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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