Quinobequin
Water-memories of a river
(Audio, 2021)
Listen with your headphones.
"Water carries all of the memory of our planet. That water— it may have started in an ocean, a river, a spring, but then it evaporates into the sky, and it becomes the clouds and then it rains down onto the earth. (…) It has within it all the memories of our planet". (Nana Yvette to Ana-Maurine Lara)
In Quinobequin, I have tried to imagine and listen to the aurality of the river that sources Cambridge’s water supply. Its ecological awareness is hidden by the city’s urban planning and modern modes of interacting with water. Together, they encompass a history of colonization that entails a complex of practices and ruins that still run with the life of water, mediating more than matter. Ana-Maurine Lara has conceptualized this ecological awareness as memory water, an embodied knowledge of chains of life in creole spiritual practices that resist what she names as ‘blood logics’, a cognitive archive of blood purity and violent contamination.
As I imagined possible resurgences and arts of noticing (Tsing 2015) of the cognitive archives (Mazzarella 2018) hidden in the ecocide of modern territorial networks being perpetrated in this river, other territories emerged. The Amazon, currently being devastated by the same blood logics, is thus imbricated in this project as an unconscious daily disturbance, the acknowledgment of its devastation, one of the last frontiers of modernity.
As an ongoing project of modernity that began with the renaming of the landscape and the gradual annihilation of native practices, the river’s colonization resulted in an imbalance of heritages and lack of historical justice that can be sonically perceived. The collective memory of the Charles is muffled; the river is cut by railroads that decide the fixity of its margins, shutting off processes of non-human agency, such as geological erosion, tidal reach and floodplains; its margins are perceived as sites of detached leisure or groundless fear.
Quinobequin is the pre-invasion name of the Charles river. It means ‘meandering’ in Algonquian. This trace of memory informs a compositional methodology for this work, a creative search for past histories of listening (Feld 2015). Becoming aware of the hidden geographies in sonic and pictorial layers is a form of unweaving the threshold of anonymity that was imposed on these waters, getting closer to the shore.
Special thanks to Ernst Karel for advising this project, as well as all the students in his class, Sonic Ethnography. Thanks to Anthony Derveniadis Hernandez for his ears and insight.
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