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The Caribbean Inside the Electronics

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The Archive Looking Back

Brook Andrew works across photography, installation, moving image, performance and museum interventions, frequently questioning the systems through which historical images and objects are collected and interpreted. His practice is informed by Wiradjuri and Ngunnawal cultural perspectives as well as sustained engagement with archives, colonial histories and the politics of visibility.

What interests me is the idea that an archive is never simply a storage room.

Someone decided what deserved to be collected. Someone wrote the label. Someone chose which photograph represented a person, culture or event. Those decisions can survive long enough that we begin treating them as neutral facts.

Andrew’s work often turns attention back onto those structures.

That changes the position of the viewer. Instead of only asking, “What does this historical image show?”, another question appears: “Who constructed the way I am seeing it?”

Museums traditionally ask objects to explain history. Artists can reverse the relationship and ask the museum itself to explain how it has been producing history all along.

https://www.brookandrew.com/ngadhi/me

#BrookAndrew #AustralianArt #IndigenousArt #Archives

Colombian Art

A Crack the Museum Could Not Erase

Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth appeared in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2007 as a long fracture running through the concrete floor. The Colombian artist connected the work with racism, exclusion, colonial histories and the experience of people regarded as intruders within supposedly open societies.

What fascinates me is what happened after the exhibition.

The crack was filled, but its trace remained visible in the floor.

Most exhibitions are designed to disappear cleanly. Walls are repainted, objects leave and the building prepares itself for the next event. Shibboleth resisted that reset. Removing the artwork created another version of the artwork.

The scar became evidence that something had happened there.

That feels unusually appropriate for a work concerned with histories that institutions and societies may prefer to close over. Repairing a surface does not return it to an untouched state.

Sometimes the most effective monument is not an object added to architecture, but damage the architecture is forced to remember.

https://www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/en/the-collection/artists/doris-salcedo

#DorisSalcedo #Shibboleth #ColombianArt #InstallationArt

guggenheim-bilbao.eus Biografía y obras: Salcedo, Doris | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Doris Salcedo’s biography and works on display at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Audiovisual Art

When Image and Sound Share Structure

Ryoichi Kurokawa’s syn_ is an audiovisual performance built as a diptych with 2.1-channel sound. First created in 2011, it has been performed internationally in spaces ranging from Tokyo’s Studio Coast to festivals and arts centres in Europe and North America. Kurokawa describes his broader practice in terms of constructing audiovisual phenomena from field recordings and digitally generated structures.

What interests me from a VJ perspective is that the image does not appear to be decoration placed behind finished music.

Sound and image seem to belong to the same organisational system: fragmentation, rhythm, interruption, density and sudden precision appear in both.

That changes the role of synchronization. Matching a visual flash to a kick drum is the most obvious way of connecting image and sound, but it is only one possibility. Both media can instead share behaviour.

A visual texture can become dense when the sound becomes structurally dense without literally following every beat.

The strongest audiovisual work may happen when you cannot easily decide which medium is leading the other.

https://www.ryoichikurokawa.com/project/syn_.html

#RyoichiKurokawa #AudiovisualArt #LiveVisuals #ExperimentalFilm

Cascade

Producing an Album on Headphones

Floating Points made much of Cascade away from his normal studio. Sam Shepherd has described working in the Californian desert with a laptop and headphones rather than the larger collection of equipment available at home. The 2024 album nevertheless became an expansive return toward dancefloor-focused electronic music, with long tracks, Buchla-inspired rhythms and detailed electronic structures.

That limitation interests me more than the equipment he did have.

A fully equipped studio offers possibilities, but possibilities can slow decisions. Remove most of the hardware and the problem changes from “what can I use?” to “what can I make this do?”

Electronic musicians often accumulate tools because every synthesizer promises another colour. Yet some of the records that sound most carefully designed emerge from much narrower conditions.

Cascade is a useful reminder that complexity in the finished sound does not require complexity in the working environment.

Sometimes restricting the studio does not reduce creativity. It concentrates it.

https://ninjatune.net/release/floating-points/cascade

#FloatingPoints #Cascade #ElectronicMusic #MusicProduction

Ninja Tune Cascade by Floating Points Sam Shepherd aka Floating Points has announced his new album Cascade will be released on 13 September via Ninja Tune. Along with the announcement Shepherd has shared lead single 'Key103' which comes with visuals continuing his ongoing collaboration with Tokyo based artist Akiko Nakayama.Cascade is a...
Field Recording

Listening Before Making Sound

KMRU’s work repeatedly begins with recording environments. Joseph Kamaru has built compositions from field recordings gathered in Nairobi and many other places, treating apparently minor environmental sounds as material worthy of sustained attention. His practice has expanded into installations, performances and long-form ambient works in which place is not simply captured but reshaped through processing and composition.

I find the order of operations interesting.

Music production usually begins with making a sound: play a synth, strike a drum, choose a sample. Field recording can reverse that relationship. First you listen. The world has already generated the material.

That produces another question: when does documentation become composition?

A recording of traffic, wind or machinery may initially describe a place. Once it is edited, layered, filtered and placed beside another recording, it begins constructing a place that never actually existed.

The microphone therefore becomes more than a device for collecting sound. It can be an instrument for noticing what most of us have trained ourselves to ignore.

https://kmru.info/

#KMRU #FieldRecording #KenyanMusic #SoundArt

Bomba Estereo

The Caribbean Inside the Electronics

Bomba Estéreo describe the Caribbean as the soul of their music: its colours, fruits, sounds and culture. Since forming in Colombia in 2005, the group has mixed electronic production with rhythms and musical references connected to Colombia’s Caribbean coast, eventually carrying that hybrid onto international dancefloors.

What interests me is that the electronic part does not erase geography.

Electronic music is sometimes described as if technology makes sound placeless. The same software, synthesizers and production tools are available in Bogotá, Antwerp, Tokyo or Berlin. Yet what musicians feed into those tools can remain intensely local.

Rhythm is one way that happens. So are vocal phrasing, language and the cultural memory surrounding a sound.

Bomba Estéreo remind me that electronic production does not have to create a neutral global style. A computer can process a local musical idea without removing its origin.

Perhaps technology becomes most interesting when you can still hear where the person using it is standing.

https://www.bombaestereo.com/about

#BombaEstereo #ColombianMusic #ElectronicMusic #CaribbeanMusic

Afrofuturism

History Mixed Like a Sound Collage

Moor Mother’s The Great Bailout approaches Britain’s relationship with colonialism, slavery and commerce through something closer to a sonic essay than a conventional album narrative. Camae Ayewa combines spoken language, electronics, jazz-derived textures, noise and contributions from musicians including Lonnie Holley and harpist Mary Lattimore. The music moves between fragility and abrasion rather than settling into one genre.

That instability feels important.

Historical subjects are often presented to us as completed information: dates, locations, documents, statistics. Sound works differently. A voice can overlap another voice. Noise can interrupt meaning. Something from the past can suddenly feel uncomfortably close.

I like the idea of an album behaving less like a timeline and more like an archive whose boxes have been opened simultaneously.

Music cannot prove historical facts by itself, but it can change the emotional distance at which we encounter them. Sometimes confusion, repetition and collision describe the persistence of history better than a perfectly ordered chronology.

https://moormother.net/

#MoorMother #ExperimentalMusic #SoundCollage #Afrofuturism

Moor Mother Moor Mother | The Great Bailout Moor Mother's 'The Great Bailout' (Deluxe) Out Now On ANTI- Records
Ambient Music

Sampling as a Memory Machine

Susumu Yokota’s Symbol is assembled from fragments of classical recordings by composers including Debussy, Ravel, Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky, alongside material connected with John Cage and Meredith Monk. Yet the 2004 album rarely feels like a demonstration of clever sampling. The fragments are transformed into an atmospheric world where the historical source can become difficult to identify.

What interests me is what happens to time inside a sample. A digital fragment may last only seconds, but it contains an older performance, an older recording technology, another room and another interpretation. Yokota places those pieces beside one another until musical history stops behaving chronologically.

Sampling is sometimes discussed mainly through questions of borrowing. Symbol suggests another possibility: sampling as memory construction.

The original recording survives, but its function changes. A piece of orchestral music can become texture. A voice can become architecture. Something created decades earlier suddenly occupies the same musical present as everything surrounding it.

The sampler does not merely repeat history. It changes the room in which history is heard.

Symbol

#SusumuYokota #Sampling #AmbientMusic #ExperimentalMusic

Desert Blues

Desert Guitar Without Standing Still

Tinariwen’s 2026 album Hoggar continues a musical language rooted in the Tuareg culture of the Sahara, but the group has never behaved as if tradition means refusing outside contact. Their earlier recordings already connected electric guitar, Tamashek poetry and cyclical desert rhythms with encounters involving rock, folk and experimental musicians. Hoggar, released on 13 March 2026, adds collaborations including José González and Sudanese singer Sulafa Elyas.

That ongoing openness is what I find interesting. Tinariwen’s guitars can sound instantly recognisable, yet recognisability has not forced them into repeating one historical version of themselves.

There is an important difference between changing a tradition to make it fashionable and allowing it to continue meeting the world. Tinariwen seem closer to the second possibility.

A musical identity can remain strong without becoming sealed. Perhaps the clearest evidence that a tradition is alive is that it can absorb another musician without disappearing behind them.

https://www.tinariwen.com/

#Tinariwen #TuaregMusic #DesertBlues #Mali

tinariwen.com Tinariwen The official website for Tinariwen. New album 'Amatssou' out now.
Chernobyl

Recording the Reactor Itself

For Chernobyl, Hildur Guðnadóttir did not simply compose music inspired by a nuclear power station. Part of the sound world was built from recordings made inside Lithuania’s decommissioned Ignalina nuclear plant, whose RBMK reactors were similar to those used at Chernobyl. Industrial resonance, machinery and the acoustics of the building became raw musical material alongside voices and instruments. The soundtrack was released in 2019, but its production method still feels unusually direct.

What interests me is the decision to begin with the physical environment rather than imitate it later with synthesizers. A metallic drone generated by an actual industrial structure carries a different kind of information than a preset labelled “dark ambience.” The building already contains irregularities, resonances and mechanical histories that a composer can discover rather than invent.

Field recording is often treated as background texture. Here it becomes closer to orchestration. The place itself is one of the instruments.

https://www.deutschegrammophon.com/en/catalogue/products/chernobyl-soundtrack-gunadottir-7130

#HildurGudnadottir #Chernobyl #SoundDesign #FilmMusic

Deutsche Grammophon CHERNOBYL Soundtrack / Guðnadóttir | Deutsche Grammophon Chernobyl is a five-part miniseries by producer Craig Mazin, which premiered on HBO on May 6 2019. The series deals with the nuclear disaster which occurred in
Bamana Art

When Mud Becomes a Language

Bògòlanfini is often translated simply as “mud cloth,” but the description hides how complex the process and visual language can be. In Mali, narrow strips of cotton are woven and joined before plant dyes, mineral-rich mud and resist techniques gradually create contrasting patterns.

A particularly well-documented cloth made by Gneli Traoré in 1969 shows how those patterns can carry much more than decoration. Individual motifs can refer to objects, historical events, social ideas, proverbs or songs. Used together, they can form visual statements whose meaning depends on knowledge passed between generations.

That changes how I look at repetition in pattern.

From a distance, geometry can appear abstract. Once you understand that a zigzag, circle or cross might carry a specific association, abstraction begins behaving almost like writing.

The surface occupies an interesting territory between image and information.

We often think digital culture invented the idea of encoding meaning into patterns. Textile traditions remind us that humans have been doing something similar for a very long time, using cloth instead of pixels.

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/642873

#Bogolanfini #MalianArt #TextileArt #BamanaArt