Ncontrast magazine - Visual Sounds section - theme: Diaspora.

In today’s globalized world, music has distanced itself from the human migrations and is assuming its own diasporas: endless and complex exchanges that go beyond the mixing of two cultures. Each musician, but also each person, is a land of arrival and departure. Sounds and techniques leave the limits of the material and, either as simple information or as personal sensitive expressions, travel permanently, creating new communities.

In the case of musicians like Panda Bear, Gang Gang Dance, Black Dice or High Places, this movement goes even further. Everything in their music seems to come from fading countries and cultures: xamanism, paraphernalia, reverb, dislocated sounds. And everything seems to reach out for a somewhere new: traditional instruments from Polynesia, China or Africa, treated as samples, become embedded in a fluid yet organic electronic music that aims for eternity.

The way through which these bands take familiar sounds out of their context and work them in new musical structures gives the impression that their music has no fixed roots. It’s as if the sounds got together in a journey of uprooting, in a ever-going search for a new unity. All of them travel with the musician, and in the act of listening, they also implicate us in their conflicts, creating a distance or a sense of identification and connection. They take us with them on their diaspora.

This progressive sonority that mixes conflict and harmony shows that the essence of these songs is not the departure or the arrival but the diaspora itself. Seated on choirs of comfort or batered by glitches of uncertainty, together we look for the promised land.

The festivity, the contemplated beauty, the unexpected fright and the ecstasy of communion that are lived during the listening of these bands seem to translate the contemporary experience of unlimited sharing as well as the blurring of cultural diasporas. What is searched here is a common culture in permanent mutation and what is felt is that now we all are members of the same diaspora, eager travelers on our way to a hyper-world.