https://radiusstation.net Radius Station Sun, 28 Mar 2021 06:46:04 +0000 https://radiusstation.net en http://radiusstation.net/africans Sun, 28 Mar 2021 06:46:04 +0000 Radius Station 401892 The Africans: A Radio Play in Three Acts Based on The Trial of Christopher Okigbo, a novel by Ali Mazrui Written and directed by Christian Nyampeta, with the assistance of Shariffa Ali Voiced by Phindile Dube, Prince Joshua Botongore, Moya Michael, Otobong Nkanga, Obi Okigbo, and Mohamed Toukabri, and a guest appearance of Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom Original musical compositions by Julien Simbi&nbsp; Produced by Sofia Dati and Helena KritisRecording by Johan VandermaelenInterns: Nathan Ishar and Sophia Attigui&nbsp; Writing Circle: Shariffa Ali, Hannah Black, Rahima Gambo, Emmanuel Iduma, and Andros Zins-Browne Additional sources include More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction by Kodwo Eshun; and Women and the Nigeria-Biafra War: Reframing Gender and Conflict in Africa, edited by Gloria Chuku and Sussie U. Aham-Okoro Commissioned by WIELS Centre for Contemporary Art, Brussels, in the frame of the exhibition “Risquons-Tout”, curated by Dirk Snauwaert, Zoë Gray, Devrim Bayar, Helena Kritis and Sofia Dati in 2020Co-commissioned by Ntone Edjabe at Chimurenga Library’s Pan African Space Station With the special support of the Flemish Government, Mondriaan Fonds, Africalia and The Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands With thanks to: Lisa Akinyi May, Mai Abu ELDahab, Laïla Bouquet, Eric Cyuzuzo, Benoit De Wael, Mariama Errami, Elisabeth Severino Fernandes, Mwanza Goutier, Zen Jefferson, Emma Kamau, Lissa Kinnaer, Nicole Bongo Letuppe, Adams Mensah, Kristin Rogghe, Anjalika Sagar, Oussama Tabti, Cees Vossen, Mary Wang, and Xiaoyu Weng The Africans: A Radio Play in Three Acts Based on The Trial of Christopher Okigbo, a novel by Ali Mazrui Written and directed by Christian Nyampeta, with the... http://radiusstation.net/tidal Tue, 22 Dec 2020 04:32:44 +0000 Radius Station 393482 http://radiusstation.net/creation-plans Tue, 22 Dec 2020 04:28:54 +0000 Radius Station 393481 An Evening With Christian NyampetaA mixtape streaming temporarily on music platforms including iTunes, Spotify and Tidal, from 21 December 2020 1. Evening News2. Operating Systems3. Long Letters4. Makambo5. Election Results6. Time Zones7. Malaika8. Creation Plans 8. Creation Plans This is my own iteration of “The Creator Has a Master Plan”, the monumental creation by saxophonist Pharoah Sanders from 1969, co-composed and featuring percussion and vocals by Leon Thomas. “The Creator” has a daunting genealogy: soon after Sanders’ initial release as part of his album Karma, Thomas also released the song, but with the extended lyrics that had actually been included in the liner notes to Karma, first as a single and then on his album Spirits Known and Unknown (also 1969). That same year, an abridged version of the song, again featuring Leon Thomas on vocals, also appeared on Louis Armstrong and His Friends, an album by the legendary trumpeter and vocalist, and, about a decade later, drummer Norman Wilson released yet another rendition. It is, in fact, Wilson’s version I heard first, not in its original form, but when it was sampled by producer DJ Premier of Gang Starr on his 1995 production of the Brooklyn hip hop group Das EFX’s then-popular track “Real Hip Hop”. The Das EFX song (and Pete Rock’s remix) used to light up the dance floors in the eastern part of the Netherlands where I was living in the early 2000s, when I was a DJ co-organising parties. More recently, “The Creator” was covered by jazz vocalist Dwight Trible in 2018. A decade or so before that, around 2011, I myself recall editing Pharaoh Sanders’ epic 32 minutes and 48 seconds track and remixing it into a much shorter version for the mixtapes I was making for friends at the time. Indeed, “The Creator” is the first song I remember working on, and the current open and ongoing iteration the listener hears here emerges from the same process of looping the basic chords my untrained hands can manage to mimic and overlaying the track with changing elements resulting from various recording sessions. Pharaoh Sanders’ “The Creator” is organised into an introduction, followed by a kind of prelude, after which a persistent phrase is repeated throughout the remainder of the track, with Leon Thomas’s vocals and throat singing appearing in quiet moments, as well as when the song accelerates into an explosion of free blowing. Through a half-hour-long ebbing and flowing of complete eruption and controlled rendition, the song evokes cries, screams, moans, prayers and hopes. I resolved to edit the song out of motivation to move past the eruptions and arrive at the quieter moments of contemplation, but later I realised there was no merit in listening to one part of the song and not spending time on the rest. As a YouTube user comments on one of the song’s music videos on the site, “Pharoah’s song has created an aural image of the history of suffering and the triumph of the spirit over the physical world.” <img width="1080" height="1080" width_o="1080" height_o="1080" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/3868545fd484ae00288aa97951e3f1ef8337fcbe62ded452540a671b80f7e546/201221_Malaika-Nyampeta-3.jpg" data-mid="1028098" border="0" /> An Evening With Christian NyampetaA mixtape streaming temporarily on music platforms including iTunes, Spotify and Tidal, from 21 December 2020 1. Evening... http://radiusstation.net/malaika Tue, 22 Dec 2020 04:28:46 +0000 Radius Station 393480 An Evening With Christian NyampetaA mixtape streaming temporarily on music platforms including iTunes, Spotify and Tidal, from 21 December 2020 1. Evening News2. Operating Systems3. Long Letters4. Makambo5. Election Results6. Time Zones7. Malaika8. Creation Plans 7. Malaika This song is certainly one of the many that would make up my “sonic biography”, to use a term by DJ and artist Ain Bailey, because it was often played on the radio when I was a child in Kigali. I am, of course, not the only one who will have heard Miriam Makeba’s song: Makeba’s rise to fame in South Africa during the 1950s, her subsequent success overseas in the 1960s, and her role in the global anti-apartheid movement are all fairly well documented. Indeed, Makeba is part of the sociography of entire generations in Africa and beyond: even in the States during racial segregation, she was perhaps the most prominent African performer within American popular culture. Her songs such as Pata Pata became radio hits, her records sold well and she regularly appeared on television. She was somewhat of a celebrity in 1960s America, appealing to the American mainstream regardless of the difficulties facing Black people in America. My own cover of the song draws from the electrifying rendition sung by Miriam Makeba and Harry Belafonte on An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba, their album from 1969. Aside from this joint studio album, Belafonte and Makeba appeared together live many times, something which is indicative of Makeba’s Pan-African practice of cultural intimacy and anti-imperial internationalism, whereby she would sing in a number of African languages and collaborate with fellow musicians from various African diasporas. On her Live in Paris album, Makeba introduces the version of “Malaika” that appears there as a song from Tanzania. Malaika, a Kiswahili word meaning “angel” in English, is actually dedicated to human rights activist Stokely Carmichael, whom Makeba married in 1968 before the couple relocated to Guinea to avoid the difficulties they both faced as a result of their union: because of their association, Makeba wrongly came to be portrayed as an extremist and both endured poor treatment in the United States. Makeba features in William Klein’s The Pan-African Festival of Algiers (1969) and is recorded nursing a child while rehearsing with Dorothy Masuka, who was herself in exile from what was then Rhodesia. This intimate collaboration renders the atmosphere of solidarity found in Algiers at that time, which itself had become a refuge for many freedom fighters fleeing political persecution. The festival, which was mandated by the Organisation of African Unity, offered a lasting cultural landmark in which alternatives to the imperial course of history were imagined, even if those alternatives were short-lived. In any case, “Malaika” is a protest song, like many of Makeba’s songs, especially the ones featured on the An Evening With album, such as “Khawuleza”, the Xhosa title of “Hurry, Mama, Hurry!”, referring to situations in which children alert their mothers the authorities are coming, situations that are especially resonant and relevant at this time of renewed protests against police brutalities across the globe. Altogether, although I myself grew up viewing “Malaika” as a lullaby that was performed in Swahili lessons, Makeba’s renditions are, in fact, political expressions of longing across geographies, and protests against exiles and expulsions. <img width="1080" height="1080" width_o="1080" height_o="1080" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/3dd17ee850f756367782b38c85c94bd52549b9d1a761de7419fdcefc150176be/201221_Malaika-Nyampeta-5.jpg" data-mid="1028097" border="0" /> An Evening With Christian NyampetaA mixtape streaming temporarily on music platforms including iTunes, Spotify and Tidal, from 21 December 2020 1. Evening... http://radiusstation.net/time-zones Tue, 22 Dec 2020 04:28:32 +0000 Radius Station 393479 An Evening With Christian NyampetaA mixtape streaming temporarily on music platforms including iTunes, Spotify and Tidal, from 21 December 2020 1. Evening News2. Operating Systems3. Long Letters4. Makambo5. Election Results6. Time Zones7. Malaika8. Creation Plans 6. Time Zones I consider this recording to be an elegy, in that it imagines and laments the distance that so often exists between families across the globe. It is a reflection on how, all too often, people are unable to join in celebrations with their actual or chosen families and, at the same time, are forced to suffer their personal tragedies alone. Still, the improvised lyrics also imagine a time preceding the present suffering, and a zone of peace and rest. <img width="1080" height="1080" width_o="1080" height_o="1080" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/1137b7ba33dfc5c6ee83fcc27db277225ff2cf99376ebb8a2f8e4ecb55363a60/201221_Malaika-Nyampeta-11.jpg" data-mid="1028096" border="0" /> An Evening With Christian NyampetaA mixtape streaming temporarily on music platforms including iTunes, Spotify and Tidal, from 21 December 2020 1. Evening... http://radiusstation.net/election-results Tue, 22 Dec 2020 04:28:22 +0000 Radius Station 393478 An Evening With Christian NyampetaA mixtape streaming temporarily on music platforms including iTunes, Spotify and Tidal, from 21 December 2020 1. Evening News2. Operating Systems3. Long Letters4. Makambo5. Election Results6. Time Zones7. Malaika8. Creation Plans 5. Election Results This was recorded intermittently while following the Brexit referendum and, later on, while remembering the victims of the tragic fire at Grenfell Tower (immediately after the re-election of the Conservatives whose systematic social neglect was linked to the disaster), and before that, at the height of the farce that brought into office the 45th president of the United States. To some extent, I have lived through these moments with a sense of incapacity because I am not allowed to vote in either the UK or the US despite having lived in those countries for many years. Of course, these referendums and elections result in policies that affect whole communities living in regions and environments located far away from where the votes are cast. The suffering of local communities from police violence also reached a tipping point this year, but one of the symptoms of the broader anxiety felt by nations politically and culturally at odds with themselves; the disregard for justice at the hands of all sectors of authority leads to an extreme escalation of the social logic of abjection that makes it even harder to rest in peace. <img width="1080" height="1080" width_o="1080" height_o="1080" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/855cc22a9f65dd019cbfd1ca3cdea436a86dccba5d9931c3c17cd3fdb7a8090d/201221_Malaika-Nyampeta_1.jpg" data-mid="1028094" border="0" /> An Evening With Christian NyampetaA mixtape streaming temporarily on music platforms including iTunes, Spotify and Tidal, from 21 December 2020 1. Evening... http://radiusstation.net/makambo Tue, 22 Dec 2020 04:28:09 +0000 Radius Station 393477 An Evening With Christian NyampetaA mixtape streaming temporarily on music platforms including iTunes, Spotify and Tidal, from 21 December 2020 1. Evening News 2. Operating Systems3. Long Letters4. Makambo5. Election Results6. Time Zones7. Malaika8. Creation Plans 4. Makambo This unresolved excerpt exemplifies the method by which my “sonic sketches” help the discussion between myself and my collaborator about the mood, instrumentation and treatment of the musical output. ‘Makambo’ was originally the name of a song by Geoffrey Oryema from his album Exile (1990) produced by Brian Eno. Oryema sings about the pain of being forced to flee his native land, for he lived in exile in France following his father’s murder in Uganda in 1977 where his father had been a cabinet minister under Idi Amin. I had not heard the song for a long time when I received a streaming link to the album, sent to me by my friend, curator and educator Nana Adusei-Poku last year. It reminded me that, although digital exchanges have now increased due to the global pandemic, rather than being a novelty, remote transmission has, in fact, always existed for diasporic communities. One letter a month, one audio-cassette or VHS tape a year, one phone call or video call a week, archipelagos of identities have been kept alive over the ages by sharing from a distance. My version of the song is thus dedicated to refugees and displaced people across the world as their plight is now further exacerbated by the urgency of the pandemic. <img width="1080" height="1080" width_o="1080" height_o="1080" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/ba02127ad08b4e641b0638585e4a37078a54f2e516678d6765f27c224b6a6493/201221_Malaika-Nyampeta-7.jpg" data-mid="1028093" border="0" /> An Evening With Christian NyampetaA mixtape streaming temporarily on music platforms including iTunes, Spotify and Tidal, from 21 December 2020 1. Evening News... http://radiusstation.net/long-letters Tue, 22 Dec 2020 04:27:49 +0000 Radius Station 393476 An Evening With Christian NyampetaA mixtape streaming temporarily on music platforms including iTunes, Spotify and Tidal, from 21 December 2020 1. Evening News2. Operating Systems3. Long Letters4. Makambo5. Election Results6. Time Zones7. Malaika8. Creation Plans 3. Long Letters In 2018 I co-organised a workweek in Huye, a rural but historic town in the south of Rwanda. Delegates from working groups based in 14 cities across the world attended to share their findings on a collaborative research piece around the histories of art education in their respective locales. As part of the programme, I had organised an “evening school” consisting of musical gatherings, performances and film screenings, which was by far the most transgressive component in that it brought together neighbours, authorities, children and more into one space where social differences were suspended. The preparation for this moment and its ongoing afterglow compelled me to produce an EP, which I viewed as a kind of sonic catalogue of songs recorded before, during and in the aftermath of the major events that had marked the recent history. In a way, the forthcoming EP is a continuation of that “evening school” in Huye, and the initial idea for the album was to revisit the selected songs in collaboration with contemporary linguists and musicians, through translations, remixing and reprises. However, the ensuing lockdowns caused many cancellations and the album was ultimately developed in close collaboration with musician Julien Simbi mentioned earlier. What has remained is the method of featuring short interludes containing recitations of what I would describe as “long letters”: excerpts by poets and novelists including Kodwo Eshun, Bessie Head, B. Kojo Laing, Ali A. Mazrui, Scholastique Mukasonga, Nnedi Okorafor, Yambo Ouologuem, Ousmane Sembène and Namwali Serpell, in a reading that performs their writing as diagnosticians of their society. <img width="872" height="872" width_o="872" height_o="872" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/bcdf1c030aaa9bf4efb22af2296d7e6eff5af5c09f14a53c2dc74ca36d732695/201221_Malaika-Nyampeta-4.jpg" data-mid="1028085" border="0" /> An Evening With Christian NyampetaA mixtape streaming temporarily on music platforms including iTunes, Spotify and Tidal, from 21 December 2020 1. Evening... http://radiusstation.net/operating-systems Tue, 22 Dec 2020 04:27:36 +0000 Radius Station 393475 An Evening With Christian NyampetaA mixtape streaming temporarily on music platforms including iTunes, Spotify and Tidal, from 21 December 2020 1. Evening News2. Operating Systems3. Long Letters4. Makambo5. Election Results6. Time Zones7. Malaika8. Creation Plans 2. Operating Systems This is dedicated to artist and philosopher Kodwo Eshun, under whose supervision I completed my thesis at the Visual Cultures Department of Goldsmiths. I describe the recording as a sonic sketch because of how I imagine it to differ from the usual methods of composition. For example, the narration recites the table of contents of Eshun’s book, More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (1998). By extension, the song is also a dedication to my peers at Goldsmiths; to the wider artistic community in which the writing emerged; and to the large cohort of fellows, teachers and colleagues across the world who permitted me to call upon them at any time for help. Altogether, the song is an expression of gratitude for the assistance, help, collaboration, solidarity, support and guidance I received during my doctoral studies and beyond from the likes of Jean-Paul Martinon (my second supervisor) and Nicole Wolf at Goldsmiths, as well as my examiners, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Leela Gandhi. In summary, the song is a way to synthesise friendship and affiliation as the operating system for cultural belonging. <img width="1080" height="1080" width_o="1080" height_o="1080" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/e1f4cc9eccb681218f338e4f68588431176095b5abb56d9df73b04d87969ff3c/201221_Malaika-Nyampeta-6.jpg" data-mid="1028074" border="0" /> An Evening With Christian NyampetaA mixtape streaming temporarily on music platforms including iTunes, Spotify and Tidal, from 21 December 2020 1. Evening... http://radiusstation.net/evening-news Tue, 22 Dec 2020 04:25:17 +0000 Radius Station 393474 An Evening With Christian NyampetaA mixtape streaming temporarily on music platforms including iTunes, Spotify and Tidal, from 21 December 2020 1. Evening News2. Operating Systems3. Long Letters4. Makambo5. Election Results6. Time Zones7. Malaika8. Creation Plans 1. Evening News Most of my recordings tend to be made with a particular receiver in mind and this recording is no different for it was composed for the attention of my collaborator, musician Julien Simbi. Julien is, in fact, the first to receive most of the compositions I finish and I have taken up composition a bit more seriously in order to be able to discuss “musically” some ideas that inform Julien and I’s long-term collaborations, including Julien’s soundtracks for my films, a radio play currently in development with WIELS Contemporary and Chimurenga Pan African Space Station, and other collaborative music projects. This track is made using samples and existing loops as a way to learn how to play the electronic keyboard, the title of the song reflecting the need to remaining sensitive to the actualities by refusing the numbing, desensitising effects the current news cycles have. <img width="1080" height="1080" width_o="1080" height_o="1080" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/7290bcfd0b2fd798931a3342872a7be636340b73ebfd3426af3dc2f1cf74d7d4/201221_Malaika-Nyampeta-5.jpg" data-mid="1028066" border="0" /> An Evening With Christian NyampetaA mixtape streaming temporarily on music platforms including iTunes, Spotify and Tidal, from 21 December 2020 1. Evening...