Slave Dances by Kumo

This 7 track album was commissioned and released on the label sound-space in 2021. Sadly sound-space can no longer continue trading, at least for the time being, and have kindly returned the tracks they released back to the artists.

Concerning the title
The use of the term Slave can be deeply problematic as it dehumanises enslaved people and debases their culture. Yet the term ‘Slave Dances’ appears in music dictionaries to describe the origins of African American music. I decided to retain the term in the title of my work to pass on my own shock at seeing it in regular, though diminishing, use, employing it provocatively to contrast with the whitewashed history of popular dance music that we inherit.

"Slave Dances (Seven Portraits) is an immensely pleasurable, brilliantly sourced weave of rhythm, texture, and repurposed, reworked sounds doctored up in [Kumo's] South London home studio. It is, however, a vital tool for reflection on the connective history of Black music, remaking connections which have been erased by the habitual omission by whites of black agency in music history and its origins.

There is the sensibility of the gallery of these pieces; one could imagine them as hanging sculptures, or mixed media works incorporating diverse visual elements and materials. However, there is none of the gallery’s white-walled, silent sterility about Slave Dances (Seven Portraits), which is bristling and teeming, kinetic, and, despite
the sombre subject matter, joyful, playful even. Slave Dances (Seven Portraits) is as delightful as it is educational."

David Stubbs

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Slave Dances (Seven Portraits)

Over 15 years ago, while working on an album of music based on the dance rhythms of the time, my old friend Uli Gerlach asked if I'd ever thought of investigating earlier dance music; the Foxtrot, Charleston, and so on. The idea stayed with me and, as it has been for so many of us, the lockdowns provided a chance to finally research this music and apply the findings to my own work.

My first discovery was that the essence of this music is a far cry from the superficial glitziness of Strictly Ballroom or the geriatric end-of-pier dancehall. The truth is that these are all so-called "slave dances". They all derive from African American culture of the late 19th and early 20th century and carry with them the trauma of slavery and treasured remnants of African culture. 
 
The work culminated in Slave Dances (Seven Portraits) and an accompanying full-color zine available here:
www.psychomat.com/slave-dances-seven-portraits-zine

I am very white, at times almost transparent from lack of melanin. So what am I doing digging around in someone else's story and deriving my own work from it? I asked my friend, artist Joyce Treasure, what she felt about this project. As a graduate of the Black Studies degree course at Birmingham City University, the first such course in Europe, she asked some probing questions about my intentions and made some painful comparisons. Eventually, she gave me her support and went on to contribute her own art and words to the project.

These stories need to be told. Black people can be as unaware of much of this vital history as anyone else. Their story has been utterly colonized, censored, and retold to them by whites over the generations, often removing all traces of black agency and context.
 
Despite the color of my skin, I realized that this is in part my story too. I'm from Liverpool – but a quick glance at my family tree reveals that none of my great-grandparents were born in the city. They came from Scotland, Ireland, Lancashire, and Wales. They uprooted themselves from long, local traditions dating back generations, lured to Liverpool by the economic boom driven by the transatlantic trade built on the barbarity of slavery. Their children, my grandparents, would have sung and danced the Charleston, the Black Bottom, the Bunny Hug, perhaps even Shimmied. Indeed, my mother sang me the lullaby "Go to sleep my Little Picaninny" as her mother would have sung it to her, each generation sharing the appropriated culture of those enslaved whose suffering produced the wealth around them. 

By identifying this in my own DNA I no longer feel like an exploitative voyeur mining another culture for my own benefit, I feel an even greater responsibility to decolonize our collective history and identify how slavery continues to touch us all, economically, socially, and culturally. 

The racism born of slavery exists within the white community so it is whites that have to engage with the problem and tackle it. It may be daunting but the fact is that black people have been telling whites about this for 400 years and yet the message never seems to penetrate. It is the responsibility of whites to stick our necks out and be counted; make mistakes, offend each other, risk accusations of appropriation or of becoming, God forbid, the "white savior", in order to get the conversation moving both between each other and the black community. Otherwise, this central narrative in our economic and cultural lives will remain a sideshow and our true histories, no matter how vast and all-encompassing, will remain hidden.
 
Each of the seven pieces on the album is derived directly from the original dances in the titles but each also functions as a portrait of a notable African American musician. Sometimes the link is directly from the content, other times via technical relationships in the music. Each is in homage to their achievements in the face of adversity and discrimination.


Jono Podmore AKA Kumo,
London
August 2021 

released August 23, 2021

Jono Podmore aka Kumo is best known for his tireless work curating the archives of Krautrock pioneers Can. Podmore has been no slouch with his own musical projects, working under his Kumo alias across multiple releases, performances and installations. His latest album Slave Dances (Seven Portraits) explores concealed African American identity

http://www.psychomat.com/kumo-short-biography/

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