The Imagined New Volume II:
Black Sonic

The Black Sonic sets assemble a range of offerings including playlists, conversations, podcasts, listening sessions, and interviews. Following the thematic of heritage as heresy, the hope is for those who engage with the digital archive to continue the explorations begun in 2020-2022, to uncover, unpack, create and circulate emerging definitions of Black Sonic(s) that bring further polyvocality to the making of new archives. In future, African sounds may remix the popular notions of Black thought currently in use. Migrations and nomadic indigenous knowledges may shift the sonic and speculative possibilities of technological advancement. Diasporic dialogue may deepen understanding of Black living histories outside catastrophic frameworks.

An exploration of the material aspects of black phonic substance with reference to Fred Moten.

Black Phonic Substance is a visual-sonic mixtape. Within this mixtape, language is discussed as a central concern of black life. This experiment positions black life as the heretical premise that challenges the orthodoxy of language as defined by the perceptual limits of post-structuralism and linguistics. Here, we consider the phonic substance of teeth sucking, eye rolling and the dialectics of throwing shade.

Black Phonic Substance is the attempt to unsettle the “analytic-interpretative reduction of phonic materiality” and discuss blackness as an ongoing improvisation “that moves in excess of meaning.”

Is it possible to discuss blackness as a sign, signifier and a neither that is both? How might blackness name a fluidity and continuum of expressive communication that exceeds the rigid borders of discipline or geographic location? On these imprecise terms, the published academic texts of both Fred Moten and Denise Ferreira Da Silva become a score – a set of symbolic pitches, rhythms and phrases embodied by performers Carl Hancock Rux and Okwui Okpokwasili, organized into an imagined mix. Vernon Reid scores the opening remarks on Wah-Wah guitar.

A dive into the ways sound, dress, and movement can be used to create and reclaim spaces for new possibilities. This set takes its title from Njabulo S. Ndebele’s important book Rediscovery of the

If the project of history is marked by catastrophe, of systematic thingification, the rendering of everything considered peripheral to the optic fantasy of civilisation (read whiteness) as objects to be manipulated in service of that fantasy. How then might the Black Sonic help fire a radical imagination that “flips that script” and begin a process of “smaddyisation”; becoming not a thing but a “smaddy” (Jamaican word for somebody). In this section we consider how people use sound, dress, and movement to both create and claim spaces to declare and display these newly imagined and reimagined somebodies.

Through the contribution of Rhea Storr, we explore Carnival and Junkanoo practice(s) as a way to create these spaces. Through the contribution of DJ Lynnee Denise we explore the relationship between movement and sound as a kind of technology for accessing new types of being. With Zara Julius’ contribution we listen to and experience sound as something tangible and visceral and Ashon Crawley contributes by taking us through his art practice(s) as a way to reconcile the past with the present.

Contributor: Rhea Storr

Artist filmmaker and researcher investigating Black Radical Imagination as realised through experimental cinema.

In this visual essay produced specially for the project, Heresy as Heritage Rhea Storr, reflects on the Black Sonic, and the interview with Prof Bogues, her previous works Junkanoo Talks and A Protest, A Celebration a Mixed Message, her practices as a filmmaker and her relationship with carnival and junkanoo.

Taken together we begin to see Carnival and Junkanoo as sites of knowledge, as archives of skills and knowledge techniques, as heritage from which heresy is inherited. Storr positions junkanoo not only as a space to assert national and personal pride but also as a conjunction point where the past is remembered, the present celebrated and possible futures imagined. Through junkanoo practices of costume making, dance and singing, ideas and knowledge about the world are shared with participants and told to the viewer through pageantry. This pageantry forms a new kind of commentary that articulates and asserts new, understandings of what it means to be human.

Contributor: DJ Lynnée Denise

Artist, scholar, writer, and DJ whose work reflects on underground cultural movements, the 1980s, migration studies, theories of escape, and electronic music of the African Diaspora.

Using archive footage DJ Lynnee Denise explores the symbiotic relationship between sound and movement. A relationship that provides a platform for people to transcend into new states of being and from within the safety of the Electric Ring Shout to assert and express these new identities.

DJ Lynnee Denise graciously sat down with us for a discursive conversation based on Electric Ring Shout. Here we discussed not only the relationship between sound and movement but also rhythm as heartbeat and how different modes of dance seek out different relationships with that beat and in so doing continuously find new ways to express being smaddy.

Electric Ring Shout

Lynnee Denise in conversation with the Black Sonics Team

Contributor: Zara Julius

Zara Julius is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher and cultural worker based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is especially engaged in thinking through the internal workings of the Black sonic, and how they might help us reconstitute time (pasts, presents, futures) in the face of various unfreedoms.

Zara Julius takes us through a working methodology of ‘rapture’. Thinking through the internal workings of the Black sonic, and how they might help us reconstitute time (pasts, presents, futures) in the face of various unfreedoms, they shared a Black Sonic Playlist. This sometimes personal but always fascinating journey around Africa and the Diaspora used sound to both transport and locate us in specific geographies but also lift us to rapturous new heights and spaces.

Watch Zara Julius discuss her black Sonic Playlist with the team

Contributor: ashon crawley

ashon crawley is an audioartist and Professor of Religious Studies and African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (2016) and The Lonely Letters (2020).

In this presentation ashon crawley guides us through an exploration of his interdisciplinary art practice(s) from architecture to painting inviting us to have a reckoning with the past that remains present and enable us to give ceremony, memorialise and give honour to those that have denied it by history.