Articles
Your Own Hand Sold You
Poet, choregrapher and AfroSonics arkivist, Harmony Holiday produced this audio mix as part of Chimurenga’s ongoing research project and multimedia installations on the legacies of FESTAC ’77, the 2nd World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, held in Lagos during 1977.
Nakhane takes em to Church
Taking his first pilgrimage to the Grahamstown carnival, our PASS Chi-laaitie Joshua Adams reports on South Africa’s much hyped prince of pop. The cold, dimly lit venue had a pious calm to it. Blue and orange back-lights illuminate the set of drums, a keyboard, a couple guitars, and laptop, as the performer Nakhane Touré prepared to rock the crowd. It made sense that everyone was sitting, listening attentively as if this show was mass and the stage was the altar. Touré is playing at St. Aidan’s …
Somewhere between a Scream and a Lullaby
In a city where the boundaries between life and death are laid bare, artists are birthing new spaces for dreaming ‘other ways of breathing’. Stacy Hardy reports from Kinshasa. Art is the strength to make reality say what it would not have been able to say by itself or, at least, what it might too easily have left unsaid,” wrote the Congolese novelist and playwright Sony Labou Tansi in 1985. Writing out of the turmoil of post independence, Sony’s texts posed a …
The Anti-Art of Kongofuturism
In the multidisciplinary lifework of Bebson Elemba aka Bebson de la Rue, Eléonore Hellio* discovers the mind and matter that inspire ‘ephemeral architectures’, radical folklore and emancipation from the post-colonial present. Bebson de la Rue is one of central Africa’s most unique sound and visual artists. A musician and a singer, a rapper, performer and bricoleur extraordinaire, he grew up in the city of Mbandaka, on the banks of the Congo River. Located astride the Equator in a region of …
Category: Articles, Pass Blog
Tags: Bebson de La Rue, Bebson Elemba, Eléonore Hellio, Pan-African Space Station, PASS
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Call For An Archive Of Afrosonics
The collective improvisations of black America – and their profound impact on poetry and sound – are near impossible to find in the annals of US academe. In fact, their absence is as stark as the control of archiving is white, writes Harmony Holiday. Since the 1950s, jazz music and the literary imagination have been inextricably linked, producing transcendent recordings and written work and many hybrids of the two – a new sonics, an antique Futurism – from Langston Hughes …
Reading Fred Ho: A Jazz Suite in the Key of Red
Gwen Ansell and Salim Washington celebrate the revolutionary life, language and hard-ass leadership of an unconventional saxophonist, composer and generous collaborator. Reading The Text Gwen Ansell Prelude: Home is where the violence is ‘Everything I create starts with the music… [and music]… like any conscious human activity, can be a force to change humanity, society and the world.’ Baritone saxophonist, composer, martial artist and revolutionary polymath Fred Ho (Fred Wei-han Houn) was born in Palo Alto, California in 1957 and …
Category: Articles, Pass Blog
Tags: Fred Ho, Gwen Ansell, Pan-African Space Station, PASS, Salim Washington
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Whycome Kamerun be Bass Central?
Lionel Manga explores the place of music in the social and cultural space of ‘this here country’ – a world of ambient, chronic poverty and the land of Manu Dibango. Night has taken over from day where the Wouri river makes its way out to sea. Thick miasma travels the streets, stinking in the heat. The city’s going beery-eyed: joy and bitters, if you can believe it. It’s back to normal – sort of – but February lingers on the …
Gospel Christian Porn Rap
Fucking with the puritanical social mores that pervade the world’s most religious country is the clear and conscious intent of Ghana’s popular and controversial hip-hop duo, the clever FOKN Bois, writes Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah. M3nsa and Wanlov the Kubolor are the FOKN Bois: controversial, unapologetic and boldly venturing into territories that other Ghanaian musicians stay well clear of. The duo met as college students in 1997, and Wanlov would “lie to M3nsa’s teachers that M3nsa was needed at the school administration block by staff, and we would run off to …
Category: Articles, Pass Blog
Tags: FOKN Bois, Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah, Pan-African Space Station, PASS
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Stalking Thandiswa
by Clarissa Cummings I’m a sucker for intense relationships with people who have no fucking idea I even exist. Since the advent of online social holes like Twitter and Facebook, my phantom connections and passive-emotional steez have skyrocketed. And I’m not complaining. I’ve been enthralled in some of the most fulfilling 15 minutes of non-committal, pseudo relationships. All types of relationships. I’ve become a serial cyber best friend, lover, intellectual companion and enemy; all with strangers I meet scrolling through …
JitsVinger: practicing, not preaching
By Lindokuhle Nkosi Jitsvinger is concerned with matters of identity. Language. Land. Becoming. Being. He delves deep into the “who are you” and “why”. Through his lyrical, rhythmic fast-paces rhymes, he aims to do more that entertain. He enlightens. In stark comparison to the flashy, bling-culture of the hip hop of late, he wears his humility like a cloak. “People always wonder about how I made it. How I’m making a living of my art but they don’t know what …