Black Electronic Music as a Means of Eco-Ancestral Repair: Aural Traces of More-than-human Relationalities

Abstract:

Many see electronic music genres as disconnected from the natural environment due to the synthetic sounds associated with higher tech music production. However, since the 1970’s, the advent of synthesizers, drum machines, and electronic production methods has led to many unexpected explorations of eco-ancestral repair within Black communities. In re-establishing reciprocal relationships with land through inherited spiritual practices, electronic music holds the power to facilitate Black ancestral repair by evoking aural traces of more-than-human relationalities — embodied means of relating to elements of the wider biosphere beyond the oppositional binary of human/non-human. The reparative nature of these genres can be mapped from collective means of survival on the plantation subsistence plot, through which contemporary Afro-diasporic communities have inherited a spirit of commonality and a sacred conception of the earth. In retracing the conditions of invisibility necessary to continue sacred practices without mastery and control, the subcultures of Black electronic music emerged from underground portals through which rituals such as the ring shout enabled spiritual possession by deities personifying elements of the natural world, eventually laying the foundation for secularized forms of Black vernacular dance styles to come. With DJs inheriting the call-and-response techniques of plantation conjurers, contemporary Black electronic music subcultures reestablish the personhood of its participants through the continuation of folk traditions rooted in reciprocal relationships with land, rejecting colonial categorizations that deem Black bodies as less-than-human to facilitate more-than-human interconnectivities within the wider biosphere. This reconstitution of relationships to the natural environment therefore allows for the Afrofabulation of self-determined futures, calling for new forms of vibrational transmutations to generate ancestral repair.

Bio:

Simone Delaney (they/them) is a multidisciplinary designer in MIT’s Master in City Planning program interested in intersections of race/space/ecology. With a background in architecture and landscape architecture, they have been an active organizer with Design as Protest since 2020 and have supported resilience-centered projects in San Francisco, New York, Louisiana, Florida, and Jakarta. As a descendant of self-emancipated fugitives that migrated north to so-called Canada, their research interests include fugitive landscapes, Maroon legacies, Black + Indigenous interrelationality, and climate disaster collectivism. Outside of design, they are committed to centering ancestral land-based practices through Black rootwork.