Sounds of the Diaspora
In short
ROLE
Researcher, DJ & Percussionist
SKILLS
DATES
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Researcher, DJ & Percussionist
A kid that was raised on equal parts of Miles Davis, Beethoven, Wookie & The Abyssinians, music has always felt like the language I know best. Not in terms of my depth of knowledge or even understanding, but in the purest sense of what language means to me - a way to understand the world and in turn, understand oneself. Since a child, I have built worlds within my home lost in sound and as I continue to grow, music continues to be the the first thing I reach for when sense-making about self, society, ancestry, love, loss & hope.
Perhaps you could say my first practice of exploring music was through dance. As a child, through tap and ballet, as a teen through street dance, then as an adult, a sort of improvised contemporary style that embodies all the movement languages my body learnt, remembers and continues to invent.
My musical research follows the sonic threads that connect Afro-diasporic music across the Black Atlantic, tracing the nuances of our similar yet estranged experiences through rhythm, story and soul. I have a keen interest in the ways that traditional african percussive rhythms from West Africa have inspired electronic sounds born out of the diaspora in places like London, Lisbon, Dominica Republic, Trinidad, Brazil and Haiti.
This next practice was born after I left my job in banking in 2013. During a few months in New York, as my creative being went through its rebirth, a friend taught me the basics of DJing on a Numark controller in their apartment. Thirteen years and many dancefloors later, my DJ practice has become a tool for experimenting with storytelling through rhythm and feeling—in pursuit of connection and collective healing—through music from Africa and its diaspora.
Most recently, I have become a student of Djembe and Sabar, two West African drums that carry tradition and storytelling at their core. For me, engaging with rhythm in its purest form has been an immersion into African Indigenous rituals and ways of being—offering insight into how knowledge is held and passed on through rhythm, and the power it has to transform.
