I use the term “black
semiotics” as an unofficial DIY poetic and political speculative diagram in
the form of an affective cartography (or a spaced out grammar) of musical
signs, sounds, indices, affects and feelings which can be located and/or
perceived spatially and temporally, simultaneously, in the inner spaces of
songs (or sounds) and on the outside in the air. This gesture shall be
understood as a possibility to engage with distinct modes of subjectivation and
processes of sublimation - as a sonic metaphor for talking about forms of
musicality, improvisation and sensibility (or for speculating upon physical, ethereal
and sensorial qualities encountered in the act of ‘composing’ – including an exploration of social and psycho
conditions for creation and an examination of forms of pre-industrialized,
serialized or capitalized processes) of any musical material; obscure, overlooked or popular - and also as
a political-aesthetic expression of resistance in relation to distinct hegemonic
musical scenes or sonic contexts both internally and externally in the ‘world
territory’ to use a jargon present in standardized music industry contracts.
In
this regard, an electronic clap in the syntax of a programmed rhythm pattern in
a song; a small sound fragment of a sampled syllable such as “ai” taken from the phrase “ai
amor” for example - doubled or duplicated as a an unstable sonic interval
produced by hitting two different notes on a cheap sampling keyboard - or an
entire song as a wave form in a
computer screen or an ‘artist’ in flesh or virtually (well-placed or displaced
in any territory) or in name (a group, a collective or an entity or intensities
in the plane of consistency) in relation of reciprocity or not with other
artists, groups, collectives or sonic expressions and experiences - may be felt, lived, read, translated and transformed inter-semiotically (as) and (into) new components of a
sexually-charged reflexive automatic musico-writing improvisation to invent
and/or generate new unfixed ramifications, associations, and other singular
relations between forms, substances, expressions and contents. The concept of black
semiotics, thus, is thought in the context of this manifesto in terms of sonic,
psycho-social, spatial and temporal relations which are not fixed or unified as
discourse. These ‘signs’ may act randomly and inappropriately in the
articulation of a displaced black-latino-brown-caboclo-mestizo poetic
event for reading other semiotic processes and encounters in the ‘world
territory’. These relations of movement can be thought in terms of active
foreign voices against dominant narratives and are able to provide other
contexts for the production, reception and appreciation of a multiplicity of
intensities, presences and sonic landscapes. In this sense, Brazilian post punk,
funk carioca and other tropicalized moments – be they visible musical genres or
intrinsic forms of musicality (you might think of numerous examples such as
samba canção, bossa nova, pagode, samba de breque, partido alto, or
Tropicalismo, Vanguarda Paulista, electropop, synth pop, punk, pop Rock or even
Afro-Brazilian religious such as Camdomble, Macumba or any other syncretic
ritual both in terms of musicality or specific genre categories if you like) -
can be read both as separated and relational components, assemblages, processes
and ideological ‘signs’ of what we call
Black Semiotics. In practice, these relations of production of materiality,
semiotic immateriality, incorporeality, historicity and subjectivity have been
serving an equally active, resistant and foreign ‘deterritorialized’ black
market for a number of years.
Labels: affect, aural affection, black semiotics, black-latino-brown-caboclo-mestizo, bruno verner, camdomble, dada globe orixas, fiction, poetics, subjetivation, tetine
