Noise Source (upcoming)

This new collaborative work is an improvisational response and meditation on Article 36 of The Negro Act of 1740, which prohibited enslaved people from keeping drums and other instruments that “may call together or give sign or notice to one another of their wicked designs and purposes”. Combing live synthesized noise sampling by Concept Rxch and digitized approaches to tap dance by Charlie Maybee (Cybynyx), this work reflects on the legacy of this law and its effect on early American performance styles derived, augmented, and created by enslaved people. From the resilient fragments of their fractured identities and displaced cultures comes a form of radical experimentation with percussive sounds that puts a postmodern and future-oriented twist on their unique technique of cultural memory in the absence of their ancestral instruments.