Author: lungiletech

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 in her Call for an Archive of AfroSonics, first published in the Chronic. Now, to counter this absence, she’s teamed up with New York based publishers FenceBooks to launch an Astrosonics imprint.

 

The Astrosonics imprint of FenceBooks will be devoted to the powerful, transformative, and all-too-often invisible or grossly underrepresented in the publishing world, body of work that lives in the interstices between poetry and poetics, music and sound art, and dance and the moving image—we will offer sanctuary for work that most gracefully and articulately subverts the boundaries between these forms. This means we will publish both in print and digital formats as well as occasionally on vinyl, works which transcend the categories of genre using sacred ancient and future technologies often rooted in the spirit of collective improvisation, as well as in the Devotional Avant Gardes to which many black brown and beige AntiqueFurturist artists turn in making their work.

Through our publications and releases we will build the necessary lexicon for this material, fleshing out terms like the Devotional Avant Garde the AntiqueFuture, and Afrosonics and Astrosonics themselves. With a fierce and devoted creative and curatorial spirit we will draw a line between the zany and diffuse iterations of this multi-disciplinary/cross-genre aesthetic, and those which truly lay down a gauntlet and invent new reaches and repositionings of artistic communication from the literary to the aural to the all of it. The monthly podcast we produce lays the foundation for our publications and releases and will preview some of their content and set an overall tone and aura for the imprint.

In addition we will house an archive that chronicles the history of Astrosonics, at a major university as well online (digitally). This will be a living archive which we will expand with each project we produce, each text we publish. In the first two years of operation we will publish seven works covering the full gamut of Astrosonics; and in addition we will provide a Journal of Astrosonics to be released quarterly, and three live events of varying scales per year which we will document on film and in audio. Our journal will be unique in that it will come in the form of “objects,” Astrosonics-related materials that we design and distribute to subscribers. Some examples are: screenprinted shirts and dresses (with the text of poems or images of poets on them), herbal teas and other medicinals in the spirit of Afrosonics, recipe pamphlets, broadsides, engraved copper and silver cuffs, rare one-off recordings or video footage of readings and performances, ephemera, oils and spices, surveys of Afrosonics and Astrsonics in places like Paris, Brasil, and Tokyo, interviews with key artists in the tradition, etc. There will be digital written content to accompany the objects, and to which the objects will loosely or directly refer. Overall we will be developing a new type of space, for which the occupants already exist and are constantly multiplying.

 

A rough sketch of our initial seven projects is as follows:

1) A reissue/remixed version of Amiri Baraka’s Black Spirits: New Voices in Afro-American Poetry lp. This will feature extensive updated liner notes which will provide information on the poets featured in the reading. We will issue 500 copies on vinyl and infinite availability for digital download. One of our first events will be a live reading and concert celebrating this release and in the tradition of this recording.

2) A US release of Kodwo Eshun’s More Brilliant than the Sun including a CD of readings of the text mixed with the music addressed in the text.

3) A Retrospective on the work of filmmaker Bill Gunn

***4) An Anthology of Afrosonics including a CD featuring key recordings in the genre. This work will include poems, essays, speeches, excerpts from plays, pieces of film scripts, descriptions of choreography, interviews with artists and scholars, and musicians’ discographies– all of which will serve to survey both broadly and precisely, what we mean by Afrosonics; what we mean by Astrosonics.

5) A reprint of Langston Hughes’ Good Morning, Revolution including an album of music, recitations, and mixes of the two.

6) A reissue of Albert Dailey’s album Renaissance with a suite of short stories as liner notes.

7) It Never Entered My Mind: A series of short films based on Langston Hughes’ Simple Stories. Visually this suite will present and represent the human body from the perspective of Astro and Afro sonics.

Additional Primary Considerations:

The budget for each project will range from 4-7,000 depending on the scale.

We will hire two full-time employees, the founder and a lead designer

Based on the historical significance of some of our preservation work, we will ultimately aim to acquire our own venue or loft space in the city of New York wherein we can hold our events and house archival materials and generally build an Astrosonics and Afrosonics community by hosting film screenings, concerts and discussions and seminars on the topic as it evolves. A venue is always the missing link between artists and their creative freedom and we need to address this by establishing one no matter how modest, and operating it under a model that gives artists in this tradition room to experiment.

We will aim to build an audio archive of Fence authors in addition to the archive of Astrosonics

**Our funding and resources will come from a combination of grants and private donors to begin with. We will work toward hosting events that generate revenue in order to diversify our funding sources as we progress. We will also develop partnerships with universities and arts organization in the New York area and beyond, as there is a significant market for this material throughout this country and even internationally in places like Paris and Sao Paulo.

Read more here.
 

 

 

In the spirit of National Poetry Month in America, Harmony Holiday‘s AstroandAfrosonics project is inaugurating a by-us-for-us iteration of an audio archive of poems and poetry-related material:

 

We hope to record at least one poem or related-excerpt or piece of writing each day this month, with an emphasis on poems and texts by Black, Brown and Beige writers, artists and thinkers or writers/artists/thinkers in solidarity with aesthetics that are less-than-dominant within traditional archives. One iconic example of the zeitgeist of the texts we mean to record is Langston Hughes’ ‘Our Spring’ a poem from his underknown collection of poems and essays Good Morning Revolution and one that he himself did not read aloud as often as others:

 

Our Spring

Bring us with our hands bound,
Our teeth knocked out,
Our heads broken,
Bring us shouting curses, or crying,
Or silent as tomorrow.
Bring us to the electric chair,
The shooting wall,
or the guillotine.
But you can’t kill
All of us.
You can’t silence,
All of us.
Kill Vanzetti in Boston and
Dmitroff rises
in Germany
We’re like those rivers

 

Another example would be excerpts from Fred Moten’s book In the Break such as this one from the section entitled ‘The Dark Lady and the Sexual Cut’:

This is the ghostwritten anacrusis of an anti-slave narrative, a narrative after slavery, narration of the ante-slave. Carry it and start it, initiate it, an ongoing or too-long-running tale she cuts and cuts off, cutting off “her” and their recitation by a musical abundance. “Lady Sings the Blues” cuts Lady Sings the Blues. Beginning dissonantly, anarchronically, in the interruption of a narrative we already know… two phonographies: the violence she does to her words when singing is duplicated in her writing.

 

Another example still, is this passage from Pessoa’s Factless Autobiography:

Every day things happen in the world that can’t be explained by any law of things we know. Every day they’re mentioned and forgotten. and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, transforming their secret into oblivion. Such is the law by which things that can’t be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches from the shadows.

 

 

The goal is to simply record people with beautiful voices (which is most people) reciting beautiful, rarely-heard-aloud, texts that open our minds, bodies, souls and spirits to new or underserved poetic traditions. We wouldn’t mind getting some members of Wu-Tang on board to add some recognizable voices to the mix while we’re at it, but one step at a time. In addition to making this archive available to the public we will reuse and repurpose the recordings in compilations and dj sets and however else we can, so that they are accessed by more ears; and we will add the recordings to our budding digital archive of rare jazz and spoken and Afrosonic and Astrosonic poetry and poetics recordings which we are outlining here: http://afrosonics.blogspot.com/. If you or anyone you know has such a voice and may be able to make a recording to add to the archive, please don’t hesitate to reply to this email or send a recording to: AstroandAfrosonics@gmail.com . We can also send some ideas for texts to those who request them. For now, we’re looking for minimal, raw recordings— just the grit of the human voice reciting the poems and poetics against some good new fashioned silence. This is an experiment, but we hope to make into a ritual.