LOW-PASS: for any number of performers in any acoustic space

Place your hands over your ears and fully muffle them.

Slowly, like a hinge, un-muffle and re-muffle.

As you move your hands, listen to the room.

Find an emergent resonant frequency. Sing that frequency.

[A Year of Deep Listening was a 365-day online celebration of the legacy of Pauline Oliveros, and what would have been her 90th birthday. The Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer published one text score per day—online and across social media platforms—beginning on Oliveros’ 90th birthday: May 30, 2022.

The book version of A Year of Deep Listening will be released in Fall 2024—published by Terra Nova Press and distributed by MIT Press.]

Detroit-based Afrofuturist Onyx Ashanti is a self-made cyborg; through his self-made gestural synthesizers, he taps into a cybernetic system that maintains mind-body dialogue through sound. His system composes a particular Black subjectivity thatI call the cybernetic soul. I discuss Ashanti’s musical history and conceptions about performance, sound, and self through an examination of his “sonocybernetic” wearables. His organological experimentation is “myth-science,” a self-created process of becoming that emerges from his deep relationship with the instruments. Self-expression, tied to anti-anti-essentialist interpretations of Blackness and being, becomes a vehicle to imagine new futures which blur the distinction between Black bodies and consciousness.

This dissertation explores how musicians in Detroit’s North End engage with concepts of Afrofuturism to establish an emergent form of African culture in the neighborhood. By examining the work of Synergistic Mythologies, a North End-based trio of Black improvisers, I show how this cohort plays with the boundaries of Black Atlantic musical cultures. I argue that improvisation on tropes of African and Black musics subvert the binary of double consciousness and allows Black artists to understand themselves not only in relation to, but as an integral, Detroit-specific iteration of a larger Black Atlantic form.

Over the past decade, emerging Seattle-based artist Tendai Maraire, the American-born son of Zimbabwean teacher, performer, and ethnomusicologist, Dumisani Maraire, has crafted a unique musical position by marshaling multiple diasporic strands in his music. These include both the centuries-old African-American diaspora that took shape through the Black Atlantic, as well as an emerging diaspora that is specifically Zimbabwean in nature.

In this article, it is argued that the layering of these distinct diasporic histories has fostered a type of “doubled doubleness” in Tendai Maraire’s music, extending DuBois’s original conception of “double consciousness” to encompass multiple sites of identity location: the American superculture, the Shona culture of his parents, the old African diaspora, and the new Zimbabwean diaspora. It is further argued that Maraire has articulated this “doubled doubleness” musically through his relationships to musical styles associated with both old and new African diasporas, most notably North American hip-hop and Zimbabwean chimurenga, a genre that has historically functioned as a form of resistance to colonial rule.

From 1967 to 1980, the Second Chimurenga (“liberation” or “struggle”) was a Zimbabwean independence movement against Ian Smith’s white majority Rhodesian regime. The anti-colonial struggle took place on multiple fronts: internally against apartheid-style rule, externally through guerilla training camps in neighboring Mozambique, Zambia, and Botswana, and across borders through radio frequencies. These migratory radio broadcasts were a crucial sonic tool for revolution.

In this essay, I examine the impact of these broadcasts and reframe the practice of tuning into multiple frequencies through the construction of Karingido performance devices. These instruments, designed in collaboration with Zimbabwean artist Masimba Hwati, allow the player to alter a playlist of Chimurenga choral works through a circuit that adjusts the speed and pitch of each cassette mix. In doing so, the performer emulates the practice of listening to a plurality frequencies and the ebb and flow of identical yet unsynced broadcasts as they combine to form a new revolutionary soundscape.

In 2013, Atlanta-based rapper Young Thug broke into mainstream hip hop consciousness with his hit single “Stoner,” an ode to excessive cannabis smoking. While the song’s lyrics play on familiar rap tropes, Young Thug’s unique vocal delivery distinguishes him from the rest of the Atlanta rap scene: his high-registered voice swings from pointillist rapping to vocalise, often shifting through multiple timbres while presenting lyrics in rhythmically angular phrasings. This melodic style is complemented by a distinct approach which heavily inflects particular words while mumbling through others, a tactic that has been described by journalists and linguists as “post-verbal.”

In this essay, I discuss Young Thug’s unique vocal delivery style in the context of America’s current opioid crisis, and in the process, show how Young Thug’s performance signifies the anesthetic effects of the opioids he abuses, signaling a turn from rap artist as drug dealer to drug user. I begin with a critical look at Young Thug’s vocal palette; through disjointed phrasing, rhythmic cadences that move abruptly from mumbles to spasmodic onomatopoeia, and a propensity to stretch his lyrics into an enigmatically fluid melodic smear, Young Thug challenges assumptions about poetic delivery and provides an alternative, Afrofuturist aesthetic that reconfigures black voices and experiences.

In 1972, Detroit-based musician and poet Faruq Z. Bey founded the musical collective Griot Galaxy. Over their 17 year-long run, this ensemble pushed the boundaries of music that the critics called “jazz” by incorporating Islamic and Afrofuturistic ideologies with genre-defying sounds – the ensemble, fronted by a trio of virtuosic saxophonists, fluidly moved between dense walls of noise and radically avant-garde and complex art music.

In this presentation, I argue that the sonic and visual output of Griot Galaxy positioned Detroit as a crucial nodal point in the Black Atlantic (Gilroy 1993). While scholars have discussed the collective improvisation and African reversioning (Keyes 2004) of ensembles such as Sun Ra’s Arkestra (Szwed 2020), the Art Ensemble of Chicago (Lewis 2008), and musical figures such as Roscoe Mitchell (Toop 2006) and Milford Graves (Bivens 2015), the work of Detroit-based, Afrocentric ensembles such as Griot Galaxy and The Tribe are integral to understanding the way diasporic African consciousness was spread between the Chicago and New York scenes. While Griot Galaxy is no longer an active group, the musical and historical importance of the ensemble and their diasporic conceptions of the “griot” continue to influence new generations of musicians, artists, and community leaders. Based on my interviews with the surviving members of Griot Galaxy and affiliated groups, I argue that the city of Detroit was, and continues to be, an important site of new African consciousness in America.

In this essay, I argue for a doubled double consciousness that extends Du Bois’s conception into an increasingly interconnected space that Paul Gilroy called the Black Atlantic, a space which includes the histories and traditions of distinct African cultures, diasporic African communities, and Pan-African ideology. Based on the sonic practices of two artists, Seattle-based Zimbabwean American rapper and multi-instrumentalist Tendai Maraire, and Detroit-located Afrikan drummer and storyteller Efe Bes, we may hear doubled double consciousness as a multi-dimensional site of negotiation whereby musicians source from plural geographic, temporal, and cultural springs to compose a sonic “mix” of Black musical histories; this “mix” echoes the space where the hip hop DJ “noisily bring[s] together competing and complementary beats without sublating their tensions” (Weheliye 13). This anti-anti-essentialist tactic, as Carter Mathes describes in “The Sounds of Anti-Anti-Essentialism: Listening to Black Consciousness in the Classroom,” demonstrates that “it is the open space of sound that invests the project of black radical thought with the uncanny spontaneity of experimentation” (Mathes 2013).

In May 2015, Detroit’s Water and Sewage Department proposed a plan to shut off the water of 40% of its residents, a move that the United Nations condemned as a violation of human rights. The water shutoffs are symptomatic of Detroit’s legacy of decline; given the perceptions of rampant violence, widespread poverty, and a history of inadequate leadership, it is no wonder that Detroit has been labeled “America’s first Third World city” (Ze’ev Chafets 1990: 177). While Detroit serves as a marker of the Global North’s uncertain future, I argue that theory from the Global South can reveal alternative potentials for surviving post-industrial precarity in America. In response to the plight and blight of Detroit’s margins, citizens have begun to take the future of the city into their own hands. Detroit’s North End neighborhood is home to O.N.E. Mile, a cooperative network of black American grassroots organizations who blend American, diasporic and pan-African culture to establish distinctly Afrikan spaces in the city. This unified Afrikan perspective is sourced from the multiple musical and diasporic histories of the North End; from the early jazz of Jelly Roll Morton and blues of John Lee Hooker to the Afrofuturistic sounds of Parliament Funkadelic and the techno group Underground Resistance. In their performance of “ancestral literacy,” O.N.E. Mile musicians are making sense of present conditions through their past, and thereby compose an alternative, Detroit-based Afrikan modality which I argue extends Paul Gilroy’s conception of the “Black Atlantic” into a re-orientated space.

Detroit’s North End is a musical powerhouse; this neighborhood has fostered generations of black musicians, from blues guitarist John Lee Hooker, Motown legend Aretha Franklin, Parliament-Funkadelic, and techno label Submerge. Today, the North End’s topography is pocked by abandoned homes and demolished businesses, a result of decades of structural racism and post-industrial collapse. Despite the physical and social fractures of displacement, the neighborhood remains a vibrant cultural space, with music at its core.

This presentation is based on ethnographic work with the North End’s Synergistic Mythologies, a musical cohort who perform “ancestral literacy” through free-form musical improvisations. This “Detroit Afrikan” ensemble performs their antiassimilationist music - Pan-African drumming blended with black Detroit-based genres such as techno, funk, and hip-hop - in post-industrial spaces, connecting legacies of black labor and political action in the city with resonant anti-colonial movements from the African continent. I argue that music is a crucial tool for Synergistic Mythologies to generate a multiplicity of black histories in the present moment. These artists reject black invisibility and erasure in an increasingly gentrified city by making their community audible. Through their interplay of multiple sonic histories Synergistic Mythologies position Detroit as a crucial nodal point in the African diaspora; Detroit is both a receiver and transmitter of performative black culture across the Atlantic.

Dr. Dumisani Maraire, a performer and ethnomusicologist, was the first Zimbabwean musical artist to teach in the United States. His talent was supported by American ethnomusicologists Hugh Tracey and Robert Kauffman, who brought Dumisani to the United States in 1968. During his time in Washington, Dumisani introduces hundreds of students to the music, language, and culture of his home; he developed a network of culture by bringing powerful musicians, such as Ephat Mujuru, from Zimbabwe to America, thereby establishing a dialogue between the two nations. Dumisani’s legacy continues today through his students, who have established several Zimbabwean cultural centers and marimba groups throughout the United States, as well as founding the annual festival Zimfest held across the west coast of the United States and Canada, which has featured important Shona artists such as Cosmas Magaya, Patience Munjeri, Garikayi Tirikoti, Chartwell Dutiro, and Musekiwa Chingodza.

In this essay, I take a close look at Dumisami’s performance of the nyunga nyunga mbira, an instrument that was influenced by the Shona mbira dzaVadzimu and the Mozambican sanza. Importantly, the nyunga nyunga reveals Dumisani’s colonial upbringing and disconnection from indigenous Zimbabwean musical cultures. However, by bringing the instrument to the United States, Dumisani was able to recast the nyunga nyunga as a traditional icon of Shona culture. He applied spiritual relevance to this otherwise contemporary popular music, and in turn, created a new network of both American and Zimbabwean musicians who continue to share his teachings today.

Masimba Hwati is a Zimbabwean multimedia artist and scholar whose work explores the intersections of sonic cultures in the Black Atlantic. In 2018, Hwati capped his MFA program at University of Michigan with the performance art piece “Mbende/Jerusarema Tehkno.” The work explores the resonances between Zimbabwean jiti drumming and dancing and the sounds and movements of Detroit’s Jit culture.

In this conversation, Hwati and I discuss his work and the creative and cultural grounding from which this piece emerged. Our discussion focuses on the multiplicities that are formed when the two cultures are put into conversation through a remix of sound, gestures, and theatrics. Importantly, jiti and Jit were created as counter-narratives that allow practitioners to play with jest, aggression, and style in a distinctly insular performance setting. Hwati’s collaborators for the project include Detroit Jit dancers Haleem “Stringz” Rasul, Mike Mason, Gabby McLeod and Detroit DJ George Rahme. This discussion was broadcast during the 2019 virtual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology.

In this lecture, presented at Detroit School of Arts in 2020, students were exposed to the sonic output and influence of Detroit’s Conant Gardens. This includes the hip hop group Slum Village, legendary producer J Dilla, and active techno/house/electro-funk producer Omar S. While students were well aware of the importance of Berry Gordy’s Motown, this lecture gave them insight into the importance of Detroit’s continuing musical legacy. Further, I connect the sounds of Conant Garden’s hip hop producers to the African hip hop scene to lay bare the way J Dilla’s production techniques have reached beyond the neighborhood, city, and country to become the foundation for producers around the globe.