"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. After the presentation a woman approaches me. "There's something I need to tell you. A spirit entered my body while you were singing and has a message for you." She delivers the message and hugs me warmly."
"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."
A keynote performance prompted an attendee to report a spirit entering her body during singing and delivering a message, after which she appeared relieved. Singing operates as a devotional practice that links performers to ancestors and other spirits and creates an animist sense of reality. Dálava is a cross-genre project shaped by animist Slavic cosmology and a land-based folk song tradition maintained across generations. Traditional and spiritual music is becoming more visible in experimental and underground scenes, but it often collides with patriarchal colonial biases in music writing and study, producing harms such as misrecognition, desacralisation, instrumentalisation, commodification, and extraction; Canadian musical history includes extraction of Indigenous song and erasure of Indigenous lifeways.
Read at The Wire Magazine - Adventures In Modern Music
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