Inside the multimedia archive charting African sonic migration

In 1988, Steely & Clevie got into their Jamaica-based studio and made a beat for their song Fish Market. It’s got a syncopated drum on every other half-beat and a four-on-the-floor percussive loop with a 3+3+2 cross-rhythm. A first-of-its-kind interpolation of the two main musical spaces in Jamaica at the time, dancehall and reggae, it’s well-known as the dembow riddim, after their mate Shabba Ranks recorded over the beat for his unmistakable record, Dem Bow, in 1990. 

In the Caribbean, there’s a rich history of inverting, chopping and mixing beats. A commercial success in the international reggae-dancehall scene, dembow became the foundation of many songs from the region. Making its way to Puerto Rico via a derivative work of dembow in Dennis the Menace’s Pounder Dub Mix II, the underground scene in San Juan used the rhythm to catalyse a whole new genre: reggaeton. 

Fast-forward 30 years, whether you recognise it or not, the riddim is the root of a multi-billion dollar industry, propelling the career of a slew of artists, not least reggaeton’s biggest star Bad-Bunny, who’s held the spot of most listened to artist on Spotify for a consecutive three years. He’s now among 160 defendants named in a lawsuit filed in 2021 by the late Steely & Clevie’s estate. He’s in good company, joined by Justin Bieber, Pitbull, J Balvin, Drake, Rosalia and four recording industry behemoths, including Universal, Sony and their streaming accomplice, Spotify. All of whom have been accused of copyright infringement. To everyone’s surprise, the case was accepted this May. 

On its surface, most of us just see the misfortunate quandary of intellectual property and copyright law in music. But for intellectual historian Hannah Elsisi, the case evoked 500 years of disproportionately extracting and monopolising the labour and culture of people of colour. “Beat or rhythm has been historically uncopyrightable. The history of intellectual copyright is rooted in white colonial, white supremacist, and genocidal notions of what is considered foundational, held out to the commons, and what can be enclosed, considered property,” she explains.  

Copyright law doesn’t protect works that aren’t fixed in some tangible form – according to British jurisprudence, which American copyright takes after, it’s the written word. However, Afro-descendent music and, more broadly, culture and history have almost always been reproduced orally, sonically, and aurally. Much of rhythm was created by a non-tethered exchange of diasporic community making; its origins cannot be understood with linear tracing of music or bodies, let alone reduced to writing. It’s like trying to trap rain with a basket or the sea with a net. 

A professor with a PhD from Oxford specialising in global histories of gendered, carceral and capitalist regimes of power and subjectivity, the case jolted Elsisi. She began thinking about how we can plausibly ‘own’ rhythms, the roots of the global musical canon today and the relationship of sound to human rights. From here, she started Chromesthesia, an ambitious multi-media archive project spanning a film, an album (the first of many) released this November alongside a 13-hour durational performance at Le Guess Who? that tracks the sub-text of how racialised labour groups forged an imagined sense of local and global community through sound. 

Doing so, she charts sonic movements along what she calls the Global Mangrove Archipelago: “What emerged to me is the mangrove swamps from which and to which Black people had been kidnapped across the last 500 years. Along the eastern coast of Africa, along the western coast and southeastern coast of the Indian Ocean, from the entirety of the Gold Coast, and then over to New Orleans, Florida, the Caribbean, of course, and both the Pacific coast and the Atlantic coast of Latin America,” she explains. 

A cacophony enunciating histories untold, the project investigates the sonic and sensory rites of African migration patterns from 1500 to the present, unearthing a millennium of sound that forms the basis of our most popular revenue-driving electronic music today, or in Elsisi’s words, the “hit parade”. From hip-hop and grime to shatta, reggaeton, afro beats, mahraganat, baile funk, and Arabic trap-bow, these sounds are all Afro-descendent and all built on the rhythms and beats of people of colour and their errantry. Both forced and voluntary. Forged through realities of displacement, war, slavery and climate change. Experiences that, like rhythm, cannot be contained.

Chromesthesia unfurls in a congregation of sounds across the world over the course of nine tracks. Conceived during a number of residencies over the past two years, it brings together musicians and producers from all over the world, including Kelman Duran,  Gaika, 3Phaz and Sho Madjozi. All of them were chosen as “Comrades, good people whose music was steeped in history, people that paid credit where credit’s due, people who were interested in sampling in general and in what came before them, and whose music also wasn’t foreclosed to the possibility of things, of alternative futures and at the same time had a clear kind of heritage or lineage.” While there may be research on each distinct genre, no project has really explored their interconnectedness; not least with electronic sounds that will echo in raves and clubs or heady, dimly lit afterparties.

Tracking these soundscapes exposes the unevenness of the global political economy of music. A system intentionally built to allow two men in Jamaica to make a beat that forms the basis of a billion-dollar industry without themselves or their communities ever accruing a penny. One that also permits streaming platforms to operate on pro-rata systems that pay artists a measly $0.0003 to $0.005 per stream. And, Elsisi points out, if the dembow case swings in favour of recording giants, a system that’ll allow them to churn out beats ad infinitum using AI without compensating artists. 

The entrapments of the written word in copyright are microcosms of the more extensive damage history has wrought on those who know the swift violence of their erasure through its institutional narratives. “I’m a historian of violence mostly, and there’s a strong argument in the academic and activist literature that I love that says that writing the history of the Black identity outside of untold violence is impossible,” she explains. “But suppose you sit with sound, with music. In that case, there are other ways to historicism, even events as violent as the Middle Passage.” Indeed, at Le Guess Who?, Lamin Fofana, whose haunting synth lines close the record, performed an hour of geological and meteorological momentousness to evoke that event. 

With Chromesthesia, Hannah Elsisi exposes racist overtures in our history and our systems of power by using music as a medium to free us from their enclosures. She does not present history as static. Instead, she gives it grace by reimagining the possibilities of what might and could’ve happened. In the gaps, there is room for other things, like joy and pleasure, that the written word often sterilises.  

The project submerges us where salt and freshwater meet along the coasts of mangrove forests, to which we, especially Bad Bunny, Rosalia, and Justin Bieber, owe it all. In these sounds, we’re reminded of the formlessness that music embodies. There is never just one source but an endless reproduction of them. “The mangrove,” she says, “is a rhizome; it grows where salt and fresh water meet. It has no root or tip. It has no beginning or end; it’s an entirely different model for linguistics, history and concepts of identity that take difference as its starting point.” Chromesthesia clearly lays out how sound today is created through an endless exchange of difference that is irreconcilable but lovingly so; otherwise, how would these sounds we love so much exist in the first place? They wouldn’t.  

Interestingly, mangroves have a connotation of fugitive refusal and flight in Black radical thought, stemming back to the maroons who, around the 16th century, fled slavery and made independent communities, many of them in mangrove forests. Fugitivity has been referenced by scholars like Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman and Tina Campt, as an ulterior way of being a person of colour in the enclosures of oppression, by remaining outside of the logic of state power and colonial ways of thinking and being – existentially or materially. Or, as Hartmann says in her book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, of being wayward: “To inhabit the world in ways inimical to those deemed proper and respectable, to be deeply aware of the gulf between where you stayed and how you might live. Waywardness: the avid longing for a world not ruled by master, man or the police. The errant path taken by the leaderless swarm in search of a place better than here.”  

Translating to ‘the colour of sound’, the project probes a series of questions as it thumps and wheezes in a sonic phantasmagoria. What is the fine line between cultural appropriation and exchange? How is sound shot through with power? How is history refracted through sound? When we free history from the enclosure of certain forms like writing that waxes off the tongue of power, who is heard and finally given a foothold? 

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Navigating the institutional hellscapes of upper-crust academia while donning a red upside-down triangle tattoo planted firmly on her left wrist, taunting her Cambridge and NYU (primarily white) colleagues, Elsisi practises fugitivity too. She embraces her waywardness. As a woman and an Egyptian of Afro-descent, she’s aware that she operates in spaces long oriented towards her discomfort and repression. Chromesthesia is a natural extension of these postures of defiance.

It is a reckoning with sounds that excavate the annexed pasts of Black identities yet invert with the electronic pulsations of the present and future.  Chromesthesia is not an easy listening experience. There’s both a haunting and catharsis. Each song is part of a whole bursting outwards in a primordial scream, which Édouard Glissant in Poetics of Relations describes as “…the cry of the Plantation, transfigured into the speech of the world. This is the only sort of universality there is: when, from a specific enclosure, the deepest voice cries out.”

Chromesthesia responds by inverting power, giving it back – shoving power in power’s face by asserting the right to sound. It shows how you can chart painful histories of war, displacement, enslavement and migration. Yet, more importantly, the unabashed enforcement of sonic rights: the right to sing, dance, and play. In the very existence of these sounds today, screeching from radios, speakers, and TikTok audio, are liberatory echoes, which are not ephemeral but permanent, lasting all attempts of erasure. Resistance is prior to power.