Dear reader,
Before you read the text below – every story has a prequel – here are a few words about how this text came to be. It started with an invitation from Elise to dubravka: either to interview Farida or to write a text about her performance at the 2024 transmediale festival. dubravka is not a musician (and has no ambition to become one). Still, she is a passionate music listener, and for her, listening to music, especially at live concerts, is a spiritual experience. When Elise invited dubravka to take part in transmediale’s discursive programme, dubravka was particularly pleased because that would finally give her a long-yearned-for chance to hear Farida live.⁠1 Anyway, this short but long digression is to say that dubravka would never have agreed to write this text had Elise not agreed to bring dejana on board, too. dejana, dubravka’s sister, is a musician. She performs and creates composed and improvised music. She, too, is a passionate music listener and was lucky to have listened to a few of Farida’s live performances in Brussels, where she lives. This text, therefore, became a space in which d and d were, for the first time, asked to do something together. Initially imagined as a three-way conversation with Farida, it became something – as you will read – like a study of and for listening together to and with Farida (and hopefully a preparation for a future occasion for conversation with Farida herself).⁠2 As we commit to this study and to sharing our conversation, we intentionally remove in the text any sense in which “I” is either of “d” (dejana or dubravka) because, in the process, they overcome the trap of “I”. And, of course, the idea of study as a way to be in relation with others comes from Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. We extend this study from our couches and text messages outwards to others “who dwell in a different compulsion [...] who speak through bars, or speak in tongues” because “these other ones have a passion to tell you what they have found, and they are surprised you want to listen, even though they’ve been expecting you. Sometimes the story is not clear, or it starts in a whisper.”⁠3

Farida’s performance began in a determined whisper. Seeing the stage almost entirely cloaked in darkness, with just a spotlight on the place the performer(s) would inhabit, evoked a sense of respect, an appeal to listen to the silence. A palate-cleansing for the ear before the start of the performance. From the shadows, almost unnoticeably, Farida Amadou surfaced into the light. In the calmness, this slight movement was immediately noticed by some eager audience members who were conditioned to begin to applaud. A whistle or two pierced through. Farida responded with a soft hand gesture and a simple bowing of the head in acknowledgement. A kind of shuushhh. A hand gesture that ever so politely said, “Wait, wait, wait, wait… not yet… keep still… give the silence space. Listen. Listen to how the sound rises.”

She swiftly sets herself into position; making the initial sound, she frees the voice of the bass; she lays the instrument in her lap and sets in motion an almost ritualistic rhythm pattern. She summons us into an enchanted sonic world with motherly care and childlike excitement. She is an ancestor from a liberated future who desires to introduce the sound and the music rather than the self. I don’t know if I’m reading her behaviour this way because I like to do this when performing – my first contact with the audience is to introduce the sound, the music, and the piece. Then, if needed, talk. But somehow, seeing her directing and handling her body and body language is exactly how it feels: the desire to draw us into her world, not by explaining it or herself but by letting the sound bring us in. The sound is woven out of herself, her bass guitar, her ancestors, and our ancestors; out of all of us.⁠4

This performance, or rather this first part, is not simply a musician playing a bass guitar. What Farida Amadou offers to the listener is a symbiotically created transintrumentalistic performing entity, an entity that redefines the identity of what an instrument can become under the fingertips and fingernails – and palm and hand and soft mallets and – of a being that does not allow themselves to be restrained by how an instrument, a bass guitar in this case, is ‘supposed’ to be used, but challenges that identity and expands its entire corpus to become sounding material. It is a fascinating experience to listen to a bass guitar played by Farida. At times, there is so much percussiveness to it. But all the percussive playing and slaps and plucks still allow the strings’ vibration to pass. It is also interesting how the instrument – regardless of whether it is held in a conventional or non-conventional way – feels like an extension of her body. But then, with the sound coming through the amp, a kind of trinitarian body comes into play. And we are bouncing on and off the interplay between them, somehow placed inside this body, too. In all the abstractness we face when it comes to sound, this possibility to be between these points creates a different kind of tangibility, a different kind of live performance.

Expanding one’s main instrument – with preparations, with ways of playing, with effects or pedals or electronics, with any adjustments and experimentations that alter its commonly recognisable identity – is a way to develop a transinstrumental performative practice, a practice whereby artists (musicians) work to express ideas and to create in ways that go beyond simply ‘playing’. Surpassing that, they are building transintruments for transcendence: something we should all do with all of our instruments for living today. Liberate them so that they, too, can continue to live. And allow them to liberate us from the imposed canons that tell us what things are ‘supposed’ to sound or be like. A bass guitar, with all the additions and bells and things, together with Farida herself, is a piece of a puzzle in this process. This is not about turning the bass upside down. Maybe it’s about meeting the bass where it was always supposed to be met.

Abolitionists have been thinking about rehearsal and life in rehearsal, extending it from the realm of theatre and music to life – of living as though we are already liberated. Maybe it is because, for those disciplined in the Western canon of music, either as listeners or players, there is the curse of the virtuoso, an exceptional individuated individual separated from the sounding community and performance, fixed as one perfect possibility of interpretation, completed as a closure. I was thinking about the sensation in my body when I was listening to Farida Amadou and Aquiles Navarro in the auditorium of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) and the ways in which the performance drew me to the edge of my seat and how this was because of precision, not separation. This is also to emphasise how Farida is so damn precise in relation to the instrument, which in turn opens up in relation to her body towards new realms and new relations.

What I particularly enjoyed when listening (and relistening) to the recording of the performance at transmediale is the way she layers.⁠5 It is always a surprise where she takes us. Once the sound is there, you are like – yes, this is it! But also, it is about how she layers things. Creating density through various means and coming out of it by using all kinds of sounds – pure sounds, noise sounds, distortion sounds, percussive sounds, slide sounds, bells – not least because it is far more than just the use of (pedal) effects; it is about how she invents and develops the materials. It is not simply her techniques of playing and handling her instrument; it is how the instrument is transformed through her imagination of what it can do and how, together, both herself and the instrument can expand. Sometimes, she layers by decomposing, revealing an element that is within a layer that already exists. There are many examples of this, from the very beginning all the way until the end of the solo and beyond, but there are two aspects of technique that become sonic material that are particularly worthy of attention. The first is hearing the sound Farida makes by sliding her hand and fingers up and down the fretboard.

The second, even more impressive aspect is about finger pressure and percussiveness. There is a strong presence of a consistent, somehow tangible sound, an ongoing rhythm. But then she goes and changes her finger pressure. And it changes everything. By decreasing the pressure of her finger, she reveals a mid-layer of the performer’s perspective – or at least, from my perspective, that so-called “harmonic pressure” – when the finger is only gently touching the string and not fully pressing on it, releasing overtones of sound. The sensation the performer experiences when doing this is to feel more concretely the vibration of the string on their skin, the change of vibration depending on the frequency. This is some middle or even inner state of sound, which gives the performer an intimate, tactile feeling of the sound, perceiving it not just aurally but viscerally. This is some inner layer of the tangible, and she reveals this hidden layer – which is already part of the layer she has laid out – and adds a layer of what exists from the inside. It is ‘already a part of it’ because this kind of pressure is an inevitable moment along the trajectory towards full pressure. So, in a way, it always happens; but usually, it is so brief that the listener’s ear can’t perceive it. But it does happen. By changing her finger pressure, Farida freezes the moment she wants to draw our attention to so that she can generously share it. In this constellation, overtones, which have a high-pitched sound and fragility, become more like an undertone, a backbone of the sound. Farida layers the sound not by adding something new but by unmasking what is already there. Unmasking what is already there reminds us that magic is present – even when it is not obvious at first hearing.

I first listened to Farida in Brussels, but when you mentioned how you came to Farida through Moor Mother, it made me think of other ways of hearing this layering through unmasking; and made me ask myself whether this might also be something that comes from holding space and recognition, not only by speaking against current injustices but by unmasking and making the world conscious and aware of all of the injustices that have been – and that have been silenced for decades. And I wonder further; might that be a conscious or unconscious, intentional or incidental way to, with sound, enact what Camae Ayewa calls a “practice of temporal deprogramming”.⁠6 Nothing is wrong with ‘just’ the enjoyment of sound being the sole driver. Once you and your instrument click and it sounds good, you ride with it and keep on transforming it. And sometimes, or in the best times, it takes you to places you could never have even imagined. And that is an amazing feeling, both as and for a performer and as and for a listener. But often, there are underthoughts that drive you. And I always keep thinking and listening out for that, trying to figure out whether there are certain underthoughts, underlayers that drive the musician. Sometimes, they are there; sometimes, you contribute this extra layer yourself as a listener who brings your own understanding of what you are hearing. It doesn’t mean you are making it up. It is there because you are listening through your own experiences. You might trace connections that the artist might not have directly thought about. But that does not mean they are not there. They are. And they are revealed through the process of listening.

Listening is not only the action of the audience. As a performer, you are also a listener. You listen to yourself. When you play by yourself, you listen to yourself. And you listen to your audience listening to you. And to the space listening to you. And when you play with others, the act of listening multiplies. Listening is always a layered action, but it is even more so in this case. Listening to yourself playing is always a critical – sometimes brutal – action. But it is a way of developing yourself as an artist and musician. Think of it as something of a mixture of Ruggiero Ricci’s and Jacques Rancière’s words on self-learning and being your own best teacher while understanding how important it is to remove your ego and to recognise how precious the process of constantly seeking, searching, and experimenting is. Experimenting is the only way to learn – to learn the (your) right way of doing things the wrong way. At first. And later. Learning, especially self and expression, is a process that is forever ongoing. It is a humbling process. But most rewarding in the long run.

Farida builds spaces with her music. Even when she performs on her own, she is in relation. In the first part of her performance in the HKW, she built a discourse and a space for Aquiles Navarro to enter, in which he immediately sounded like he had always been there. Farida showcases the ways in which music can refuse linear time so that when he started to sing, the HKW resonated as if he was continuing, not starting. Together, they broke open the building built in the 1950s to celebrate the individuated North American way of life.

Maybe it was because the performance was held at the end of the festival that took place during a time of genocide, and/or perhaps because I felt the need for some communion and spiritual relief; I wished we could have been in different spatial relations with Farida and Aquiles. While darkness managed to blur some of the boundaries of the stage and created shadows as an expansion of time and movement, the space in HKW still felt constraining. As listeners, we were placed in a disposition that privileged the ocular – not even the aural – which reduced listening to a passive act concentrated in the head (as if we didn’t listen with our whole bodies). Still, that night, in our bodies, we felt how liberation might feel.

As I write this, I have a tab open on another screen next to me with Farida’s NTS Radio Live performance at a show hosted by NKISI in October 2021.⁠7 In the landing image of that page, she is playing guitar, sitting on the floor next to a large speaker. I think maybe I wanted all of us to have sat on the floor, in a circle around Farida and Aquiles, in communion with our whole bodies – not just our breathing. Maybe that is also why I so appreciated the shadows in the auditorium of the HKW once I had realised that I could watch Farida and Aquiles by watching their shadows and that I was not just opposite them but also between them, closer, responding to the call of music, refusing the separation between myself and the sound, and listening with my whole body. Listening is a way of being in relation to life.

For me, all processes of listening – and listening as a performer – are instrumentally present in Farida’s practice. She is a self-taught bassist. You can feel the deep listening that has happened, and that continues to happen, in each performance she gives. In the very moment she brought her solo at transmediale to a close, there was already space for Aquiles Navarro to enter the performance and the soundworld Farida had established. It was masterful. It seemed complete. But as we learn from Cedric Robinson, via Moten and Harney, completeness is never the goal; it is incompleteness, a capacity to enter in relation with others, that we all strive for in study. Their communication, exchanges, and passing of sound and space to each other showcased the ultimate way of listening, with care for both themselves and the collective. The instant there were the two of them, a new (complete) collective incompleteness occurred.

Only after the performance did Farida Amadou speak briefly to the audience to say thank you. To her musical partner in fugitivity, to the audience, and to the organisers – all equally indispensable actors that made the performance possible. And here, in the end, we return to Moor Mother, whose invitation to perform her album Jazz Codes at the Barbican, just one year before, had introduced Farida and Aquiles to each other. That had been a special performance for Farida, as she stressed in her address, because:

And at that moment, a careful listener in study – which each of us must be, and if we are not yet, can become – can only feel gratitude that on that night of transmediale, the performing listeners generously extended an offer of liberation to us other listeners, inviting us to unlearn training imposed on our ears, mind and body, to the superiority of orthogonal space and even rhythms, and to open them to some other future. As someone privileged to have gained access to the recording of their transmediale performance, listening to it repeatedly in these catastrophic times, Farida, Aquiles, and transinstrumentalism in communion sound like resistance, like a liberation-oriented sonic experience. They are poetry, which, as Don Mee Choi teaches us, is the most effective language of resistance, for “Poetry can defy erasure.”⁠9