Listening to D’Angelo. Hearing Voodoo – Part 1: 'Africa Is My Descent'

Join Edward George [The Strangeness of Dub] and Dhanveer Singh Brar [Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski] for the first of three live journeys into the mesmerising and troubling sound world of D’Angelo’s Voodoo. Released in 2000, this album marked the apex and perhaps limit of his musical career, and by extension, the apex of RnB, Soul, and Funk’s impact on American society since the 1960s.

With curtains drawn and nothing on screen, the cinema will serve as an environment for close listening to the sounds and ideas flowing out of what is arguably Black American music’s most generative encounter with the wider diaspora.

Sound provided by Pavilion’s new speaker system which will soon be available for creative and community use.

Listening to D’Angelo is a three part project commissioned by performance, possession + automation, a three-year project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
www.possessionautomation.co.uk

Edward George is the co-founder of Black Audio Film Collective, the writer and broadcaster behind the radio series ‘The Strangeness of Dub’ (Morley College Radio), and the host of Sound of Music (Threads Radio). He is also part of the multimedia duo Flow Motion, and the electronic music group Hallucinator. George’s ‘The Strangeness of Dub’ dives into reggae, dub, versions and versioning, drawing on critical theory, social history, and a deep and a wide cross-genre musical selection. His live music collaborations include the improvised music group, The X Ray Hextet and turntablist Mariam Rezaei. In November 2023, George was the recipient of a Paul Hamlyn Foundation artist award. He lives and works in London.

Dhanveer Singh Brar is a writer, researcher, and teacher focussing on questions of race, culture, aesthetics, politics and theory from the mid-twentieth century to the present. He has published two books, Beefy’s Tune (Dean Blunt Edit) (The 87 Press), and Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski: The Sonic Ecologies of Black Music in the Early Twenty-First Century (Goldsmiths Press). Dhanveer is also member of two research and performance projects, “Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective” (with Louis Moreno, Stefano Harney, Fred Moten, Fumi Okiji, Paul Rekret and Ronald Rose-Antoinette) and “Lovers Discourse” (with Edward George). He works as a Lecturer in Black British History at the University of Leeds.