SONICS OF THE ANCESTORS
A five-part sound exploration by Mz.Icar Collective
Laundromat Project Liberation Series, Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn
Sonics of the Ancestors was a five-part, process-based series exploring sound as something we hear, feel, make, carry, and remember.
Created as part of The Laundromat Project’s Liberation Series, the project brought artists, musicians, neighbors, and guests together in Bed-Stuy for a sequence of participatory experiments centered around sound, vibration, memory, and collective creation.
Across five gatherings, we explored different ways of encountering sound: making beats together, translating frequencies into visible patterns through vibration, slowing down through sound and meditation, recording voices and stories onto cassette tape, and gathering around a drum circle.
Each session became its own experiment.
We were interested in what could emerge through listening, repetition, improvisation, conversation, and play. Participants moved between analog and digital technologies, using drums, speakers, recording equipment, cassette tapes, sound frequencies, and their own bodies as tools for making and receiving sound.
At the center of the series was a question: What does sound carry?
Rhythm can hold memory. A voice can become an archive. Bass can move through a body before it is understood as music. A recording can preserve a moment long after the people who made it have left the room.
Sonics of the Ancestors considers these experiences as forms of transmission, connecting contemporary experimentation with long histories of rhythm, oral storytelling, gathering, and communal knowledge across the African diaspora.
The five sessions became a living archive of the project: beats made together, voices captured on tape, vibrations made visible, drums shared in a circle, conversations, movement, silence, and the sounds of people occupying a space together.
The video and audio collected here document fragments of that process.
They are traces of what happened in the room, and of what continues to resonate after it.
Voice Recording & Sound Collage Guest Collaborating artists: Rashid Amir and Eliki Sol Using portable mics and phones, participants paired up to capture Bed Stuy’s stories, ambient hum, conversations, rhythms, sirens, and silence, and collaboratively remix these sounds into a living collage. This session was grounded in presence, attuning our ears to the neighborhood’s past, present, and future.
Call to the Ancestors: Communal Drum Circle
Collaborating Artists: Shaun Kelly and Brion Vann
This intergenerational drumming circle invited participants of all ages to explore memory, place, and dreams through guided prompts, drum rhythms, and call-and-response. We learned about the legacy of this practice and synced ourselves.
The Shape of Sound
Guest Collaborating artists: Osei Alleyne
Participants explored visualizing sound and cymatics. Using tools such as a Stylophone Theremin, and speakers paired with a projector, we examined the shape of sound and the connections between language and tone throughout the African Diaspora to create new works.
Community Beatmaking
Collaborating Artists: Isaac Sawyer and Amore Querida
Beat Cypher: Community Beatmaking Session invited participants to become co-producers, using drum machines and collected sounds to build new beats. This session blended traditional rhythms with contemporary beat-making in a collaborative cypher