This Ain’t No Archive, It’s An Echo: Black Womanhood and Sonic Identity

-- By SelahWilliams - 25 May 2025

A Bird’s-Eye View

“The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is: it’s to imagine what is possible.” In Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, bell hooks does not simply reflect on artistic practice, but invites us to examine the labor of creation itself. Whether using analog synths, hardware samplers, or digital audio workstations, Black women create alternate realities through musical composition. Their work bears the imprint of multiple traditions, including Afrofuturism, but resists being contained within any single frame. In the droning hum of synths or the abrupt disjunctions of a chopped sample, we don’t just hear sound, we hear lives reassembled against erasure.

Sonic Fiction

Kodwo Eshun offers a crucial lens for understanding this creative labor. In his work, More Brilliant than the Sun, he describes “sonic fiction” as a way of thinking about music not as narrative in the traditional sense, but as an engine of speculative history and an imagined future encoded in sound. Sonic fiction rejects the idea that sound must follow linear time or conventional meaning. Instead, it amplifies what Eshun calls “chronopolitics,” or music that plays with time as a way of rewriting reality.

Consider keiyaA’s Forever, Ya Girl. The album opens with low, woozy synth pads, punctuated by erratic hi-hats and choral loops, an unmistakable signature of the Roland SP-404 sampler she often performs with. The sound is warm, almost analog in its grain, yet unpredictable in form. Or take Jlin’s Black Origami: hyper-percussive, disorienting, and composed almost entirely of polyrhythmic drum samples she arranges using FL Studio’s step sequencer. The kicks and claps don’t fall into familiar 4/4 time, but stutter forward like mechanical incantation.

What these artists create isn’t a backdrop. It’s architecture. The synth patches keiyaA layers, reminiscent of the Yamaha DX7’s crystalline tones, aren’t just mood-setting; they mark a shift in agency. These aren’t love songs or party tracks. They are sonic theses which are full of silence, distortion, and resistance. L’Rain’s Fatigue, for instance, opens with voice memos and noise, folding her own sampled breath into looping guitar and synth lines. This is music that asks you to dwell in discomfort and to hear subjectivity where it’s not supposed to be.

The Black Woman and the Machine

The SP-404 is not just a sampler; it is a site of invention, often used by artists like keiyaA to layer vocals, pitch-shift harmonies, and produce grainy textures that gesture toward lo-fi soul and gospel. The Elektron Digitakt and MPC Live are rhythm composers, but in the hands of artists like Suzi Analogue and others, they become tools of polyrhythmic play. Ableton Live, Max/MSP, and modular synth racks allow artists like Moor Mother to sculpt noise, distortion, and time-stretched archival material into landscapes of refusal.

These machines aren’t neutral. Their interfaces encourage certain, more rigid, musical behaviors like grids, loops, and quantization, but artists bend them, break them, and rewrite their logic. What emerges is not just sound, but form: new vocabularies of feeling and new architectures of experience.

Fugitive Technologies

In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the lives of Black women who defy the expectations imposed upon them by colonialism, patriarchy, and the state. These women, often labeled as “wayward,” are seen as deviant or unruly because they refuse to conform to conventional norms of respectability. For Hartman, these "wayward" lives are not lives of disarray, but rather lives of radical possibility and self-determination. In the case of Black women’s engagement with electronic music, sound itself becomes an act of resistance, much like the “wayward” lives Hartman writes about. In the context of electronic music, the refusal to adhere to traditional musical forms, often by manipulating technology and sound in non-conventional ways, mirrors the subversion Hartman describes.

This manipulation of tools is also a manipulation of law. Sampling, a cornerstone of electronic music, is always shadowed by copyright. Clearing a sample costs money and demands permission. Many independent artists simply can’t afford it, and so they develop evasive strategies: heavy manipulation, use of public domain material, or a refusal to disclose sources. Moor Mother layers distorted fragments of civil rights speeches, jazz, and noise so thickly that the origin becomes illegible. L’Rain processes vocal samples until they are indistinguishable from synth drones or field recordings.

This practice isn’t accidental. It is tactical. It is a form of legal evasion and a mode of world-building, rejecting the frameworks of authorship and ownership that exclude Black women and other marginalized creators.

Infrastructure and Autonomy

Engaging in this kind of artistry requires Black women to circumvent more conventional publication routes. Independent collectives and labels like Never Normal Records and Discwoman aren’t just curators but protectors of creative freedom. They often forgo restrictive publishing contracts, support licensing experiments like Creative Commons, and build artist-owned infrastructure. Their work challenges the traditional industry model that demands conformity for survival.

Here, legal and business choices are extensions of sonic practice. The decision to publish through a small collective rather than a major label is a compositional one. Every beat, every contract, and every software tweak becomes a site of invention.

Conclusion

To engage with Black women’s experimental electronic music is to engage a complex ecosystem of machines, histories, legal codes, and futures. These artists stretch the limits of sound not for novelty, but for liberation. Their creations embody the work of imagining what is possible and creating the future heard before it arrives.

They are composing lives in fragments, stitching together survival from circuits and samples. They build futures not in theory, but in practice: in the kick drum that refuses the grid, in the synth drone that dissolves the present, and in the law they bend to protect their sound.

Notes

Eshun, Kodwo. More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. Quartet Books Limited, 1998.

Hartman, Saidiya V. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. First edition. New York, NY, W.W. Norton & Company, 2019.

hooks, bell. Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations. Routledge Classics, 2012.

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This Ain’t No Archive, It’s An Echo: Black Womanhood and Sonic Identity

-- By SelahWilliams - 20 Feb 2025

A Bird’s-Eye View

In contemporary music, Black women have continuously redefined and expanded the boundaries of sound, using their voices, bodies, and technologies to create sonic landscapes that challenge traditional conceptions of identity. Afrofuturism, as a cultural and artistic movement, provides a critical framework for understanding how Black women use music, especially electronic and experimental genres, to forge new identities and futures. Through their engagement with technology, specifically machines and electronic tools, Black women are able to reclaim and reimagine what it means to exist, both in the present and in speculative futures. These sonic practices work as both acts of resistance and expressions of Black futurity.

Afrofuturism for Sonic Exploration

Afrofuturism is a lens through which Black people, particularly Black women, explore alternative realities and futures. Emerging in the late 20th century, Afrofuturism combines science fiction, speculative fiction, and Black cultural expressions to envision new possibilities that reject the limitations of the present. For Black women, Afrofuturism offers a platform to envision identities beyond the constraints of colonialism, patriarchy, and racial capitalism. In the context of sonic exploration, Afrofuturism becomes a means to experiment with new soundscapes, technologies, and narratives.

Kodwo Eshun’s concept of “sonic fiction” illustrates the potential of sound as a tool for building new realities. In his seminal work More Brilliant than the Sun, Eshun argues that sound, and by extension electronic music, functions as a form of storytelling that can break from traditional narrative structures. For Black women, sonic exploration becomes a way to create speculative worlds—worlds in which they are central, in control, and free from historical oppression. As Eshun suggests, sound is not merely an aesthetic form but a vehicle for creating alternative identities and futures.

The Black Woman and the Machine

Historically, technology has been a site of both marginalization and empowerment for Black communities, particularly Black women. Electronic music, with its emphasis on machines and digital tools, allows Black women to not only engage with technology but to master it and reshape it to suit their own needs. Instruments such as synthesizers, drum machines, and digital audio workstations (DAWs) become not just tools for music production but extensions of the self—an embodiment of Black women’s creative agency.

For Black women, using machines to create sound is a way to reclaim technology from a history of exploitation and control. Drum machines and samplers, often associated with electronic genres like techno, house, and hip-hop, allow Black women to manipulate sound in ways that challenge traditional modes of musical production. These machines become instruments of power, granting Black women the ability to control the sonic landscape and, by extension, their own narratives.

Fugitive Sound

In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the lives of Black women who defy the expectations imposed upon them by colonialism, patriarchy, and the state. These women, often labeled as “wayward,” are seen as deviant or unruly because they refuse to conform to conventional norms of respectability. For Hartman, these "wayward" lives are not lives of disarray, but rather lives of radical possibility and self-determination. In the case of Black women’s engagement with electronic music, sound itself becomes an act of resistance, much like the “wayward” lives Hartman writes about. In the context of electronic music, the refusal to adhere to traditional musical forms—often by manipulating technology and sound in non-conventional ways—mirrors the subversion Hartman describes. These Black women’s sonic practices act as a radical reimagining of identity, much as the wayward lives are a reimagining of societal expectations.

Hartman’s notion of “beautiful experiments”—unpredictable and disruptive acts of Black self-expression—aligns with the experimental nature of electronic music. Just as the wayward lives in Hartman’s book create new forms of Black existence outside of traditional structures, Black women in electronic music use sound as a space to experiment with who they are and what they might become. The "waywardness" of their sonic practices opens up new futures and spaces for self-definition, challenging both patriarchal and colonialist histories. These experimental sounds become not just a form of personal liberation but an affirmation of Black womanhood that defies societal constraints.

Black Political Imagination and Sonic Practices

Shana Redmond’s work on Black political imagination underscores the role of music as a tool for political expression and social change. Redmond argues that music is not merely an aesthetic pursuit but a crucial component of Black political movements, linking sonic practices to broader struggles for justice and equality. For Black women, electronic music becomes a space where the personal and the political intersect. The sounds they create are not only expressions of selfhood but acts of resistance that challenge systemic oppression. Redmond’s focus on the connection between music and political imagination illuminates how Black women use electronic music to expand their political and social possibilities. The futures imagined in their music are not just speculative; they are a call for change, a vision of what could be if Black women were free to shape their own destinies. Electronic music, as a subversive form of artistic expression, reflects larger struggles for Black autonomy and self-determination.

Conclusion

Through their engagement with electronic music and sound, Black women have developed a powerful tool for identity-building and resistance. The relationship between Black women and machines, framed through the lens of Afrofuturism, allows for the creation of sonic landscapes that challenge historical narratives and offer new possibilities for the future. By integrating the theoretical perspectives of Kodwo Eshun, Daphne Brooks, Shana Redmond, and Saidiya Hartman, it becomes clear that Black women’s sonic exploration is not just an artistic practice but a form of political imagination and resistance. As Black women continue to use technology to expand the boundaries of their identities, they are crafting new futures that are more liberatory, creative, and autonomous.

Notes

Eshun, Kodwo. More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. Quartet Books Limited, 1998.

Hartman, Saidiya V.. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. First edition. New York, NY, W.W. Norton & Company, 2019.

Redmond, Shana L. Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora. NYU Press, 2014. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qfdpd. Accessed 19 Feb. 2025.

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