after-party on January 12th. John has recently put together a 4-CD box set of essential zouk both traditional and contemporary, spanning the years from the late 70s to today. You can find it here, amongst other internet places: Simply Zouk. If you’re still one of the intrepid few who prefer to buy their music in a physical shop, you’ll also find it at HMV and similar retailers. Thank you, John, for the music, your knowledge, and the post!’
A while back, I was invited to start work on a music compilation of traditional French Antillean music: gwoka, bele, chouval bwa, biguine, jing-ping, and so forth. I needed some quotable contemporary material from current traditional musicians, and found to my surprise that those approached would only participate if the interviews were conducted in kreyol.
For commercial reasons the compilation wasn’t completed. But the illuminating conversation between Prof Carolyn Cooper and Jocelyne Beroard at January’s Moving Conversation, as well as the wonderful performance by Zil’oKa, a dance group whose average age can’t be more than the early 20s, reminded me that it was in the fields of language and dance just as much as of music that Jocelyne’s band, Kassav’, helped effect a revolution.
Francophone songwriters have been composing in kreyol for more than half a century, true, but it wasn’t until the late 70s and early 80s that there was general commercial recognition of the fact. Suddenly, LPs from the French Antilles and Haiti started appearing in record-shop racks with pull-out lyric sheets in (to many eyes) an almost-indecipherable script. Kassav’s members, and the composers with whom they collaborated, regarded it as a mark not of nationalistic honour, but of cultural necessity that written lyrics accurately reproduced sung lyrics.
In this, Kassav’ were very much of their time as regards contemporaneous writers in fields other than music. The Negritude writers of the 30s- Aime Cesaire and others- had already extended the scope of the linguistic studies of the Haitian anthropologist Antenor Firmin beyond specialist circles and into wider cultural usage. But it wasn’t until the 70s and 80s, and the appearance of Martinican authors, poets and movie scriptwriters such as Raphael Confiant, Daniel Maximin, Jean Bernabe and Patrick Chamoiseau that kreyol — as a signifier — became almost an everyday necessity rather than an academic nicety, even though such writers were not confining themselves purely to kreyol in all their work.
The same thing’s happening today in Jamaica, although admittedly, reggae has had a much wider world stage for a much longer time than Franco-Caribbean music. Prof Cooper played a track from the recent album by perhaps the most exciting ‘new’ reggae voice in a decade — Chronnix. Just 22 years old, Chronnix is part of a new generation of Jamaican artists that don’t recognise the constraints and conventions of commercial reggae and dancehall. Accordingly, you’ll find lovers’ rock, dub, ragga, dancehall, roots, Rastafari, nyabinghi and everything in between in a Chronnix set, all of it composed in a contemplative and poetic patois, with thematic preoccupations that owe more to Bobs Dylan and Marley than to current dancehall.
What’s more, written Jamaican patois is appearing more often now than a decade ago: for example, in the extraordinary novels of Marlon James, such as A Short History Of Seven Killings, a 700-page, patois-Pynchon-esque mix of fact and fiction about the events and characters surrounding the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1977. And here’s the thing: after fifty or so pages, even a white, middle-class English guy like me finds himself internally vocalising and appreciating the flow, beauty and humour of Jamaican patois, and understanding every word.
Here’s a good podcast of current “Reggae Revival” as the ‘new’ Chronnix sound is being tagged.
What’s just as exciting is the way in which Kassav’s ‘kreyol-and-proud’ legacy, as well as the tempos of modern r & b and dancehall, has influenced nouvel’ scene Franco-Caribbean music, as Guadeloupe’s foremost practitioner of back-to-roots modernity, Admiral T, demonstrates below:
Admiral T says to the kids at the beginning: “Mis ti krik!’. They reply ‘Mis ti krak!’ .‘I’m going to tell you a story!’ ‘ Yes, we’re listening!’
Or the beautiful Lycinais Jean, in this adaptation of a Jocelyne Berouard classic:
Q: WHEN IS ZOUK NOT ZOUK?
A: WHEN IT’S BAD ZOUK.
There’s been much discussion among ‘old-school’ Antillean zouk fans about ‘modern’ international zouk (ie post- 1995 or thereabouts). Many believe the current style for the relentless 88-ish b.p.m. tempo is a travesty of original zouk –- party and carnival music which often hit 140-150 b.p.m. in its late-80s heyday. It doesn’t really trouble me either way: after all, much of zouk’s early impetus came from Dominican cadence-lypso and Haitian konpa direct, neither of which styles were unusually frantic.
Nevertheless, I can sort of see why first-generation zoukeurs feel that ‘their’ music has been hijacked by the requirements of the dance teacher! But ultimately, all popular music tends to change in line with the recording techniques and technical advances of the day, and with the blueprint of commercial ‘chart’ music generally. For example, what the music industry calls ‘r & b’ today would be unrecognisable to the r & b artists of the late 40s, like Roy Brown and Wynonie Harris -– but it’s still r & b, for all that.
To reiterate a cliché: there are just two kinds of music, good music and bad music. I think the same applies to zouk, whenever it was recorded.
SEMBA AND KIZOMBA- PAULO FLORES- A TRUE ORIGINAL
Speaking of ‘international’ zouk, I believe that there’s a misconception among some that today’s zouk sound developed solely from Antilllean zouk, and that everything else is mere emulation. The fact is, though, that the Luso-African community had a much larger input into zouk’s beginnings in Paris than they’re often given credit for. There’s something about Luso African melody that makes it perfect for zouk, especially its fado-inflected melancholy.
I recently put together a 4-CD box set of essential zouk both traditional and contemporary, spanning the years from the late 70s to today. You can find it here.
I recall seeing many posters for Cape Verdean parties and club-nights in 80s Paris record shops. More importantly, arrangers and composers such as Emmanuel ‘Manou’ Lima and Tito Paris were providing the blueprints for the then-new sound of zouk-love. Many of the great Afro-zouk classics recordings by Oliver N’Goma, Monique Seka, and others bore the unmistakeable print of Manou Lima’s keyboard arrangements, while the Paris and Abidjan dance club soundtracks of the time included many tunes by Luso-African stars — Bonga, Paulo Flores, Tropical Band, Carlos Burity, Eduardo Paim, Juju Delgado, Cabo Verde Show — in the mix among the more instantly recogniseable Kassav’, Kanda Bongo Man, etc.
Which brings us neatly to the much-anticipated Modern Moves conversation between Paulo Flores, the undisputed king and foremost international populariser of Angolan semba and kizomba and Professor Marissa Moorman, whose book Intonations is the essential primer for any Angolan music lover or musicologist. With that in mind, I thought I’d leave you with a couple of YouTube videos that demonstrate beyond doubt the mutual indebtedness of the Antillean and Luso African musical diasporas.
The first is a duet between Kassav’s Jacob Desvarieux and the great Eduardo ‘General Kambuengo’ Paim.
The second between Jacob, once again, and one of the lesser-known stars of kizomba, Nilo Carvalho.
The third link, of course,, shows Paulo Flores singing one of the keynote songs of semba, with a superb band.
So, till then: We ou nan pati la! E ve-lo na festa!
JOHN ARMSTRONG
Feature image: Zil’oKA dancers performing to ‘Zouk la si sel medikaman nou ni’ in the presence of Jocelyne Beroard and Carolyn Cooper, King’s College London, 12th January 2015. Photo courtesy of Fareda Khan.
Friday 4th May 2018 Anatomy Lecture Theatre (day) and Great Hall (evening) King’s College London, Strand Campus, WC2R 2LS Five years of Modern Moves draw to a close. Celebrate with…
Our fifth Moving Group was dedicated to an exploration of tango music and dance, and it involved a double bill. First, we heard Dr Kendra Stepputat, ethnomusicologist from the University…
In the historical city of Ouidah, the power of nature mingles with the tragedies of modern history and the resilience of the sacred.
We at Modern Moves know about the sacredness of pythons. I have devoured, from cover to cover, many times over, Katherine Dunham’s account of her complex relationship with Damballa, serpent god, which first started during her fieldwork in Haiti. In Ouidah, I saw the same coiled and terrifying beauty, the same egg yolk stains proclaiming sacrifice and offerings.
The lieux de memoire combine mercantile and sacred dimensions. Can the sacred ever come to us unmediated in modernity?
The sacred can confront and defeat banalisation. Of this I am convinced, as we drive past statues whose obviously recent vintage does nothing to diminish their strange and disquieting power.
Melancholia comes in many colours. What we feel in response to a history that we did not shape but yet feel as ours can require words that are beyond European lexicons. As postcolonial subjects we feel the European words in our mouths and reshape them with our tongues . Our bodies play out different affective trails. Memory is physical, its burden lightened through laughter, through movement. Through posture. Through swag.
I note the now-familiar routine. The guide intones the horrors of the slave trade. The visitors strike their poses. Elina and I wander around, taking pictures. The sand is hot beneath our feet. The sea is out there- it seems close, but the sand is far too hot to walk to the water.
The guide is talking about Mami Wata. She is the water goddess. I say, in the Brazilian way, ‘Iemanja’. He spins around. Once again, he is surprised by me. ‘How do you know of her? Where are you from?’ I’m just an Indian woman who lives in the world and loves to know about everything. Oh and I dance. And like to think through dance.
We stand by the shore. I hear the guide describe the mode of worship appropriate to Mami Wata. ‘Are there temples to Mami Wata here?’ I ask. He peers into my face and his voice drops. ‘She doesn’t need temples. She is here, she is everywhere.’
My own voice drops in synchronicity. I feel we must speak low. ‘Do you see her then?’ The guide looks at me. ‘I sense her presence everywhere. At night, I see her here, on the beach. She is a mermaid…. she has no legs, just the body of a fish….’ Then…. ‘she is like you.’
