EMUSE 2015: Aboriginal Electronic Music Festival celebrates a new sonic movement
Why is local singer and composer Russell Wallace spearheading an initiative to teach electronic-music production techniques to First Nations youth?
“Well, I think it was time,” says the soft-spoken Coast Salish musician, on the phone from his office at Mount Pleasant’s Native Education College. “I mean, there’s been a lot of aboriginal electronic music out there: Buffy Sainte-Marie has been doing it for ages, and then A Tribe Called Red is really huge all over the world. Knowing people in town, I thought it would be really cool to bring all of us together, but primarily it was to do workshops for youth. And while there are other programs out there that focus on beat-making and stuff like that, we’re trying to make it a little more diverse, because electronic music is quite a wide-open field.”
That’s apparent from the lineup Wallace has enlisted for EMUSE 2015: Aboriginal Electronic Music Festival, which encompasses a series of free daytime workshops at the NEC on Thursday and Friday (October 8 and 9) and a gala CD-release concert at the Musqueam Cultural Education and Resource Centre on Friday night. Diverse, too, are the sounds collected on Listen to Our Heartbeat, a compilation of Aboriginal electronica that ranges from Enter-Tribal’s harrowing, hard-charging rap anthem “Sisterz” to Tiffany Moses’s downtempo charmer “Facade” to Wallace’s own warmly nostalgic “Generations of Love”.
Listen to Our Heartbeat is aimed at raising awareness around the troubling issue of violence against Native women, but it’s also a celebration of a nascent movement in Canadian culture. Picking up where the pioneering First Nations singer-guitarists of the ’60s and ’70s left off, a new generation of indigenous performers is using electronic music to address concerns that are both sonic and societal—and often deeply personal, as Moses notes.
“It’s more about what moves you in the moment,” says the producer and occasional DJ, when asked if she can identify any dominant trends in Native electronica. On reflection, however, she says that one shared characteristic might be an awareness of landscapes both external and internal.
“I mean, I’ve heard of approaches based on the observation of the landscape,” the Dene musician explains in a separate telephone interview. “I know from my mother that we can be, say, down at a river, and there’ll be a whole beach filled with stones, and she’ll notice the one that’s different, or the one that’s special or peculiar in some way. It’s an interesting ability; it’s about looking at a whole and also seeing individual specifics. So maybe an indigenous or aboriginal approach would involve more time consciously looking at your surroundings, and letting your music be informed by how you feel and how you interact with the world.”
Moses’s own sonic landscape for “Facade” is deceptive: the tune sounds like club jazz, but it’s not a live performance by a band. Instead, it was painstakingly assembled on the computer, using MIDI instruments and electronically augmented samples to emulate drums, upright bass, and trumpet. The producer will share some of her secrets at a NEC beat-making workshop on Friday afternoon, along with singer and songwriter Kinnie Starr.
“I’ve worked with Tiffany before, and we found out that we have different skills,” says Starr, in a call from her Vancouver home. “In beat-making, my excellence lies mostly in taking risks, and her excellence lies mostly in audio fidelity. She’s very thorough, and I’m very ‘wing-it’! So that’s cool for the students who’ll come to our workshop, because they’ll see two very different approaches to working with digital equipment.”
Again, Starr stresses that there are no rules when it comes to making digital tracks with a First Nations focus. Rhythm, however, is one factor that many aboriginal artists might have in common. “It blew my mind when I first heard other Mohawk people partying—like later at night, after shows and stuff—and singing traditional stuff,” says Starr, who didn’t fully connect with her Native heritage until she was in her 20s. “It blew my mind how much those songs sounded like rap music to me. Maybe if I’d been raised in my tradition I wouldn’t make that connection, but there’s something in them that I think just spills over into electronic music.”
“That’s what I heard back in the days when I was clubbing,” says Wallace with a laugh. “When you’re in the club, you feel the drum—and when you’re at a community event where there’s a lot of drummers, you do too. So that four-on-the-floor beat is fairly common, and the repetition of the songs is there as well. Ever since the ’80s I’ve seen the connection, but I never really had access to the equipment to help me realize it. Now everybody can do it, even with an iPhone.”
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