Sonic Intimacies: Echo & Decay: an evening on Black Technologies and Sciences

We warmly invite you to an evening that focuses on Black Technologies and Sciences. How are we conditioned to hear race? In what ways do we attune to different Black social life and their sonic registers? Within Echo & Decay: an evening on Black Technologies and Sciences, we reverberate science as the way “Science” is understood within the Jamaican vernacular. Here science is synonym for “bush magic” or indigenous spiritual practices, which allows ground for the metaphysical to be interweaved within Technologies.

Sonic intimacies is about the way we relate to each other; the echoes and al ternative technologies that have developed within different Black (Diasporic)communities. It is the secret code and coded lingua francas that allows space for strategies to decentralize whiteness. Within this program we aim to delve into the multiplicity of Black technologies and artistic practices that guide alternative visions and approaches towards alternative Black technologies.

Echo & Decay: an evening on Black Technologies and Sciences opens with an evocative performance by sound artist and spiritual researcher NKISI and dancer Jazzmon under “MBI-LA”. This will be followed by a conversation around the implements of sound. This is a conversation that grows, with input and perspective from the artists, Raziyah Heath and the audience.
This is followed by a performance by sound artist and engineer from Johannesburg X14, Mohale Motlali. We will close off the evening by a performance by Lauren Duffus, London based producer and DJ, who will gently guide us into the night program.

Date: Friday, November 10, 2023
Time: 19 :00
Location: Warmoesstraat 66 , Amsterdam
Rsvp Here

Sonic Intimacies Weekender is a four-day gathering that moves and attunes to the role of sound as a means to empower self-determination and narrate stories about everyday histories, intimacy, social life, politics, futures, (non)beings, and inner life worlds.
X14:
X14 (pronounced - zeeah), originally from Cape Town, has called Johannesburg home for over a decade now. Having quickly immersed himself in the local electronic music scene on his arrival, X14 met local legend Big Space, who went on to release all of X14's efforts to date on his own Wet Dreams Recordings label. X14 shows off a totally different side of Johannesburg's musical landscape.

Lauren Duffus:
London-based producer, vocalist and DJ Lauren Duffus began composing and producing during the first lockdown in the spring of 2020 and soon discovered the ways it helped her to navigate her emotions (specifically grief at the time) through music. Lo-fi tracks began to surface on her Soundcloud page, such as ‘Stir Fry’ which would later become one third of her debut EP ‘SULK’ - made up of 3 experimental yet minimalist dance tracks that weave reflective, melancholic and hopeful melodies, crying sounds and dancehall drums. Following this she went on to release a varied catalogue of tracks and edits that showed us we were watching her experiment and develop her style in real time. From “Habits”, released on AD93 - a tense, slow burning cinematic dance track debuting the use of her signature layered vocals, to “Permanence” an emotive classical piece featuring a voicemail from her Doctor over a tense orchestral arrangement. Simultaneously playful and tender, her unique sound articulates something heartfelt and cinematic and this quickly singled her out as an exciting addition to London’s experimental electronic scene. Her goals are to grow as a producer and compose for visual arts, documentary and film.

JAZMON VOSS & NKISI present MBI-LA:

MBI-LA, is an experiment in ritual performance exploring the living archives of spiritual technologies embedded in music and our bodies. Music and the symbolic are the only realms the invisible has agency to act and affect the environment. How do we make room for the invisible forces? how do we invite them in?

Through the use of sensory codes we are merging music, dance and oral storytelling in a symbolic framework, as a multi fractal entanglement. The audience is invited energetically as an active member of the temporal secret society, MBI-LA, to invoke and call for intersubjective relationships with ancestors and the non-human in ways that do not re-enact violence against such life. Through sound, noise, voice and text we will be activating kinetic traces of memory that are inscribed in and by the body in motion aka oralitura (through reading Leda Martins, Performances of Spiral Time ).

Jazmon Voss is a multi talented performer and artist based in Rotterdam with roots in Utica, New York. In his 15 years professional ballet career, he has performed at Dance Theater of Harlem New York, under the direction of Arthur Mitchell, Ballet Black in London, Scapino in Rotterdam, and more. Pushing the boundaries in dance, music, and fashion as ways to explore the entanglements between fantasy, movement, and emotional space in queerness; he uses performance as a way to deconstruct euro-centric notions of gender norms while reconnecting with his afro-indigenous heritage.

Nkisi produces intense, powerful sonics influenced by ancient Kongo rhythms, rhythmic noise, our planetary electromagnetic grid, and experimental improvisation. The creative musician and visual artist is one of the co-founders of NON Worldwide. She recently launched her label INITIATION and research platform The Secret Institute, exploring the secrets and mysteries of vibrational rhythm, the ritual as a socio-political tool, invisible gestural sonics, and strategies of trance.

AI Image generated by: Fallon Fox