Album title: Chromesthesia: the Colour of Sound Vol. 1

Release date: Friday 8 November 2024

Formats: Digital & Vinyl

Label: Chromesthesia

Live: 9 Nov 2024, Le Guess Who? 13-hour durational performance

TRACKLIST

1. MANGROVE / Deena Abdelwahed | Nick León | Julmud
2. ETERNIDAD / Nick León | Baby Cocada | Kelman Duran
3. TOOTSIE'S / 3Phaz | KUKII (fka Lafawndah)
4. ZAMALEKY / Sho Madjozi | Double Zuksh
5. AJE (ME LLAMA LA CALLE) / Dj Babatr feat. Oshaz
6. SUCIO / Dj Babatr | LYZZA
7. TIME ON / Gaika | Cõvco | Lord Tusk
8. DARK OUT / Maurice Louca | Kelman Duran | Asher Gamedze | Hannah Elsisi
9. INFINITE:REGRESS INTO FUTURES PAST / Lamin Fofana

CREDITS

• Creative & Music Director/ Executive Producer: Hannah Elsisi
• Creative Producer: Sarah El Miniawy (Simsara Music)
• Mastering: Heba Kadry
• Cover Art Direction: Cõvco
• Cover Artwork and Design: Kim Coussée
• Gatefold, Inner Sleeve and Additional Design: Valerie Arif, Bethany Andrezjak
• Inner Sleeve Text “Dark Out”: Hannah Elsisi

• “Dark Out” Mixing: Radwan Ghazi Moumneh (additional mixing by Heba Kadry)
• “Tootsie’s” Additional Vocal Mixing: Nightfeelings
• “Dark Out” vocals recorded by Lucas Mendes (Noatune, London), Safi el-Kebir (G-Space Gouna)
• Recorded in Miami, Ramallah, Tunis, LA, London, Cairo, Paris, Johannesburg, Caracas, Amsterdam, Berlin, Cape Town, NYC, Hurghada

In its first of more-to-come iterations, Chromesthesia will launch its inaugural compilation mapping centuries of movement, resistance, and creolite as they have been inscribed in sound. From Rio to Cairo, Miami to Kampala - Chromesthesia probes the audiopolitics of diaspora, tracking soundscapes of errantry and migration along 20 sites of what Elsisi calls The Whole Mangrove World.

The Global Mangrove Archipelago pulses with sound. Dancehall and Baile Funk, Amapiano to Dembow, Mahragan and Raptor House, Jizan to Jazz – these sounds, forged through intergenerational exchange and displacement, define the global rhythms of our time. Who controls these sounds? How does music intersect with rights? What does belonging mean in our globalised soundscape?

Any look at the musical charts, or “hit parade”, of the last two decades reveals the music of the world today to be: Afrobeat, Dancehall, Baile Funk, Cumbia, Reggaeton, Shatta (forged in intergenerational interactions between Central and West-African rhythms used by enslaved populations to communicate with each other in the mangrove forests of the Caribbean and South America, before later migratory movements, both forced and voluntary, transported these sounds back across the shorelines of the Mexican Gulf to North America); Mahragan “Electro-Shaabi”) and Arabic Trap-Bow (forged in intergenerational interactions between afro-islamic musicking rituals of North and East Africa and the Gulf: Bahri, Gnawa, Singeli, Zar); and the hip-hop, drill, grims, punk and noise of the world’s colonial metropoli.

From the Mexican to the Persian Gulf, the Atlantic to the Med, the global rhythms of our times archive over a millennium of African and afro-descendant musicking on the move. In reprising the interaction of longue-durée African migratory patterns with more recent movements of migration across these bodies of water, Chromesthesia centres the sonic and sensory rites (rituals of song, dance, music and performance) in which racialised labour groups have forged an imagined sense of local and global community. The popular music of the twenty-first century is virtually impossible without shared global experiences of migration and displacement due to war, climate change, economic collapse, and gender violence, among other factors. In other words, ‘the hit parade’ is shot through with power. Who gets hit for making a song? Whose songs become hits?

Chromesthesia tracks these movements through the idea of sonic rights: the right to sing, dance and play. Elsisi flips the script on politics through a sonic lens:

“Chromesthesia investigates politics as the power to be heard – to sing this song, to bang that beat – as it chafes against the right to be heard – the legislation of acceptable and hegemonic speech. The two, often, do not go hand in hand: cultural enfranchisement has not always translated into political representation. But precisely because music needs no permission, it can sound the horn of liberation. Music, then, is an archive of political power, expressed otherwise. Sitting with that sonic archive it becomes possible to make audible what written history has silenced: joy in community crying out from the deepest of enclosures; immense power as against impossible violence. The rhythms of the mangrove world are held out to be blasted out LOUD.”

NOTES TO EDITORS

About Chromesthesia & Hannah Elsisi

Dr. Elsisi, an award-winning social and intellectual historian with a PhD in History from Oxford University, brings a unique perspective to this project. Her academic work and two forthcoming books (2025/2026) focus on global histories of gendered, carceral, and capitalist regimes of power and subjectivity. Chromesthesia combines this background with a life-long involvement in London and Cairo’s underground music scenes and various activist movements.

Elsisi co-heads a Research Centre at NYU called Mangrove where different faculties from linguistics to drama investigate the languages, ecologies, sounds and aesthetics of migration. Her own project within that, Chromesthesia, explores a millennium of history undergirding Afro-descendant electronic music, from electro-shaabi to Amapiano, Raptor House to Reggaeton. A curious case on the docket of the US supreme court started it all for Hannah, from there the project developed through a series of workshops and residencies bringing musicians together to explore the shared histories of their sonic influences and some of the larger issues that music highlights today from the future of artificial intelligence and intellectual property to the relationship between cultural representation and political power. Culminating in an exhibition, film, open access archive, a 12-hour durational performance and a series of records: with the first volume scheduled for release on November 8, 2024.

To celebrate the release, a spectacular (touring) 13-hour performance featuring over 20 acts will take place in Utrecht, the Netherlands at Le Guess Who? Festival (7-10 November) this year. Le Guess Who? invited Elsisi to curate the festival and commissioned her to direct a marathon non-stop performance telling a millennium of afro-descendent musicking and migration. The full line-up of over 20 acts includes Sho Madjozi, Yaya Bey, Jowee Omicil and Lamin Fofana and four newly commissioned pieces from the likes of Betsayda Machado & Babatr and Nick León. A veritable dream team includes the Congolese Natisa Exoce on choreography and the dutch-born Sudanese maverick Tarik Barri on Audiovisual design.

FOR COMPILATION PREVIEWS, INTERVIEW REQUESTS AND MORE INFORMATION CONTACT SARAH@SIMSARA.ME