Listening to the Echoes of the South Atlantic Listening to the Echoes of the South Atlantic | Page 26

through multisensory, interdisciplinary works, including sound-based installations
and sculptures.
Through extensive research of African diaspora histories, mythologies and
cosmologies Hoyt transforms existing objects such as boxing gloves, burnt electric
guitars, used vinyl records, guitar plectrums, and hair picks into thought-provoking
works with a strong political undertone. When he isn’t busy mining the cultural
archives of his life (literally and figuratively) he also draws and paints. His installations
and sculptures are accompanied by self-composed sonic texts (soundscapes), which
he aptly describes as a form of sonic cartography, employed to map out historical and
fantastical Afro-futuristic Black Atlantic journeys – what he refers to as the voyage
from slave ship to spaceship.
Satch Hoyt’s long-term research project Afro-Sonic Mapping, initiated in 2016 and
supported by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), is worthy of a detailed description,
particularly in terms of how it conveys the importance of musical migrations within
the Black Atlantic and involves highly innovative collaborations with musicians
throughout the Atlantic triangle.
The project will continue to map the sonic associations, transformations and
performances of the Afro-Sonic Signifier in diverse Transnational African
Diaspora contemporary communities, within the context of colonial
bombardments and transatlantic migrations. With a defined focus on its
resonances in our current post-colonial time, Afro-Sonic Mapping links the
unchartered waters of anthropological field recordings to the contemporary
urban frequencies of Kinshasa, Luanda, Salvador de Bahia, London,
Kingston, New York, Los Angeles and New Orleans. Sonic Mapping is a
tool to perceive and understand the existence and migrations of the ‘Eternal
Migration of the Afro-Sonic Signifier’.
The first  Afro-Sonic Mapping  journey was intrinsically focused on the
investigation of music recorded in the late 19th and early 20th century by
pioneering European anthropologists. Some of this material, which has been
digitized and is currently housed in the Berliner Phonogramm Archiv, was
recorded in the area currently known as the Democratic Republic of Congo
and Angola.
As I travelled this journey, I brought copies of this music, along with other
early field recordings, and connected with cross-generational musicians,
academics and culture makers to revisit and decode the essence of these
recordings. The rhythm patterns are of prime interest; this journey aimed to
prove that these very same beats are employed in various current music genres
throughout the Transnational African Diaspora and in many popular music
styles globally.
The phonograph recordings were a source of inspiration in the process of
creating new music with traditional and contemporary musicians. This
process of connection, analysis and performance was repeated in each of the
locations visited in this first  Afro-Sonic Mapping  (i.e. Luanda, Salvador de
Bahia, and Lisbon). The research aims to reveal the eternal migration patterns
of these pre-middle passage codes of music as a cyclic phenomenon. The local
contemporary dance styles and fashion trends in all the destinations visited
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were likewise documented and filmed.
Whether Satch Hoyt is performing with the band Burnt Sugar, The Arkestra Chamber
at The Apollo Theatre in Harlem, playing the flute freestyle with a group of seasoned
jazz musicians at The Music Box in New Orleans, or conducting fifteen women from
Cali, Colombia for the live performance Hair Combing Cycle 1530, he is not only
mapping Afro-Sonics, he is connecting bodies through innovative collaborations
that bring Black musical and cultural history to the front and center of contemporary
space. With Hair Combing Cycle 1530 the hair pick becomes a musical instrument
and the act of combing is an act of resistance, nowhere more eloquently described
than by Fred Moten in his essay about Hoyt’s performance:
A comb is like a harp, in this regard, and a symphony of combs is a symphony
of psalms insofar as the comb is sung to by the hair it pulls, screamed at by
what it teases. Its plucking is basic, out of the depths, so you can hear the harm
in harmony. Combing is ritual chanting of the psalter, a song of a song of
ascents in descents and dissent, ours only because it’s not and gone, out from
under the proper and the private doubling one another in brutal redundancy,
knotted in praise of the general tangle, I and I against I fanned out in flamed
amazement and shook foil, shining ire in the fringe between comb and hair,
the teeth of freedom iterative and irritant, itinerant, unacquired, fluted as the
exteroceptively interoceptive instrument that knows all Satch’s stops, as he
would wish, his genius their iration, his arrangement of them anarranging all
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of him and all as some gilt white roses.