Techno Histories
"Songs articulate distance, texture, and intent. They respond to the acoustics of landscapes and social structures; they are amplified in some spaces and dampened in others." -- e-flux
Techno Histories is a project I started in July of 2022 to tell stories of ancestry, lineage, and identity through techno. Each track tells a story of someone I interview, record, and collaborate with to create a collage of samples, grooves, and narratives.
Techno has long served as the voice of the political underground, providing marginalized groups with not only a creative language, but a cultural music that necessitates space and ritual. Techno Histories is part of the process of claiming that voice, ritualizing it, and sharing it with my community.
Check out techno histories that inspire me HERE.
Jennifer
This is a history I made to honor Jennifer Koh's visit to my Music Maker's of Asian America class. Koh writes and talks extensively about attending protests to support Asian American people in the US. The history combines samples of protests Koh herself attended with those her parents, and teachers attended, all against the a recording of Ko herself playing violin.
Kaia
The following is a techno history I made to describe my own relationship to techno and Jewish culture. I used recordings of my mentor Hankus Netsky and his mentor Morris Hollender. I created all the drum samples out of klezmer drum recordings from the 1920s, and combined these with recordings of my grandfather singing his favorite yiddish songs and my friends playing those same songs with their klezmer bands.
Katherine and Maxine
This techno history discusses the relationship between the perspective of a sex worker, Maxine Holloway, and that of Katherine MacKinnon. I take interviews with both of these women and put them in dialogue with one another to create an argument about the inherent morality of sex work.
Sofia
The idea for this project came from an interview with Sofia Kourtesis. The following is a clip of my interview with her: Sofia talks about collage, space, and connection through the music.