Music In Times Of Strife - A Note To Musicians

Rather than viewing collapse as mere destruction,  embrace it as a generative force where brokenness is understood as a condition to embody and negotiate, rejecting the logic of repair.

This concept extends to the idea of dismantling the dominant systems that shapes our understanding of our existence, those oppressive structures that appear social, political, and environmental—developed out of Western thought.

This method of “re-worlding” therefore suggests an undoing of the existing world order of notes and melodies of melancholy, creating aural space for new possibilities that emerge from the collapse of these orchestrated systems.

From this state of improvised brokenness found in the chaotic aftermath will emerge a kinship found in wastelands of maternal wails. 

And through these new connections — both human and non-human as in robot sibilances that haunt dreams — in light and shadow, in forests and in depths of oceans. - our metaphors will embrace their demons.

Write notes in the translation of errors emotional exchanges between cultures, souls and wrapped in their losses and recurring methods of deprivation.

Rhythmatize freedom that arises from the disarticulation of simple images of poverty in a climate of impunity and make beauty seem like transition and upheaval waltzing hand in hand. 

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Your melodies aught be not orchestrated by state and societal forces, but rather by reimagines of a new poetics of resistance and littered with narratives of mobility, impermanence and acts of resilience in adversities.

But can music be composed that juxtaposes multiple temporalities pertaining to Africa’s diverse history, mythology, and ecosystems related to biological evolution and eminent extinction?

As musics of each land are independent corpuses of knowledge about the envisioned future, from pasts that unfold horrible memories they linger as scores narrated through blistered lips.

Can Africa’s songs be generated through sequences of informal instigations and responses to destruction,  traumatised jubilations that become a metaphor for inherited gestures and wounds?

Are there sonic remnants and souvenirs after any destruction such as sounds of fighter jets and explosions of shells in homesteads that can be decoded and recoded into a collage of real and fantasized history?

Believing that music is not meant to atone or repent the broken and damaged, it still has the capacity to interrogate, trigger and root memories. So, can musicality induced in the cacophonies of horror become a soothing balm to scars in minds and souls of the dispossessed?

And can music made against a background of incomprehensible ruin and killing in warzones like Gaza and elsewhere be considered therapeutic of lived traumas?

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What song can translate our leaders’ tyrannous genes, those who could watch hundred of young men perish trapped in cramping mineshaft, wantonly disregarding life for favour of profiteers?

Whispering to souls frightened by jubilation, could this music be mournful and painterly, rousing wounds to song and bleeding over again, in the midst of relief and momentary rescue?

In light of imposed silences that convey concealed voices of poets incarcerated by their demons, may your chorus be filled with uncomfortable hymns that triumph over bellicose slander of paddlers of power.