ListN Up playlists are commissioned by American Composers Forum. Artists are selected by ACF staff (including I CARE IF YOU LISTEN and innova Recordings).
Jessie Cox is Assistant Professor of Music at Harvard University and a scholar of experimental music as well as a composer and drummer who reimagines the world through music. His first monograph Sounds of Black Switzerland: Blackness, Music, and Unthought Voices (Duke UP, 2025) addresses how thinking with blackness and experimental musical practices might afford the opening of new discourses, such as thematizing Black Swiss Life.
Music is, for me, a way to re-imagine and change the world, and this playlist presents pieces that are exemplary of this kind of musical practice. I start and end with two artists who made me come to think music as this kind of force: I start with Charles Uzor, about whose work I have written in my recent book Sounds of Black Switzerland, and end with Afrofuturist pioneer Marshall Allen. Throughout we find unique ways in which musicians ask us, the listeners, to take this task to heart and create a better world through music.
Mothertongue, No. 3: “Fire/Mimicri” by Charles Uzor, Performed by Isabel Pfefferkorn and Ensemble Mothertongue with Rupert Huber
Charles Uzor’s Mothertongue album was a special find for me. Particularly, the works Mothertongue and 8’46” George Floyd in Memoriam keep being on my mind and in my inner musical ear. They present us with questions of migration, belonging, home, existence, and more, raised very critically, and at the same time opening unthought possibilities, all through music.
High Wave by Susie Ibarra and the Dreamtime Ensemble
Thinking about sound and space is uniquely approached in recent Pulitzer Prize winner Susie Ibarra’s fascinating album Walking on Water, which is accompanied by one of my favorite books—Rhythm in Nature. What I love about it is how field recording is not an apparently neutral background, but rather becomes a question of how we carefully musick with nature.
Wind Music by Peyton Pleninger
Peyton Pleninger’s Wind Music continues this trajectory—it is a work that presents a saxophone sound forged in a personal relation with nature. It was made after “daily practice of improvising at the beach, listening to the sound of the wind, the rhythm of the waves.” The work presents Pleninger’s unique approach to the saxophone, rhythm, melodic figures, improvisation, and more.
Palmas by Matük
Matük’s Palmas takes us onto the dancefloor as a critical sonic listening space. Matük’s use of samples and Afro-Latin rhythms presents an imaginative sonic refiguring of the roles of digital and Indigenous technologies of sound.
Antropofagia for Electric Guitar and Ensemble by Arthur Kampela, Performed by Contemporary Insights
Arthur Kampela’s Antropofagia reimagines musical instruments, the musicking ensemble, and the performer’s bodies, all in sound. The challenge to our sensorium, as listeners and performers, is to remain open to ways of inhabiting our own bodies/place in unthought ways. Here a performance by Contemporary Insights.
Liminal Lines by Viola Yip
Viola Yip’s Liminal Lines reimagines the performing, listening, and moving body as well, this time through the “dress” as musical instrument. The liminal sounds of our bodies movement in space as heard and felt through our clothing becomes a radical possibility for cosmic dream-worlding. What if in every little instant of sound lies an infinity not yet heard?
Are You Ready by Marshall Allen
Marshall Allen has pioneered dreaming better worlds through music. And he, and the Arkestra, with Sun Ra, have made “Dreams Come True.” So here is maestro Allen’s Guinness World Records holding album, New Dawn… “Are You Ready?” Where else can we go from here?
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