- An ambient expert shows off his techno side in this all-originals mix.
- As a producer, Lamin Fofana makes ambient music that makes you think. His painterly compositions may be beatless, but they're full of movement, expanding and contracting from modulations and shifting frequencies to create a sense of infinite vastness. This immensity of sound creates a cerebral mood, allowing the Sierra Leone-born talent to explore sociocultural issues close to his heart, like geographies of the African diaspora and what he calls Western rationality in music.
He translates this heavy subject matter into textural sound using narrative structure, field recordings and archival material. The final product could be an album or an audio-based installation. Rooted in themes of identity and belonging, his exhibitions seek to disorient the senses and have been shown around Europe, including the Biennale in Venice.
On his RA Podcast, the New York-based artist presents an all-original mix of loopy techno that mirrors the dynamism of his ambient productions. Laced with acid and pulsing synths, these cuts are faster paced and geared for dance floors, but they share the atmospheric touch of his earlier work. Based on the interview below, it seems like we'll be seeing more of this side of him in the year ahead.
What have you been up to recently?
I am back in New York after a few weeks in Italy. I had a short residency in Florence and I started some little fires. I'm feeling anxious about not clearing the fields before I start new fires. I'll spend the next couple of months working through all this stuff. Other than that, just staying alive in apocalyptic post-pandemic New York City.
How and where was the mix recorded? And can you tell us the idea behind it?
I wanted to share a glimpse of what's happening in my work but not bubbling to the surface yet. I spent the last few years putting together exhibitions, installations and performances at museums and galleries, and a lot came out of the research and production for some of these projects. Simultaneously as I'm working on these heady and emotionally taxing projects, something else is happening, alternative emotional bits and bumps beneath the surface and finally some of it is slipping out, or rather surfacing. After relocating back to New York, I've been listening and sequencing pieces and finding places for them to land. This mix is sort of a preview of things to come.
I recorded this at home in my kitchen with my laptop, a USB turntable, MIDI keyboard and a Zoom audio recorder.
What's one club or party that had a major impact on you as an artist?
I came up as an artist and DJ running labels and nights in New York in the 2010s, first DJing with the Dutty Artz crew at places like the Cove, Glasslands and then running Sci-Fi & Fantasy and throwing parties at 285 Kent and Bossa Nova. We did one in a bakery somewhere among refrigerators and dough machines and bread carts. It was scrappy and inclusive and fun.
When I moved to Berlin it was totally a different atmosphere, and it changed the way I look at clubs and think about club culture. The exclusionary, militaristic, hyper-gatekeeping nature of certain clubs in Berlin really turned me off, and I kept away. This exclusivity was of course also in New York to a certain degree, but the commitment to creating beautiful, safe and inclusive spaces was felt, and those spaces were created under tremendous duress and precarity.
Some moments and spaces spring to mind. Places and spaces that are no longer around, or have been completely transformed and the people have moved on and you are only left with a memory. No particular club or party to give an extra shout-out to, but I have memories of dancehall nights in Flatbush, warehouse parties in Bed-Stuy and Bushwick, some memorable house parties in Harlem.
With all this nostalgia and the current renaissance and mainstream embrace of underground dance music and club culture, it's good to remember that clubs aren't necessarily spaces of openness. Sometimes clubs will make statements about their commitments to inclusivity and safety, but their proclamations and promises ring hollow. Clubs are messy spaces of exclusion and exclusivity. There's so much talk of clubs being spaces for personal and collective liberation and expression, but I also experience them as places of brutal exclusivity, especially in the European context as an African. In the extreme, they're institutions of unfreedom.
Most of the work you've released recently has been rooted in ambient. What drove this recent direction towards techno, and how do you approach dance music and "ambient" music differently?
I approach from a space that is open to all kinds of possibilities. It is not a restricted or closed off space, and that’s something I try to remember and practice when I approach the work. I am fully aware of the surrounding world, the external world, the reality and restriction, but my approach or way of thinking and producing electronic music is not too concerned with the rigid distinctions of category or genre or with the brutal delimitations imposed on techno music. Some of these things I learned from listening and studying older artists and poets working experimentally and not too concerned with categories. Simple lessons: to be categorized is to be restricted. So I choose to remain open, experimental, listening and searching for what’s possible beyond the categories as we know them. You can find me in a house on the outskirts of ambient and technotown making black noise. The noises emanate from a timeless space and sometimes they are untethered and nonlinear and other times they arrive with a certain urgency and certain notions of connectedness or rootedness, but even when the roots and rhythms are muffled and the multitude of voices are
submerged, there is a certain African presence. I just stay open to receive it and do my best to organize and sequence the pieces when they arrive. I’ve been doing this for a minute, so this is not a sudden swerve or turn. It was always there, palpable and felt. It was just a matter of time before it surfaces back and becomes somewhat hearable or noticeable.
You've previously created sound-based works for art institutions like the Venice Biennale, Liverpool Biennale and New York's Mishkin Gallery. How does the process differ for composing for art versus for albums?
Well, I guess we are dealing with imagination and possibilities again. We have to be careful not to draw too fine a line distinguishing between “composing for art versus for albums”. It is never one or the other for me. If I’m lucky, the compositions resist closure and remain open to recomposing and decomposing and never reaching a resolution and never arriving at a final destination. An album can simply be an audio recording or a collection of audio recordings one stores on vinyl or CD or some in digital format and that audio can be retrieved and playback and experienced. For me, it’s documentation, it’s a picture of the piece captured at that given moment, so the album is a snapshot photograph. On the other hand, exhibitions, site specific installations, or performances are always multisensory experiences where sound, which is my primary medium, is just one part, supporting the other parts, the other components. Here, we can disrupt the hierarchies of the senses a bit, destabilize the ordering of sight, sound, smell, and taste. I hope I’m making sense and and you see where I’m going with all this.
What's one social or political cause you want the world to pay more attention to?
This is a difficult question because there's so much, and I don't know where to begin. But in light of the recent humanitarian catastrophe, the capsizing of the Adriana off the coast of Greece, I think we should be paying more attention to migration, and when catastrophic events occur, how we respond. People are overwhelmed, tired and uninspired, and are no longer shocked by news, pictures or videos of Africans, Syrians, Palestinians or Pakistanis dying in the Mediterranean Sea. At least from where I'm standing, what I'm observing is a gross inhuman indifference of Europeans to the ongoing catastrophe. Here in the United States, a similar situation on a different scale is unfolding, with people fleeing violence and extreme poverty in Haiti, Venezuela, Nicaragua and other Central American countries and facing all kinds of perils crossing the Southern border.
This has been a focus of my work, for nearly a decade now, reflecting on the flow of contemporary migration and the relational problem of "the migrant" and "the refugee," and connecting this to the long history of migration, the constant movement of people all over the landscape and seascapes since time immemorial, all that overlapping histories and experiences.
We need a long view of migration, I mean we need to look at movement and migration in geologic time, not just in this moment with the latest, current "migrant crisis" or disaster at sea or at the border, but looking at migration and movement of people as a timeless and true universal experience. The point being this: we are all refugees, everyone comes from Africa. It's a simple point, but this gets lost or overlooked due to willful ignorance and misunderstanding—or what Kodwo Eshun termed collective agnosia.
What are you looking forward to in the near future?
Music-wise, some stuff on Black Studies and Sci-Fi & Fantasy redux. In the not so distant future, look for materials to land on The Trilogy Tapes and Honest Jon's Records.
TracklistLamin Fofana - Waterfront (Prisms Mirrors Lenses)
Lamin Fofana - Dog in a Fisherman's Net
Lamin Fofana - Freetown 2082 (A Different Future)
Lamin Fofana - Unparalleled (Catastrophe)
Lamin Fofana - It's Only a Matter of Acceleration Now
Lamin Fofana - Before the Fall (After Empire)
Lamin Fofana - We, in Some Strange Power's Employ, Move On A Rigorous Line
Lamin Fofana - Eroding Present
Lamin Fofana - Driftglass
Lamin Fofana - Our Wingless Days (Voice Cry)
Lamin Fofana - Lines and Speed Decay in My Voice
Lamin Fofana - The Cycle The Circle