This episode features Rully Shabara, an experimental vocalist based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Emma Lo talks with him about Xhabarabot Voice Machines, an ongoing project in which Shabara engineers interactive instruments from his own vocal samples. They discuss issues of consent in sampling, appropriation and self-exploitation, and open source technologies.

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Rully Shabara born in Palu, Indonesia, is interested in exploring human voice as a medium of creation, and language as a subject to experiment with. Shabara has initiated numerous concept-based projects around voice, for instance navigating vocal range, textures, and spirituality in his project Senyawa (with Wukir Suriyadi), or developing a conceptual language-driven band project Zoo. He has delivered workshops around the globe, which focus on using the human voice as a rich resource to explore primal expression and improvisations.

Shabara has collaborated with many notable international musicians and artists such as Keiji Haino, Stephen O`Malley, Otomo Yoshihide, Rabih Beaini, Damo Suzuki, Bob Ostertag, Yoshida Tatsuya, Trevor Dunn, Arrington DeDionyso, Justin Vernon, Jon Sass, DJ Sniff, Daisuke Fuwa, Greg Fox, and many more.

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This episodes features Anjeline de Dios, a philipino cultural geographer and vocal artist. Emma Lo will talk with her about voices, disobedience, well-being, and sonic conceptions of space. They will engage with how voices are shaped and how to connect with one’s own voice.

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Anjeline de Dios is a cultural geographer and vocal performer creating and studying emergent spaces of sound, healing, and change. She previously worked in academia as a university professor of cultural studies, and in systems-led innovation as a strategic researcher. Currently, she is an independent researcher, performing artist, meditation and systems-change facilitator, and consulting divination practitioner. The projects she sustains with collaborators in arts and wellness communities are fed by her purpose of creating curious, welcoming musical spaces. Her contemplative practice aims at helping people to listen better to the life within and beyond themselves.

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The new season of Sonic Interventions engages with Asian (diasporic) perspectives and opens with a conversation of Prof. Dr. Doris Kolesch, Dr. Layla Zami, and Emma Lo with artist-scholar Dr. meLê yamomo. In this first episode, they discuss sonic relationalities and archival practices. Learn more about his work, such as 'Echoing Europe’, the Decolonial Frequencies Festival, and DeCoSEAS.

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meLê yamomo is an Assistant Professor of New Dramaturgies, Media Cultures, Artistic Research, and Decoloniality and author of Sounding Modernities: Theatre and Music in Manila and the Asia Pacific, 1869-1946 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). He is the co-project leader and principal investigator of the European Joint Programming Initiative Cultural Heritage (JPICH) project Decolonizing Southeast Asian Archives (DeCoSEAS), and laureate of the »Veni Innovation Grant« (2017-2022) funded by the Dutch Research Organization (NWO) for the project »Sonic Entanglements: Listening to Modernities in Southeast Asian Sound Recordings« (2017-2022). meLê is the winner of the Open Ear Award, the most prestigious composer’s prize in the Netherlands, and one of the 2020 KNAW Early Career Awardee by the Netherlands Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also currently a member of the Amsterdam Young Academy. meLê is also resident artist at Theater Ballhaus Naunynstrasse where his creations Echoing Europe, sonus, and Forces of Overtones are on repertoire. meLê also curates the Decolonial Frequences Festival and hosts the Sonic Entanglements podcast. In his works as artist-scholar, meLê engages the topics of sonic migrations, queer aesthetics, and post/de-colonial acoustemologies.

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This episode discusses Nick Cave's exhibition Forothermore and features a conversation with scholar-artist Dr. Meida Teresa McNeal and curator-artist Danny Dunson. A timely meditation on listening, Black bodies, house culture and visual arts, enriched with sound excerpts from Dr. Zami's research field trip to Chicago.

In Conversation With

Meida Teresa McNeal is Artistic and Managing Director of Honey Pot Performance. She received her PhD in Performance Studies (Northwestern) and her MFA in Choreography & Dance History (Ohio State). Awards include Field Foundation’s Leaders for a New Chicago, 3Arts Award in Dance, Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist, and the Links’ Hall Co-Missions Fellowship. An Independent Artist and Scholar at the intersection of performance studies, dance, and critical ethnography, Meida also teaches at University of Chicago and Columbia College Chicago. Meida also works with the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events' Executive Administration team as the Senior Manager of Arts & Community Impact Investments building and implementing artist recovery programs and creative placemaking grantmaking initiatives. Prior to this role, Meida worked with the Chicago Park District as Arts & Culture Manager supporting community arts partnerships, youth arts, cultural stewardship, and civic engagement initiatives.

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Danny Dunson is an art historian, critic, curator, and writer. He is a Director of Curatorial Services at DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago. Dunson graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago with a degree in Art History and received both a Fulbright Grant and Gilman Scholarship. Exhibition projects include "The Color is: Nick Cave and Jack Cave" at the DuSable Museum Roundhouse, “In Memoriam, Portraits of the Middle Passage, In Situ,” at the Cape Coast Castle Museum in Ghana, and “Collective Reflections: African and Diasporic Expressions of the New Vanguard” in Gallery 1957 in Accra, Ghana. He founded the Legacy Brothers and The Lab, an artist development consultancy designed to prepare emerging artists of disadvantaged communities to enter the art world by providing grants for studio spaces, supplies, and living expenses.

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Nick Cave

DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center

Lori Branch

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DJ Set by Lori Branch at “The Power of the Party” Event, DuSable Museum

Improvisation by JayVe Montgomery + Mankwe Ndosi at Freedom From and Freedom To, August 27, 2022

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In this episode in German language, musician Natalia Kiës and photographer Elias Wessel discuss the project “It’s Complicated - Ist möglicherweise Kunst". The conversation facilitated by Dr. Layla Zami addresses information overflow, photography as painting, and the possibility for sound art to intervene into social media algorithms.

In Conversation With

Natalia Kiës has been always communicative, her main language is music: While her contemporaries mauled their flutes, melodica and glockenspiel to create some sound, five-year-old Natalia sat in front of the piano at home to practice classical music with childish enthusiasm. This idyll was cut off after the collapse of the Iron Curtain, as her family moved from Upper Silesia to Germany and Natalia was forced to leave her beloved piano behind. At first she was forced to take a break from her passion for music, but the urge to dedicate her life to music only grew.

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Elias Wessel was born in Bonn, Germany and is based in New York City since 2008. In an age of fast-changing technologies, offering numerous ways of generating images, he challenges the conventional definition of painting: Wessel creates his “paintings” without resorting to traditional painting techniques and eschews classical genres. The artist’s abstract works—which in many ways show connections to painterly practices—are in fact made up of photographs and digital material. Over the past several years, his practice has been increasingly focused on investigating the effects of digitization and the digital tools themselves. Above all, the quality of Elias Wessel’s working method lies in the way he links fundamental discourses in the history of photography with latest technologies and current sociopolitical issues.

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Current Exhibition in Berlin

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Latest Books

“Textfetzen. It’s Complicated: Texte aus einem a/sozialen Netzwerk 2019–2021. Ist möglicherweise Kunst.”

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The Black Square (Malevich)

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This episode presents BRICKS (A 20-YEAR MUSIC TOUR OF REPARATIONS), and features playwright Charlene Jean, performer Mercy Kelly, and host Dr. Layla Zami. A conversation about decolonial spirituality, matriarchs, gentrification, Black time, and queer performance strategies, enriched with lively audio samples from the performance.

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Charlene Jean is an experimental theatrical artist, performer, playwright, and producer. She is a playwright of BRICKS (A 20-YEAR MUSIC TOUR OF REPARATIONS. BRICKS is an always-changing script-template detailing the history-repeating shared injustice of "buried" towns, considers the spiritual / land-memory implication of gentrification, and reimagines the biblical story of Jericho as a communal work-strike to alleviate the shared suffering particularly of our Black ancestors and our Unhoused.

With this production, she is an awardee of the MAP Grant Fund in 2022/2023, a 2023/2024 Creative Capital WILD FUTURES finalist, 2023 Jonathan Larson Grant finalist, and a semi-finalist of 2022-2024 National Black Theatre Playwriting. Her works, which also include KING AFUA and SHIT IN THE BLOOD: A BIOMYTHOGRAPHY OF RECIPES, have been presented at Weeksville Heritage Center, Harlem Film House, Mother New York, International Society of Curational Programming, and JACK Arts Radical Acts Festival. Next, Charlene will act as dramaturg for UGBA (Ungrateful Black Artist)’s show, Dark Skin Support Group, through the Public Theatre’s Emerging Writer’s Group. She will also enjoy a Musical Theatre lab at Manhattan School of Music, a Movement Research lab at Judson Memorial Church, a New Works series at the Brick Theatre, and a Hi-Arts CRITICAL BREAKS Residency, culminating in a live cast album recording of BRICKS, in which she will also perform.

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Mercy Kelly is a Brooklyn-based Black trans visual artist, model, performer, and advocate who isn’t here to be your teachable moment. In BRICKS, Mercy Kelly plays Cassandra, the Matriarch.Mercy’s work focuses on the beauty of fat, femme body performance as liberation. Mercy is passionate about expanding narratives and understandings of what it means to be trans, moving towards re-idealizing the notion of what it means to have a body. Mercy is interested in the ways we map desire, paying particular attention to how hue, color, size, and shape form our deepest longings.

40 acres and a mule

J’ouvert

“How have we collectively chosen capitalism over community” is a question presented by Dayna Lynn Nuckolls/@PeoplesOracle, sidereal astrologer and mentor/Big Sis.

The “urgency…” quote is indeed by Toni Morrison.

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Recorded on the historical site of the Weeksville Heritage Center, this episode welcomes Najee_ (interdisciplinary artist and yogi) and Erica Harper (VP of Learning and Engagement at WHC). The conversation with Dr. Layla Zami addresses restful practices and restorative sounds, African-American liberation history and the meaning of community. An episode full of emotions and information!

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Najee (1987.Charleston South Carolina, USA) is a Multidisciplinary Artist ,Certified Yoga Instructor and Sound Practitioner based in Brooklyn New York, whose insights are rooted in Ashtanga, Rocket, and Iyengar philosophy. Najee_ is inspired to help others thrive in life by nurturing body, mind, and soul with yoga, hoping that you step off the mat feeling invigorated, nourished, and balanced. Najee_ specializes in experimental improvisation in soundscapes and arrangements that imbue the power of sound to facilitate transformative healing experiences . Often utilizing various percussion techniques and a range of vibratory instruments to free the mind and body from stress and create moments of inner peace and balance. Asé.

Erica Harper is Vice President of Learning & Engagement at the Weeksville Heritage Center. WHC is a historic site and cultural center in Central Brooklyn that uses education, arts and a social justice lens to preserve, document and inspire engagement with the history of Weeksville, one of the largest free Black communities in pre-Civil War America, and the Historic Hunterfly Road Houses. The Center celebrates and centers Black culture, community and creativity; and sparks dialogue and collaborations between local residents, artists, academics and activists that advance us towards a more just and equitable world. Programs include exhibitions, performances and other offerings such as Najee's weekly Rest & Restore session with yoga and sound.

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Dr. Layla Zami is in conversation with fellow artists-scholars Mendi and Keith Obadike, a married Igbo Nigerian American couple who create music, writing, and art. In this first episode, they discuss alternate ways of listening that allow us to perceive something beyond the surface. Learn more about their work, such as 'Frequency' and 'Timbre', which were inspired by a lively African-American literary legacy.

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Mendi + Keith Obadike make music, art and literature. Their early works include The Sour Thunder, an Internet opera (Bridge Records), Crosstalk: American Speech Music (Bridge Records), Black.Net.Art Actions, a suite of new media (internet art) works (published in re:skin on M.I.T Press), Big House / Disclosure, a 200-hour public sound installation (Northwestern University), Phonotype, a book & CD of media artworks, and a poetry collection, Armor and Flesh (Lotus Press). They have contributed sounds/music to projects by wide range of artists including loops for neo-soul singer D'Angelo's first album and a score for playwright Anna Deavere Smith at the Lincoln Center Institute. They were invited to develop their first "opera-masquerade" by writer Toni Morrison at her Princeton Atelier. Their recent projects include a series of large-scale sound art works: American Cypher at Bucknell University and The Studio Museum in Harlem, Blues Speaker (for James Baldwin) at The New School in New York, Free/Phase at the Chicago Cultural Center, Sonic Migration at Scribe Video Center and Tindley Temple in Philadelphia, and Fit (the Battle Of Jericho) at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Their music has been featured on New York and Chicago public radio, as well as on Juniradio (104.5) in Berlin. Keith received a BA in Art from North Carolina Central University and an MFA in Sound Design from Yale University. He is a professor in the Department of Art at Cornell University. Mendi received a BA in English from Spelman College and a Ph.D. in Literature from Duke University. She was a postdoctoral fellowsh at Princeton University, and is currently an associate professor in the Department of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute.

This research network combines arts-related disciplines such as performance studies with philosophy, history, sociology, and cultural anthropology. The Collaborative Research Center is based at the Freie Universität Berlin and works in cooperation with Humboldt University, the Berlin University of the Arts, the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), and Leuphana University in Lüneburg.

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