Member Since: 6/25/2007
Band Website: universalaccessories.homestead.com
Band Members:
..
Music Reviews:
Blacktismal - an enthusiastic genre-crossing instrumental with promise to hit the charts.
Afrofuturism... It's a word that describes an attitude and a way of living.
Dj Instantaneous has concocted a musical production that matches his personality -- willful, whimsical, and encompassing in almost an offhand way all the main strands of the black musical experience.
Instantaneous exudes charisma and a sly wisdom. A lean man to whom the years have been kind, his look is benevolent and ardent at once. He is known to stroll into the audience as he plays/performs, demand that people dance, and flirt with the ladies.
Outside the box, in every sense of phrase, Afrofuturism has little use for music industry categories and conventions. ''I produce cultural music," (Dj) Instantaneous states. ''American music, World music, blues, jazz, African - I continually mix everything together." The foundation of that hodge-podge is noticeably urban and Afrocentric... and arguably rooted in Hip Hop.
This is a cerebral music. Intelligent some may say.
"I wanted to do music, with more cultural roots." (Dj) Instantaneous remarks when asked about the concept behind Afrofuturism. "Thats the ideal behind the CD's (Ep) name; Past, Present & Culture."
The topic of roots comes up all the time with Instantaneous. ''The African connection is a conscious theme," ''I start with Drums," he says, ''rhythms first, that will satisfy old and young audiences, Black or otherwise..." "The beat is the first sound we all hear; inside our Mothers womb. We develop and grow to that rhythm, that beat... we're hooked, addicted to it."
Honestly infectious. The result is a groovy, volatile funk that's liable to veer at any moment into polyrhythms, solo jazz riffs, drum and bass, syncopated beats or call and response.
Afrofuturism in some ways is the epitome of melodic hip-hop. As a hip-hop artists (Dj) Instantaneous understands and embraces the fact he follows great musical traditions, the term Foundation pays homage to such. It seems the next great movement in black music has arrived.
The forthcoming CD (EP) is an immersion in Black musicality, conducted with the realness and authenticity of any inner-city America.
To understand what Black music has been in the past and what kind of future it has, you should listen to (Dj) Instantaneous... you need to hear The Afrofuturism Foundation!
Musician/Dj Supreme Radiant - Professionally Known As: Studio Stan AKA In$tantaneous) and featuring various guest atrist TBA.
The African diaspora is the diaspora created by the movements and cultures of Africans and their descendants throughout the world, to places such as the Americas, (including the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, Central America, and South America) Europe and Asia. Much of the African diaspora is descended from people who were enslaved and shipped to the Americas during the Atlantic slave trade, with the largest population living in Brazil (see Afro-Brazilian).
People
More broadly, the African diaspora comprises the indigenous peoples of Africa and their descendants, wherever they are in the world. Pan-Africanists often also consider other Africoid peoples as diasporic African peoples. These groups include, among others, the Malay Peninsula (Orang Asli),[1], New Guinea,[2] certain peoples of the Indian subcontinent,[3],[4] and the aboriginal peoples of Melanesia and Micronesia.[5]
The African Union has defined the African diaspora as "[consisting] of people of African origin living outside the continent, irrespective of their citizenship and nationality and who are willing to contribute to the development of the continent and the building of the African Union." Its constitutive act declares that it shall "invite and encourage the full participation of the African Diaspora as an important part of our Continent, in the building of the African Union."
Most societies that apply the "black" label on the basis of a person's ancestry justify it as applying to members of the African diaspora. Between 1500 and 1900, approximately four million enslaved African were transported to island plantations in the Indian Ocean, about eight million were shipped to Mediterranean-area countries, and about eleven million were taken to the New World.[1] Their descendants are now found around the globe. Due to intermarriage and genetic assimilation, just who is a descendant of the African diaspora is not entirely self-evident.
References
1. ^ Pier M. Larson, Reconsidering Trauma, Identity, and the African Diaspora: Enslavement and Historical Memory in Nineteenth-Century Highland Madagascar, William and Mary Quarterly 56, no. 2 (1999): 335-62.
2. ^ Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870 (New York, 1997), 793, 804-5.
3. ^ Heather E. Collins-Schramm, et al., "Markers that Discriminate Between European and African Ancestry Show Limited Variation Within Africa," Human Genetics, 111 (September 2002), 566-99.
4. ^ Mark D. Shriver and others, "Skin Pigmentation, Biogeographical Ancestry, and Admixture Mapping," Human Genetics, 112 (2003), 387-99.
5. ^ Harry Hoetink, Caribbean Race Relations: A Study of Two Variants (Lon-don, 1971), xii.
Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity
Crucial to his project are a wide definition of “the sonic†within black cultural production and a belief in the centrality of aurality (and/or orality) to twentieth-century black culture. Weheliye’s engagement with the sounds of black cultural production (sonic Afro-modernity) owes a significant debt to Fred Moten’s In the Break (2003), in which Moten privileges the sonic and aural within black performance and propounds a theory of black culture as inherently performative and black performance as inherently radical.
Surely "the subject" represents one of the more embattled concepts in the recent history of the Anglo-American humanities; structuralist and poststructuralist discourses were almost singularly concerned with dissolving and/or resituating the self-same subject (in some cases putting it under erasure) as it appeared in Western thinking, idealist philosophy in particular. The main thrust of these debates troubled the coherence and unmediated presence of this subject, seeking to displace the subject as the uncontested center in a variety of thought systems, with varying structures (linguistic, anthropological, political, psychic, economic, and so forth), or, in the post structuralist case, rendered visible the fissures, traces, and ruptures contained within and undermining these very structures that enabled the subject's intelligibility, and, therefore, constrained its ability to appear as the center from which all movements flow. If the advent of structuralism and its ensuing post formations provide one of the crucial reformulations of the humanities project since the 1960s, then the coming to the fore of "minority discourses" stands as the other major shift in this...
Dr. Alex Weheliye
Associate Professor of African American Studies and English
Northwestern University
Influences:
Black Music
The afrofuturist approach to music was first propounded by the late Sun Ra. Born in Alabama, Sun Ra's music coalesced in Chicago in the mid-1950s, when he and his Arkestra began recording music that drew from hard bop and modal sources, but created a new synthesis which also used afrocentric and space-themed titles to reflects Ra's linkage of ancient African culture, specifically Egypt, and the cutting edge of the Space Age. Ra's film Space Is the Place shows the Arkestra in Oakland in the mid-1970s in full space regalia, with a lot of science fiction imagery as well as other comedic and musical material.
The afrofuturist cause was taken up in 1976 by George Clinton and his bands The Parliaments and Funkadelic with his magnum opus Mothership Connection and the subsequent The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein and P Funk Earth Tour. In the thematic underpinnings to P-Funk mythology ("pure cloned funk"), Clinton in his alter ego Starchild spoke of "certified Afronauts, capable of funkitizing galaxies."
Note: Democratic transhumanism, a term coined by Dr. James Hughes in 2002, refers to the stance of transhumanists (advocates of the ethical use of human enhancement technologies) who espouse liberal, social and/or direct democratic political views.[1][2][3][4]
According to Hughes, the ideology "stems from the assertion that human beings will generally be happier when they take rational control of the natural and social forces that control their lives."[2]The ethical foundation of democratic transhumanism rests upon rule utilitarianism and non-anthropocentric personhood theory.[5] Hughes aims to encourage democratic transhumanists and their potential progressive allies to unite as a new social movement and influence biopolitical public policy, and raises objections both to right-wing and left-wing bioconservatism, and libertarian transhumanism.[2][4] An attempt to expand the middle ground between technorealism and techno-utopianism, democratic transhumanism can be seen as a radical form of techno-progressivism.[6]
The term "radical", which appears several times in Hughes' work, (from Latin radix, radic-, root) is used as an adjective meaning of or pertaining to the root or going to the root. His central thesis is that technology and democracy can help citizens overcome some of the root causes of inequalities of power.[2]
References
1. ^ a b Hughes, James (2001). "Politics of Transhumanism". Retrieved on 2007-01-26.
2. ^ a b c d Hughes, James (2002). "Democratic Transhumanism 2.0". Retrieved on 2007-01-26.
3. ^ Hughes, James (2003). "Better Health through Democratic Transhumanism". Retrieved on 2007-01-26.
4. ^ a b Hughes, James (2004). Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future. Westview Press. ISBN 0-8133-4198-1.
5. ^ Hughes, James (1996). "Embracing Change with All Four Arms: A Post-Humanist Defense of Genetic Engineering". Retrieved on 2007-01-26.
6. ^ Carrico, Dale (2005). "Listen, Transhumanist!". Retrieved on 2007-01-27.
7. ^ Cyborg Democracy.
Sounds Like: A musical Revolution.
Record Label: Unsigned
Type of Label: None