echoes of rupture/we remember

     
Our research project  STANDING IN THE CRACKS OF MULTIPLE HISTORIES  also visits the SAVVYZΛΛR airwaves with a growing constellation of stories and struggles pushing against the ongoing legacy of extractivism and colonialism by the United States. For this episode, we are excited to welcome Matana Roberts with her commissioned piece for the project, "echoes of rupture/we remember". It is a visceral excavation of memory, lineage, and resistance weaving sonic fragments and layered textures of abstraction into a dynamic aural tapestry. This offering is a polyphonic journey that travels through the fissures of U.S. history where the voices of the ancestors rise through static, field recordings clash with melodies and echo the reverberations of protest, ritual, and survival. Both haunting and illuminating, we attune to a sonic ritual that mourns, questions, and reclaims.

Matana Roberts is an internationally celebrated composer, performer, band leader, saxophonist, sound experimentalist, and mixed-media practitioner. Working across many contexts and mediums, including improvisation, music composition, visual art, dance, poetry, and theatre, Roberts is perhaps best known for their acclaimed Coin Coin project - a multi-chapter work of 'panoramic sound quilting' mixed media performance work, that aims to expose the mystical roots and intuitive traditions of American creative expression, while maintaining a deep and substantive engagement with narrative, history, community and political expression within sonic structures.