Fragmented notes and diary pages on the making of "African Feedback" in 2004.

I spent a month in Mali and Burkina Faso asking villagers to listen to experimental music. The moment they put on the headphones I pressed “Play” on the CD and started recording with the DAT; everything that was said, all the stories, questions, silences, and breaths were recorded. I collected all the feedbacks, around twenty-two hours, almost an entire day. The operation’s objective: to gather material for a, electro-acoustic composition. Hidden objective: to throw up for discussion it…them… the…

Once I returned to Europe, the first question that occurred to me with regard to this experience was: What were these feedbacks, how did they react? It’s hard to answer. For each person there was a different story. From an anthropological point of view, nothing was established. A silent scene.

After a few weeks of listening and re-listening to the tapes it struck me, however, that there was something common to all the reactions. A lack. There was a lack of surprise. Africans are surprised by nothing. There might be negative surprise, expressed as “This thing is surprising but absurd, it doesn’t work,” or positive, like “This is surprising, strange, it interests me, I want to know more about it.” But no, nobody wanted to know anything else but at the same time, nobody dismissed it. It was as though they were thinking, “This person comes all the way here to do this work, to make us listen to this thing we don’t understand there must be some reason for all this, a practical, solid, concrete reason. If this sort of thing exists then we’ll try to understand what place it has in the universe.” They took part in the game without any particular enthusiasm, totally the arguments point blank without asking for any explanation. (Nobody, I repeat, nobody asked me why I was doing it! To the point that I started asking it of myself). They accept what seems to them to be “the reality of things.”

For an African, listening in headphones is practically the most unnatural thing possible. Traditional music is always bound to dance, to a collective experience and to the place. Headphones contradict all of this. Maybe this is why the image of elderly Africans with headphones on their ears always seemed curious and fascinating to me? Ibe forgot he was wearing headphones. He thought we could all hear what he was hearing. The condition is that sound should be socialized. The moment that Ibe accepted that he was alone in the listening, the music could stop being music and could become something else that could perhaps alarm him.

Composing the piece “African Feedback” was like creating a mask for myself; the piece is itself a mask to be donned for the performance in order to re-negotiate a musical identity.

The misunderstanding came from the word ‘music’: if it concerns music there couldn’t be a difference between the music I was proposing and Dogon music. Once it was verified that it concerned ‘music’ it wasn’t possible that I could be bringing something new and unknown because music existed in Dogon well before the arrival of Alessandro Bosetti (and would continue to exist after his departure as well). Naturally there were considering without being aware of the bigger issue or even the nature of the sounds they heard, which were very different from traditional Dogon music. But this didn’t appear to concern them ... These kinds of misunderstandings were common, “the nature of things” is also that and is reflected through the immense innate power of giving different things the same name. If two things are called by the same name they are necessarily the same thing, even if seen from very different perspectives.

Akonio Dolo, a Dogon living in Paris, listened to the tapings and said to me: “You go too quickly, they didn’t understand what you wanted from them, you can’t ask such direct questions immediately, they need time to know you.”

But rather, for me the initial reaction is the one that counts, without preparation, without mediation. I’m not an anthropologist but a musician, who’s adopting “relational” strategies to construct his music. I’m interested in the misunderstandings, the embarrassments, the stumblings, and the mistakes in communication that reveal something more real with respect to how not to make a “literal translation.”

They didn’t understand what I wanted. But what actually did I want? Solo, my guide, often asked me, “But what reactions do you want?” I didn’t know. I had no thesis to prove. “Any reaction is good for me,” I said “Even none, that also works.”

A friend listened to the tapes and said to me: “But don’t you see that they don’t understand anything. They don’t know what you want.”

Why? Is there something to understand?

Sangha, Dogon country. The Club Med of anthropology? Often one had the sensation that while you were getting out the tape recorder your interlocutor knew better than you how things would unfold. If you do not have a specific desire for them to please, it can be quite problematic for the Sangha. Your interlocutor always tells you what he thinks you want to hear. In general, this is something that has to do with the Griault cosmology. Surprises are become fewer and farther between and everything becomes managed and negotiated within the perspective of an exchange. Months later, I said clearly what I thought to Akonio Dolo, while in Paris discussing the project. At first he was offended. I reiterated that most often in the end it came down to always talking about money, we always finished up with a clear reciprocal interest. “It’s logical,” he responded. But what was I searching for in Sangha? Even now I haven’t received a convincing answer.
One of the project’s hidden discoveries was that of putting back into play “in reverse motion” the exchange proposed by the Dogon to Marcel Griault (or, rather, by Marcel Griault to the Dogon – France was the occupying power -). So, they told him the cosmogony, vocally by an old blind Ogotemmeli hunter, in exchange for a “price” deemed equal on both parts. This was in great demand by white ethnology so that afterwards he made his fortune at home and, at the same time, offered the Dogon in exchange; profitable future ties with the Occident, with France in particular. From that moment on, a flood of ethnologists, tourists, unidentifiable researchers, such as myself, etc. would arrive at the cliffs bringing a semblance of well-being – but only for a few, in this very poor region, one of the poorest in the world.
I also said that my work as a composer and sound artist had an “anthropological” character but not being myself in any way an anthropologist I would have to perhaps choose a sustainable way to maintain and develop this character. The only way that came to my mind later was that of putting into play, ironically, a “parody of an anthropological expedition,” representing the adventures of Marcel Griault and Ogotemmeli in the land of Dogon.
What would happen if, seventy years later, it would be me to offer my personal and subjective musical cosmogony, without any vague commercial or pedagogical desire, simply placing a CD player on the table, putting it at everybody’s disposal and seeing if would interest anybody?
Certainly comparing the cosmogony of a nation to a subjective one, put together in a few years by a young musician might appear arrogant if you don’t consider the fact that it’s a game, a ritual of revelation and irony.

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The devil. When the Dogon say “the devil” they mean twisters made by the wind or even the empty eye at the whirlwind’s center. An area of emptiness where it’s best not to enter. They mean absence. Empty space. Or somewhere else. Often it’s the silence in the music. Something that’s missing.

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One day I went with Solo for a walk on the cliffs. “Did you bring the camera?” he asked. “No,” I replied. “If you didn’t bring the camera, it’s not worth going. Let’s not go.” “But I’m taking my eyes!” “It’s not the same thing, it’s not worth it, we’re not going without the camera.” The Dogon ask for payment for every photograph taken in the villages, a way of distributing the tourists’ money.

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It’s difficult to pose the question: “Can you sing what you’re listening to?” if “sing” refers to the same action as a man singing a traditional song, or he’s trying to imitate a Henri Chopin track. Consequently singing a traditional song with Japan noise or a Henri Chopin track playing at full volume in your ears without differentiating is, from Ouaganamon’s perspective, correct. It concerns “singing” and therefore also imitation is a song, the traditional song equaling imitation. In the case of Ouaganamon, it was he to propose a metaphorical connection to me: the sound he was listening to reminded him of the rain, therefore if I ask him to imitate it, he begins to sing a song that “talks about” the rain. What does it mean to imitate? Imitation is always a process of distortion of information, at least when it doesn’t happen in the digital domain where the dispersion of data equals zero and every copy is perfectly matches the original. But for a human being things aren’t like that. To imitate insinuates filtering through ones own perspective. It’s for this reason that the “wireless telephone” continues to appear to me an inexhaustible font of ideas and is, for that reason, the compositional process of “African Feedback,” which is based on a cycle of imitation, repetition, superimposition, inversion, and stratification. Just as Ibe obliterated the difference between socialized listening and individual listening, with Ouaganamon I had the nasty feeling that he wasn’t feeling anything. Despite the fact that the sound, as sound waves, was surely reaching him, striking his eardrums with a certain violence even (the volume was high), I found myself thinking that he wasn’t perceiving anything. In the same way that our ears filter sound elements that we instinctively judge as extraneous to concentrating on the “message” – the crackling of the radio, the scratching sound of dust on an old LP – I had the sensation that all the sounds coming from the headphones was being blocked out entirely. It was not understandable, recognizable or able to be decodified by any cultural code and thus stopped existing and disappeared.

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...je ne suis plus homme, je suis être imaginaire. L'être du diable, c'est de n'etre pas. S'il existait, ce ne serait qu'un pauvre diable. Ce qui rend un homme diabolique, c'est le fait qu'il ai perdu son âme. On guette, on sent venir l'evenement tragique mais il n'est jamais present ...
I am no longer a man, I am an imaginary being.. The being of the devil, that is, not being. If he existed, he would only be a poor devil. That which renders man diabolical is the fact that he has lost his soul. We watch for, we feel the tragic event approaching but it never arrives…
(Yambo Ouloguem - Devoir de Violence).

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Up to this point still no one had asked me why I was doing this job. I started to be perturbed and decided to pose the question myself and the end of the interviews: Is it possible that nobody was surprised? That nobody wanted to know any more?

I’m making an edition of cassettes with “African Feedback.” The price will be calculated on the basis of a median income of the country where the cassette is sold. If the cassette is sold in Mali, the price will equal about 2 euros. In Germany the cassette will be sold rather for 518 euros. (The figure is obtained by bringing the median income in Mali, which is 183 euros per year and in Germany where it comes to 47,450 euros. The ratio is 1:259).
I mean to give copies for free to those that participated in the tapings, selling copies in African markets and others in Europe. The proceeds will be shared 50/50 between the participants and myself.

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Given the unconditional respect for elders that is in force in the village, often the reply I got was: “I’m not the right person who can tell you anything about this music.” For this the dynamic was the same everywhere. What a pain.

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I don’t want to ask experts, who would be the experts concerning these questions?
In reality I could ask anybody…as far as I’m concerned, nobody is more qualified than anybody else to say anything about music. Music is for everybody, isn’t it? Isn’t the assumption, therefore, is that anybody can comment about music? This is at least what I thought at the beginning of the project.

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Why go to Africa? I wanted to do the same work with my friends in Berlin and in Northern Italy. Experimental music is usually pretty incomprehensible also over here.

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During the trip I never had the desire to listen to the “preferred” CDs that I brought along and was making the people listen to every day. And there was certainly time… I was completely absorbed by African music and by the voices of my interlocutors.

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During the composition, in Paris, it never happened that I wanted to insert “African” elements: jagged rhythms, dance rhythms, songs with vocal explanations. Everything came back rarified and whispered. Feedback. Way back.

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And if, however, music wasn’t for everybody? Every music has its context. If experimental music doesn’t “strike” in the West, well, that’s our problem.

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During the composition of “African Feedback” I realized I couldn’t do away with long times. Just like it was long to wait for reactions on the part of my “informers” while they were listening and I was taping. Sometimes they wouldn’t say anything at all for minutes, I felt the weight of the microphone, it hurt to hold my arm up. Often in Africa nothing happens. You wait.

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The recounting is always based on a difference. They tell you about something that you don’t know. Or perhaps the exact contrary is true: They are only capable of telling you what you already know?

... One month is very little. In one month in Africa I didn’t understand anything. Perhaps I understood something afterwards? While I was there all I did was work. I didn’t ask myself many questions, I simply followed to the letter the work that was given to me: Have them listen to experimental music and record their reactions.

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Common places: music is a universal language.

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The experimental music scene in the West. The so-called “avant-garde.” Is it seen it as the “cultural minority” rather than as the “diamond point” of civilization? “Certainly” many would respond. Continuing to think the contrary.

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To make computer music you need electricity.
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During the compositional process in Paris, Africa took back on a spectral character. It briefly did not exist. Either Africa didn’t exist or it’s experimental music that doesn’t exist. Anyway something was missing. The question of absence appeared central. The Western aesthetic paradigm is based on judgment, on the fact that something is “beautiful” or “ugly” (a recycling of the categories of good and evil); the existence of the object is never up for discussion. Here the ante’s been upped. Judgment is not being exercised: if the object cannot be recognized for having simply disappeared.
After two weeks spent on the composition, something strange happened. The voices completely disappeared from the piece. Was it me, who in the fury of listening could no longer hear them? Or was it the piece that went off on a tangent and no longer had anything to do with the trip, with Africa, with the feedbacks, etc., but only with “my music”?
OK, at this point the problem of the “specter” is resolved. Africa exists; it’s a real but distant place. My music also exists. The distance is made tangible.