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A Troubling, Or, A Sonic Refusal

The film is a study of Black sound through the idea of ‘troubling’. A conscious or responsive enactment of a troubling practice serves as a refusal to colonial structures, creating a disruption or a glitch in a system, or an environment. Troubling in this case is defined as constructive instead of a problem, or something to be fixed. Within this, the film aims to broaden discussions of place, race and time, using sound as its starting point.

How do we write, think, perform, practice, visualize, engage, theorize, story, or enact a practice of refusal?

Examples in Black sound:

༄ sound as a protest, or used in protest

༄ the banning of African instruments such as the drum and mbira during slavery and colonisation

༄ attempts to ban grime and drill music - again surveillance and policing

༄ sound architectures - how music videos might disrupt the construction of cities through the juxtaposition of figures in the videos who create their own

༄ productions of space, which might also serve as an alternative space to gather, including to listen

༄ listening practices more broadly, and through lyrics which challenge or criticise state/police etc

refusal as a generative and capacious rubric for theorizing everyday practices of struggle

refusal: a rejection of the status quo as livable and the creation of possibility in the face of negation i.e. a refusal to recognize a system that renders you fundamentally illegible and unintelligible; the decision to reject the terms of diminished subjecthood with which one is presented, using negation as a generative and creative source of disorderly power to embrace the possibility of living otherwise.

Troubling as Refusal

Troubling Cityscapes

"Michel Foucault's theories help us to understand the disciplinary techniques of power (including the control of the body at an individual level) and procedures of knowledge that are used to create different kinds of community and architectural space as well as allowing us to examine how some people become subject to state power in a way that they cannot counter and cannot identify. We could also consider what Foucault and Miskowiec call the set of relations, such as streets and transportation, which define a given site - for example, paying close attention to the cluster of relations such as cafes and cinemas that allow a site to be defined as a space of relaxation."

Black aesthetics of music videos

Jenn Nkiru - Black to Techno (2019)

Black Audio Film Collective - John Akomfrah - The Last Angel Of History (1996)

Defending Digga D (2020)

Approach

༄ Active listening - considering conditions of sound

༄ Artist-Facilitator

༄ Collaboration - positionality and lived experiences, acknowledging the work done.

༄ Conversations with:

༄ Adèle Oliver - Art Not Evidence, Deeping It, Music Producer

༄ Black Music Research Unit (University of Westminster)

༄ DJ Lynnée Denise

༄ Rappers

༄ Community Workers

Possibilities

༄ other geographies

༄ sound production/remixing/samples

༄ other genres - dub, jazz

༄ lyrical reading - what lyrics say and how this is reflective of environment

༄ listening practices/disobedient listening

Troubling becomes a refusal. A method of rejecting and disrupted what is given or expected within infrastructures of violence, colonial systems and legacies

Tina Campt, Black visuality and the practice of refusal (2019)

building a vocab

refusal
troubling
disobedience
rebel
unruly

In asking who does space belong to, in grime and drill music videos, The answer is ‘us’. the suggestion of a Black spatial identity through claiming ownership of space is performed via the ‘taking over’ of location(s) present within the videos.

Black noise crosses what Jennifer Stover calls the sonic colour line, a colonial demarcation that ‘codifies sounds linked to racialized bodies such as music and the ambient sounds of everyday living - as "noise”, sound's loud and unruly other.'

"Refusal operates in many forms across time as part of the black radical tradition"

What constitutes a refusal in these references are the freedom of expression through utilising public space. Space in cities is marked by its lack of - space to be, or to gather, particularly free space. Gender also plays a part in this refusal - in a male-dominated industry we see women confidently rapping directly to cameras, claiming their own place within the genre.