Talk
Library-in-Residence

Library Transmission: Contemplative Dialogue 4

Nkisi and The Otolith Collective

Date and Time:: Wednesday 24 June, 6–8pm
Location:: Minassa

When we listen to musicians, composers, and producers speak about the music that has informed their thinking, past and present, we hear insights into their sonic ways of knowing the world.

More than aesthetic reference points, these insights reveal listening as a method, as tonal coordinates, as a situated, embodied, critically informed genesis of thought. What we hear are genealogies of ideas in sound, musical itineraries that shape the ways in which artists navigate history, politics, memory and relation.

The Contemplative Dialogues series engages with these genealogies as sites of inquiry. It attends to the ways in which acoustic epistemologies attune contemporary practice. It treats listening as analytic, speculative, and world-making.

Through a selection of possession music, ritual sound practices, diasporic rhythms, noise, and experimental electronics, brought together by electronic musician and artist-composer Nkisi, Contemplative Dialogue 4 reflects on the unpredictable ways rhythms travel through migration, rupture, ecstatic states, and machines.

Moving through a fractal rather than linear lineage of sound, this session brings together tracks that have shaped ways of listening and thinking about music while exploring ideas of confiscated rhythms: sonic forms historically demonised, criminalised, or treated with anxiety by colonial and oppressive systems. It asks: what happens when we stop understanding sound as an object made by humans and instead understand humans as temporary vessels through which sound travels?

Doors open at 5.30pm; event starts at 6pm and ends at 8pm.

Image credit: Cokwe performers wearing the female mwana (m)phwo masks during a dance exhibition visit (a recent development) to a Pende village in “territoire” Feshi (1953). Photo: Daniel P. Biebuyck.

The Otolith Collective are supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

Nkisi is an electronic musician and artist-composer whose work spans live performance, sonic research, and energetic experimentation. With roots in the Congolese diaspora and a deep commitment to African cosmologies, her music combines rhythmic-noise elements with ancient rhythmic structures, ambient-industrial strategies, and metaphysical inquiry. She is the co-founder of the now-legendary NON Worldwide. She leads research through her project The Anomaly Index, which explores sonic phenomena, myth-science, rhythm, and vibration as counter-epistemologies. Nkisi investigates how sound acts as a carrier of ancestral memory, psychic disturbance, and hidden knowledge. Her recent work explores paracoustics and sonic phenomena that resist categorisation, such as haunted frequencies, anomalous recordings, and the limits of human perception.

The Otolith Collective is a long-standing artist led organisation supporting intergenerational and intragenerational art practices, research-led projects, writing and process-based forms of development. They create environments that nourish discourse and discussion, co-commission artists, and curate exhibitions and programmes with a wide range of collaborators, organisations and institutions here and elsewhere. Theirs is an international project based on transnational and translocal vision who are committed to maintaining and animating an experimental and worldmaking approach. Performing across disciplines such as visual art, performance, new music, film and video, new technology and critical writing, we draw a diverse range of audiences. The OC has curated seminal exhibitions and platforms on the work of figures such as Black Audio Film Collective, Mark Fisher, Harun Farocki, Bahar Noorizadeh, The Chimurenga Library, Chris Marker, to name but a few.