PRAYER FETISH is a vibratory trip into the Black American emergence of the last 40 years, post-Crack. It is where Up South and popular culture meet. Krewe Coumbite expresses artist Muthi Reed’s fascination with the devotional traditions of their Lowndes County, Alabama kinfolk. Reed envisions an evening of PRAYER FETISH will respond to the rhythm migrations folks hear as they enter the space. Coded in song, vernacular talk around food, farm crops, and wellness strategy, the audiovisual experience traces the evolution of the Americas as a Black geography. Participants are invited in & to circle up. Borrowing from Native technology “that which has power is done in a circle” participants will engage in a call/response collective live mix DJ set. the Sounds + Video experienced in the space generate from a library of internet researched content & original field recordings. Krewe Coumbite is a Pop-Up band where folks can play, sample, and add to the cipher using the props provided and their own mobile devices. Bearing witness to Black and Native American technologies and their polyrhythmic effect, the mix explores “reconciliation” “DNA engineering” “ecstasy” “otherworld” and “possession” as major themes that inform a Black experience.
Note about the vernacular*
Krewe’s are organized members of carnival society in Mardi Gras culture. Coumbite is a Haitian word used to describe the formation of an improvised collective of laborers who gather to perform a task for a community member. The Coumbite is based on a principle of reciprocity. The rhythmic patterns emerge out of the translocal narrative direction of an expansive network of collaborators.
FREE Feb 27, 2016 7 pm
Harvestworks 596 Broadway #602 New York NY 10012
Phone: 212-431-1130 Subway: F/M/D/B Broadway/Lafayette, R to Prince, #6 to Bleecker
Muthi:
My work is a genealogy of migrations zig zagging across/between/in borders. The cross pollination of conceptual creative connections supports the negotiations at the intersections that define my identity. Leaving the bloody south, my grandparents migrated north during the 1930s & 40s. My parents were high school sweethearts raised in North Philadelphia post-White flight. I was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1977 and raised in Philadelphia during the 1980s & 90s where we grew up with industrial ruin, hip hop culture, and crack-cocaine as the local phenomena. I spent my summers growing up with kinfolk in Lowndes County, Alabama. I am a multidisciplinary Black Prismatic artist from uptown Philadelphia who accesses ancestral and the otherworldly as creative principles in my work. My process is deeply rooted in the navigations of workers, queers, and freedom fighters who came before me.
Krewe Coumbite is an amalgamation of my life as a documentary media maker, sound recordist, oral history researcher, with investigations into Black and Brown working class cultural values and wisdoms. Krewe Coumbite is the lens through which all of my work is made.
Generating remixes of open source material, the shared content is shaped by ever broadening notions of individual + collective Black culture— economics, work, power, technology, rhythm, and harmony. I look at sound and color as tuning instruments for acclimating to the culture. With Krewe Coumbite a circle of community is generated for healing in the family, and to name systemic patterns of oppression and survival. The work becomes an opportunity to remix culture through its own information portals, using oneself as a conduit.
PRAYER FETISH is my first live mix DJ set.