"I've just given a keynote presentation at Lines of Flight: Improvisation, Hope and Refuge, a conference hosted by the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation. I'd been invited to talk about my performance research with Dálava, a cross-genre project that is influenced by animist, Slavic cosmology and a land-based folk song tradition that has been in my family for generations."
"As this encounter suggests, singing is a devotional practice for me, one that connects me to my ancestors and other spirits, and affords an animist experience of reality. Music born of traditional and spiritual practice is increasingly visible in experimental and underground circles. But music of this kind is often at odds with the patriarchal colonial bias that constrains how music is written about and studied."
Singing functions as a devotional practice that connects to ancestors and other spirits and affords an animist experience of reality. Dálava is a cross-genre project that draws on animist, Slavic cosmology and a land-based family folk song tradition. Music born of traditional and spiritual practice increasingly appears in experimental and underground circles but often encounters patriarchal colonial bias in how music is written about and studied. Such bias produces harms including misrecognition, desacralisation, instrumentalisation, commodification and extraction. Canadian musical history is built on extraction of Indigenous song and erasure of Indigenous peoples and lifeways. Current music writing commonly exoticises and mischaracterises women and artists of colour.
Read at The Wire Magazine - Adventures In Modern Music
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]