FUTUR NOIR

Text: The Brave Sleep Alone.

The musical pieces that appear in Futur Noir embody the union of the most irresolvable equations that have occurred in the Afrofuturist movement itself.; introduce a new accessible entertainment with that transgressive point that always works. The sounds float in space: raw, analytical and stupid. I try to squeeze and investigate experimental electronics in the black community. Thus, Los valientes duermen solos, brings together in what we could call following Bataille a "community without community"preserves the singularity of each one, which makes reappropriation in a corpus or school impossible. Well, this is for Los valientes duermen solos the experience not only of a deconstruction but of art in general. 

I immerse myself in the task of searching for the right approach. Beyond its flaws is that generation of authors that distilled aromas of a goldsmith, of a generation that amounts to a rabid creative manifesto, and that astonished, upset and expanded our society to the realism of asking for the impossible. In 1944, Erroll Garner was recorded playing solo or for his colleagues, in either situation freed from the pressure of having to please an audience or the club owner. Overture to Dawn (Overture for the dawn) show his true self-taught genius, with no trace of that need to impress that seemed to oppress him. The music feels relaxed, expansive, playful. Acetate discs allowed the length of each piece to extend to over ten minutes. By the standards of the time, this freed the improvisational imagination from Garner as much or more from time constraints than from commercial imperatives. These sessions were later published by Blue Note in 1953: Timme Rosenkrantz on his precious acetate discs in 1944 is closer to what we would consider today as experimental free improvisation.

It seems to me that what they were doing was very advanced for the time, very open. There was a line. Behind it opened up the unknown, where free was synonymous with giving up making money. Those who were still trapped in that dream of freedom had three options: retreat, open laterally towards something less vertiginous, or cross it. I find it more difficult to understand why that experience with Sun Ra Trio had such a profound and lasting impact on that Chicago of 1948 and 1949. According to the biographer John F. Szwed, Ra had just acquired an Ampex paper tape recorder. The drummer Tommy "Bugs" Hunter played with brushes on a telephone book, Ra played the piano with one hand and with the other a Hammond Solovox organ whose monophonic notes of théremin-like sonority offered a nervy stratospheric counterpoint to the violin of Stuff Smith. 

I like the less perfect, less studied work, the one in which you have totally invested yourself. With adulthood a Gallic symbolist poet said that: "the child abdicates his ecstasy".. Miles Davis remained the soundtrack of my childhood, it always ruled the atmosphere in my father's workshop. My first lesson was the so-called frontal side light: the light hits the model from the front, the shadows are practically hidden behind the model. The volume and sense of depth are not emphasized. The bodies stand out mainly because of their own color. And the twelve photographs of the face of Thousandsin grayscale, which appear inside the album of Miles Davis, Live-eviLbecame the most complete exercise. My father pointed out to me how the image of Thousands is drawn and blurred, enveloping the form, as much as its music. The atmosphere, the air, the depth. "The color. First I get the color. Then I improvise everything else. I work with the subconscious, like in music." These are the words of Thousandson his famous paintings at the Munich exhibition, a painting inspired by the work of Basquiatas a result of their connection through Jo Gelbard. Thousands doesn't want to talk about music, he wants to talk about other things. And here, in this writing, it happens a little bit the same, in each drawing, in each writing, what tries to be, as simple as it may be, is everything I have learned up to that moment.

Miles taught us to normalize another way of listening and dancing. Sober, elegant sounds, those same ones invented and combined by the supreme, unknown divinity, with great mastery, and building refined tensions and harmonies, that geometric game of light, atmosphere and mysticism. However, it is not a matter of melting and blurring to the point that everything loses consistency. It is necessary to work with the light on, like "Selim" and "Sivad"In other words, Miles Davisand over the years, everything expressed in his philosopher's stone, Live-eviL (1972): the verse and reverse of the musical history of the 20th century. Because of its importance, this recording signifies the need to capture, in a masterful way, a music that includes all of them. Miles' return to the studio was an excuse to try new ideas. "We don't play chords, we play sounds." manifested in 1970 when he flew to Seattle to attend the burial of Jimi Hendrix.

It all takes place in a specific era of cultural, social, artistic and spiritual revolutions in which Thousands was the tip of every spear. A form of life and excitement as can be the tonality and pulse of the A Love Supreme from Coltrane. Thousands no longer plays, but improvises, leaving room for the accompanists to create their own melodies and explore their ideas. They are extended and atmospheric jams, where the lack of emotional structure is compensated by the interaction of the musicians. Thousands creates spontaneous music, music unlike any other, which flows nervously interrupted by the short and eloquent solos of the participants who immediately return to the riverbed. Mati Klarwein signs his painting for the colossal cover. And the shots come from all sides, even though there were precedents in Thousands In The Sky, Filles de Kilimanjaro, In A Silent Way, Bitches Brew and A Tribute to Jack Johnson.

Live-eviL consists of four studio tracks and four live tracks, recorded in a club in December 1970. Its extreme distortion, ferocity, darkness and speed reflect Miles' wildest side, very different from his previous albums. The group is once again a septet, with guitar and keyboard, drums and percussion, electric bass, saxophone and trumpet. It is obvious that Thousands uses his intellect more and more in matters of textures, increasing the quintet (Shorter, Korea, Holland, Williams) with two former members, Herbie and Carterand the collaboration of Keith Jarret who plays like two men. Gary Bartzwho performs an excellent solo with soprano, Hendersonwho at the age of nineteen has already performed with Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonderand above all Zawinul who has a special talent for creating bass figures.

Live-eviL is still a rehearsal, without being that definitive album, it becomes the meridian of a cycle recorded live, opened in The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions, between 1969 and 1970. And accommodated in such areas experienced towards Africa and Asia, On The Corner, 1972. It is obvious that this is an unprecedented rhythmic project, a material that appears compiled between 1969 and 1975, with the excuse of releasing the albums Big Fun, 1974 y Get Up With It1975, homage to the death of Dukethrough the saxophone and the flute of Sonny Fortunethe congas and African percussion of Mtumeand the deep batteries of Al Foster and Bernard Purdie.

Thousands is elected Jazz Man of the Year and best trumpet player at Down Beat Publishing. Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, Dave Holland, Keith Jarret, William Cobham, Gary Bartz, Joe Zawinul, Michael Henderson, John McLaughlin, DeJohnette, Steve Grossman and Hermeto Pascoalare just sponges. The members of Thousands They planned to stay as long as they could and absorb as much music from him as possible. Guys like Hendrix, o Sly, o Bob JamesPerhaps they would not have done what they have done if they had not met him.

Thousands can be the same intellectual modernist that through him you can catch something of Sonny Rollins, some Bird, some Coltranesome of Princeeven. I write these lines while, just a few years ago, I was greeted by the revealing confessions of Herbie Hancock, in his backstage at the Auditori in Barcelona. Herbie confesses to me that he had never dared to play an electric piano until Miles forced him to use it in the sessions for Miles In The Sky. We know who is to blame for much of jazz history. Herbie starts with the crutches of ThousandsHe has formed a sextet and has thrown himself headlong into exploring the world of synthesizers and playing a more accessible music, full of African accents, which reflects the obsession for funk rhythms that can be seen on the records of Thousands o The Headhunters. Other motivations appear in the case of Chick Corea that takes an abrupt turn and Return To Forever with the Brazilian Airto Moreira. Wayne Shorter on soprano saxophone, and his sonorous mosaics reveal an assimilation of different cultures and a taste for an ornate and precious syntax. Now the music of Zawinul and its Weather Reportis much warmer, more universal, less abstract. And so it is with all the participants, including the steady hand of the English guitarist. McLaughlinor the way he plays the drum parts, Billy Cohbamdense, dense and furious, style Buddy Miles like Davis I pointed out to him. I suppose that the vicissitudes of the members of Miles' school have been and are being sufficiently documented by the music publishers and I will not insist too much on them.

Miles Davis and BasquiatBeyond their flaws and defects, they can be considered paradigmatic of the situation of the art world in the 1980s. What most influenced them was not their aesthetics, but their way of conceiving art through their denunciation and creative zeal. We have grown up thanks to their artistic lives and the magnitude of their achievements. One thing that distinguished Thousands was his way of developing as a musician: he did not want to repeat himself and only recorded when he had something new to say. Miles has always kept jazz very fresh and perhaps his greatest feat has been to impose his own artistic values on this genre: indefatigable intelligence, great courage, integrity, honesty and a constant spirit of search, always in pursuit of art, without ever falling into experimentation for the sake of experimentation.

Basquiat and his merciless paintings, left their enigmatic and amusing trace in the full expansion of popular art. Basquiat He had a special admiration for jazz, among which the following stood out Charlie Parker and the Thousands. The work "Charles the First" of 1982, and,  Discography I and Discography IIboth made in 1983, are a faithful testimony that Basquiat felt a genuine reverence for jazz until his death. Basquiat wrote in Charles the First the words: "Most of the young kings are beheaded"This is symptomatic in that all its kings are martyrs, victims of social marginalization or of an unbridled and irreverent lifestyle.

Now many things have lost their validity. They say that if you touch Kind Of Blue o Round Midnight that's not dance music. But it was back then when Thousands recorded them. But also destinations such as Rammellzee together with Basquiat embodied the theology of this writing. The iconoclastic influence of Bill Laswell made sense in the classic "Beat Bop" (1983) of Rammellzee. BasquiatHe signed its cover and put the money for its edition, but he did not produce it, as it is believed. The feverish life of Basquiathis meteoric rise to fame and his early death by overdose, were the ideal factors to turn him into a myth. Stetsasonic in the memory of Jean-Michel Basquiatuses the sample of Lonnie Liston Smith  for, "Talkin' All That Jazz" (1988). If in the field of sound art we find: Syrinx de Debussy, Hannah Hoch with its frying pan lid and toy gun, to Free Music by Percy Grainger, Michinao Takamizawa and its sound builders, the exercise routine of the Sidney Bechetthe improvisation of Charles Ives and Django Reinhardtthe lost recording of Roy Eldridge. In 2006 he had contacted Stuart Algabright of the Death Comet Crewthe question then was how I could interview Ramm:Ell:Zee. I met with RammEllZee who was sitting alone on the stage of a theater. His instruments looked more like a portable device for telepathy than a musical tool. Zee He told stories of philosopher's weapons, gothic-mathematical equations and battles in the alphabet. Young people crowded around him. They listened to the story, but did not notice the frenzied eyes of that maddened man. Poor, but full of legends.

1972. Queens, New York. Ghetto, heroin. Ramm is not Zeeis EG: Evolution Griller the Master Killer. Next to Phase 2, Blade, Iz the Wiz and Dondi: the real ones True Burners. They control the New York subway IRT lines. 1974. Zee is Jamal Z a.k.a RAMM:ΣLLL:ZΣΣΣthe inventor of the Ikonoklast Panzerism movement. Advanced and Afrofuturist punk merging with hip-hop. 1976. Zee together with Samo (a.k.a. Jean-Michel Basquiat) embody the union of the two most irresolvable equations that could have occurred in the movement itself. In a city that both writers entitled "NU YOKE". Later, the great battle of RammEllZee against Master K-Robthe classic Beat Bop (Tartown, 1983): translated as the sequel to the ".The Message" of Grand Master Flashbut, this time, until death. Basquiat does not produce it, as it is believed, only signs its cover and puts the money for its edition. Nowadays, astrological prices are paid for a copy. But it doesn't end there. If you watch the film again WILD STYLEjust before the fade to black, you will be able to appreciate and discover a RammEllZeeThe man, who is barely understood, wears a black trench coat and wields a sawed-off shotgun. A Zee is accompanied by a harsh atmosphere, where people punish themselves. At parties in the mythical Roxy Club together with Phase 2 o Futura 2000exhibiting his art in "Super Spray Graffix Xperience"or, in other festivals, as a support for the band of the Stuart Algabright, Michael Diekmann and Dj HighPriestthe Death Comet Crew. Between now and 1987, Gettovettsproject that he formed together with Shockdell and the fabulous collaborations of Bill Laswell, Bootsy Collins, Sly & Robbie and Grandmixer DXT (collaborator of Herbie Hancock). And we do not carry even half of what this character drifts.

Zee among his many collaborations, Laswelltogether with Toshinori Kondo signature Charged. Kondoin Ki-Okuin turn, does so with Crossfor whom Futura 2000 signs the cover page from Meiso. LP outputting enMo-Wax, seal from James Lavellwho wants to buy a painting of Basquiat through DJ Spooky with which Zee has an incident when it comes to making the transition. The morbid curiosity will make you look for more data and you will find out that maybe EEZ was the one who painted pictures that end up being sold as if they were his own. Basquiat... Spooky has a theme with Kool Keithinterviewed in Series B (15), a magazine that brings to light CX Kidtronik: "I was hanging out with Zee in his old studio when he points to some spots on the ceiling and says, "See that? That's from the needles that Sid Vicious used to throw." With which Basquiat shared camel (Michael Morra), which has a documentary about his life sponsored by Buscemi (DOWNTOWN 81), which features the director Jim Jarmuschfor which Zee made a cameo in... infinity...

The rappers have subsequently distorted the essence. They know more about this subculture than those guys crowned with that cap -the one that everybody wears-, which appears on the cover of the last album they downloaded. From what we have been able to observe throughout this story, we get the feeling that gothicfuturism (within Afrofuturism) was on the warpath, against the commercial use that some are currently making of it. Is the market going to make us forget about the design of lyrics for the sake of logos and fame? Rammellzee replies- "Calligraphy is only dissolved through the human condition based on war, as in well-known places like Italy, or France, or Germany. The church started this battle. One faction conquers another and makes the language of that place disappear by converting it to dialect slang until those species disappear from existence. For example "Italy" or "Italia"... could disappear in 100 or 250 years. This can happen to any species on the planet capable of having a language. It has happened before and it will happen again." Accordingly, one would have to concur with this: Frank Kofsky called cockroach capitalism in the Black Nationalism and the Revolution In Music (Pathfinder Press, 1970) Melvin van Peebles is one of the most beautiful leaders of the African-American counterculture of the mid-twentieth century. Racist censorship forced him to circulate his films only in the "black and white" cinemas.Rooms X". Guru of the Black Panthersof Spike Lee and Quentin Tarantino. A meticulous contemplator of social phenomena, I have the opportunity to talk to him for twenty minutes. I listen impressed by his simple answers and precise sense. His reflections are not there to reinforce him but to question a different approach to cinema.

It is past midnight on a 2008. I have met with Melvin van Peebles who still keeps it simple, friendly, extremely correct - a difficult thing for old directors - with a prestige that he rightfully earned. He came to cinema as if by chance. He has made auteur cinema, theater, poems, narrative and essays. He has turned difficult narratives into skillful films. He has challenged cinema by starting without knowing anything. I discover a crude observer of the most desolate reality that surrounds a country in continuous political crisis. I would like to know something about your early filmmaking experiences. Specifically, how did you get so far in cinema? Power calculates a certain limit and the radicalism spread by a minority is already a worldwide phenomenon that can be observed in the United States as well as in Africa, Latin America, Japan and Europe.

I would now like to talk about his films and his soundtracks... The story of a young filmmaker who has tried to seek communication with the public, and not for commercial reasons, of course, but for ideological reasons. It is quite logical that filmmakers - who are privileged on the scale of capitalist society - find it absurd to make a film for a small sector of the public... I mean, they find it absurd to make a film that is incomprehensible, even for those who make it. To make the greatest number of spectators aware of an argument based on ideas, in my opinion, is the task of cinema, and it is a modern and revolutionary obligation. Melvin van Peebles replies- "That's a very good question of yours! Absolutely! I think it's about that aspect of the industry, a very important aspect of the industry. A very important point, which everybody knows, it's there, but, on the other hand, it still tends to be less important". 

It was still too complicated. It was too much information to convey. Self-produced with the loan of Bill Cosby... 50 thousand dollars! The racist censorship labeled it as pornographic. It had to be screened in X theaters. This means renouncing a whole world of easy convictions... More than theories we need experiences, which are the source of theory. You might think that a man like Van Peebleswhich has been rented by pyromaniacs of black exploitation, the BlaxpotationIf he were to further refine the matches, well... he would have to start thinking, at a certain point, that he too is a criminal. But fame and money can do wonders to safeguard one's sense of innocence. 

This is how the laborious search for a quick and spectacular success catches on and manifests itself everywhere. As easy as saying: well, we are going to do this for the pure pleasure of doing it. It won't cost anything, it won't involve any economic risk, it will be playing with immense, enormous material, let's hope it turns out to be really great... This conversation requires a whole hour (laughs). Melvin van Peebles answers - "That's right...that's a business show. And you can only get away so much. I've seen big projects, I've seen small projects. I mean, it's nothing new. It happens not just in the movie business...It's often overlooked, and that's what's so important, a crucial aspect, even, of the industry. I mean, to be prepared, you have to really check and double-check seven more times what you're doing. Sometimes, people get carried away. you know what I mean?"

The representatives of Afrofuturism are those same explorers who traveled through Africa and gave African names to their children, whom I used to go to see at the film library, with a certain consciousness of clandestinity and intellectuality; today they kill me with laughter, but they are still a temple destined to the community of the faithful. If you decide to take your backpack and go off into those worlds hoping to find the old adventure, you will be met with a lot of disappointments. Being free men is difficult. In the Amazon jungle, Indians have been found playing soccer. Suddenly they saw some tourist and decided to suspend the game, put on their loincloths and charge for a little dance in front of their photo machines. We already have one less certainty to trust.

In 1991 everything was unhinged, out of reality, we all existed as generational contemporaries, in function of a cultural clandestinity. Graffiti and its music flourished obscurely, like mushrooms on street corners, and we were given strange labels. In fact, we grew up in dark rooms, and I never quite knew which term to choose. This story appealed to my adventurous and protesting side, it was very revealing because we said everything in broad strokes, without delicacy. In those distant eras of which I speak, everything was in everything. All the protagonists were good, all the plates shone spotless, of course, they were all still as upright as the first one, but they moved in a corrupt and ugly world, they were paid to sit on the lid of the garbage can, where nothing was clear and everything was murky, and the author's work was overvalued.

In the long run, let's not fool ourselves, it all becomes too much of an aperreada life, it all ends up being just another story of aliens on earth to make money. Everyone thinks they are something special, the be-all and end-all of existence, of the cosmic life force, or something like that. They won't even let you open your mouth. You spend years and years with your nose buried in the damn tomes, while the world passes you by. We used to theorize because we all needed to.There was a lot of research into the aesthetics of language, technical type displays, very calculated exercises in grammar. Because you're supposed to say it well, it's more about what you say than how you say it. Then the typical thing happens: you're doing something that you don't give importance to and it comes out well. Now, the real adventure is not waiting for you, it is there, hidden. Nowadays, if you will forgive my immodesty, pedantries are no longer tolerated. All that remains is to take the definitive step and say things clearly: to free oneself. I left graffiti and its music because I had decided to break with a certain situation. It is mere chance that decides which side one falls on. Everything is an adventure. You just have to know how to see it, to look for it, to find it.

If in sound art we find Syrinx from Debussy, Hannah Hoch with its frying pan lid and toy pistol, Free Music from Percy Grainger, Michinao Takamizawa and its sound builders, the exercise routine of the Sidney Bechetthe improvisation of Charles Ives and Django Reinhardtthe lost recording of Roy Eldridge... in Futur Noir natural sounds, abstract sounds, as well as juxtapositions such as the Singeli (fusion of hiphop, gabber and African rhythms) at the pan-African festival in Uganda.

The rapid advance of electronic music facilitated the possibility of amplifying those sounds inherent to inanimate materials: a kind of aural microscopy. Late nineties, early millennium. What was most influential was not aesthetics, but a way of narrating. Turntablism, abstract hip hop, spoken word, dub poetry, noise? he drags a meaning, he considers himself a storyteller. He tells what he reads, what has accompanied him during his life. He has dark or sallow skin, African blood and eyes like velvety coals. Beautiful culture, because she was and because she had big eyes full of suggestions, of intentions. It is often called something like panther. It is a heritage that we have and that cannot be erased by fashionable social impositions. At least, I hope so.

I like to go back to the places where I was happy. Now I have returned to resume hiphop after a long silence, only broken by his commercial experiment. Futur Noir synthesizes the points mentioned above, it is the reworked version of the definition. When the one who makes them sound is someone else, the sound of the alarms is very noisy, wrote the artist in 1956 Gutai Fujiko Shiraga. In other words, even though you have not created the work and are only the spectator, by flipping the switch you stand on the edge of the act of creation. This means that you can immerse yourself in the joy of doing something you never imagined possible and experience, at the same time, the terror of being responsible for what you do to the ultimate consequences.

The brave sleep aloneSeptember 2019.