Lamin Fofana „Black music, black noise is not something that can be captured and put in categories“

Lamin Fofana, Central Park, New York City, September 2024 (Photo: Jonathan Forsythe)

Rewind to Meakusma 2024. Lamin Fofana is invited to play three sets during the festival. Each of them of sustainable significance.

On the opening day of Meakusma he fills the (in the beginning completely dark) room with a fascinating nervousness. You can feel the presence of other people, but you can’t see them – and yet there is a feeling of closeness and security. After a gentle start, Fofana introduces the second half of his set (completely composed with original Fofana material) with rumbling sounds, a thunderstorm is in the air, but does not really discharge, instead it retreats into a black hole of sound.

Yes, Lamin Fofana can trigger such thoughts and feelings with his music – a haunting reminder that the ambient floor at the techno parties in the 90s where the place in space where the promise of futurism was hold accountable. Where else can you lose yourself in endless worlds of sound where the oxygen threatens to run out, but you’re still not afraid of suffocating because you’ve learned to breathe differently.

When everyone is already clapping at the apparent end of the set, Lamin Fofana pushes the applause back into the hall with a certain gesture and starts an electrifying last track, whose warm funk breeze seems to blow the historical dust from Chicago and Detroit into the Schlachthof, a piece of incredible intensity, although only a few minutes long, it seems like a whole, never-ending night on the dancefloor.

The light mixer flanks the end with congenially placed, flickering flashes. My skin is not one but several goose bumps, music, more brilliant than the sun, to say it with Kodwo Eshun.

The next evening Lamin Fofana is scheduled to play a real Techno set on the Speicher (as he discloses during our conversation), but somehow ended up playing another ambient set, this time not with his own tracks, instead collaging beautifully pieces by the ones like Jacques Coursil, Autechre, Roman Norfleet & Be Present Art Group and Dumisani Maraire And Ephat Mujuru.

Jonathan Forsythe and I meet Lamin Fofana on a beautiful September day on the corner of Central Park and Guggenheim Museum. We decide to rather sit in the park to enjoy the beauty of the warm sun.

Lamin, you traveled home to New York directly after Meakusma Festival, right?

Lamin Fofana: I stopped in Strasbourg for a gig and then via Paris to New York.

Does it always take some time for you to adjust to a city like New York? Because the tour rhythm, the road rhythm is totally different from the rhythm of life at home.

Yeah, it takes a while to re-acclimate. It’s different here, the air, the atmosphere, the voices, the temperature… I don’t mean the weather when I say temperature, I talk about the intensity between these places I visit and New York in particular. Sometimes it’s a bit jarring, the impact when you come back after you’ve been in Berlin or you’ve been traveling anywhere in the Netherlands, these really clean, sterile European cities. And then you come back to New York and you get greeted with that intensity.

But then you live here, it’s your life. This is where you go to the grocery store, this is where you’re familiar with your neighbours. You get back into your groove.
I live uptown, there are pockets of calm, like moments, environments, where you can go for a walk or sit for a little bit.

But yes, it always is an adjustment period.

I think the difference is also, when you’re traveling, you’re on the run, you sometimes have longer conversations but it’s more rare. You’re only just passing by, your sense of routine is not there to listen to long because you always have to go somewhere, you always have to do things. But coming home, you have suddenly the air again to breathe and also to listen differently and to talk to people differently.

It does feel that way.
Basically I’m stuck by the “on the run” part of your comment. There’s a lot to think about that there.

Going to places, playing music, it does not feel like you really go there. You get blurry snapshots of places, like a moving train – and you’re accumulating energy as you’re traveling. You stop in these places, maybe you get a release, you unload a little bit and then you get back on, you keep moving.

Thomas Venker in conversation with Lamin Fofana, Central Park, New York City, September 2024 (Photo: Jonathan Forsythe)

Coming from listening to your music and also experiencing the performances at Meakusma festival two weeks ago , I wonder: are you actually working on music on the road?

Not really. I think there’s work happening, but I don’t know if it’s actively working, composing, producing on the road. But it is happening, subconsciously. Sometimes I’m taking notes.
Maybe if I have a longer residency somewhere for a while, like two weeks in one place, I might be able to work a bit more.
But I think even here in New York, you accumulate everyday so much of that experience, and then you have to spend time.
I do get ideas and I try to sit down and create sketches or write down things. But actually, sometimes that’s just what it is. You write it and then you forget it.

But then it stays with you, it’s a little puzzle you always have in mind, because everything you experience leads to something in the end.

Absolutely. I think there’s something to that.

Do you feel that you are a slow or a fast worker?

Both.
It’s very slow sometimes. And then sometimes it happens quickly. Sometimes when it happens quickly, you have to blaze through it. You have to move fast, because it loses the energy, the momentum.

Like a wave?

Yeah.

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You just mentioned the residencies. I read you had one residency in Stuttgart at Schloss Solitude.
I come from Stuttgart, I was raised in Zuffenhausen, close to the Porsche headquarters. In Zuffenhausen was way back in time the horse garden of Schloss Solitude – the name Stuttgart refers to Stutengarten, mare garden. So there’s a direct line from the Schloss Solitude to the area I was living, because they had their horses there.
Anyway, how was Stuttgart for you? Did you have the chance to experience the city a bit?

I stayed there during the pandemic for most of 2021. I was splitting time between Berlin and Stuttgart. Solitude is – as you know – up there on the hill; and it’s a nice forest area. I go downtown or go to the city and get groceries and come back and stay. There was not much happening.

Lamin Fofana (Photo: Jonathan Forsythe)

What did your family think of you being in place like that in Germany on a kind of castle during the pandemic while they were stuck in New York or wherever?

My immediate family was in Berlin, but my extended family was the US and in Sierra Leone. It was a strange time for everyone. I mean, everywhere people experience the pandemic the same uneven way.

If you live like me between cities or even between continents, there was already in pre-pandemic times a lot of self-isolation. All these terms, you know, like shutdown – I can say a whole lot about it, but it feels like I’ve gotten out of that mindset.
Living in Germany at that time, being African in Germany, and moving around Europe, there was already a level of self-isolation for protection and self preservation in the sense that you pick where you’re going to go, you find an oasis in the desert.

Fair point, the isolation part was not new to our societies.
Also: a lot of people don’t want certain people in what they consider their places.

Yeah, exactly.
I do think that for a lot of people isolation or self-isolation was already a thing before the shutdowns, like they already interacted with their environment or the world differently. The pandemic just kind of amplified that.

You mentioned before we started the official interview that you used to live in Brooklyn (first in Bedford-Stuyvesant, than in Crown Heights) before you left the city for Berlin.
Now you’re living Uptown near Central Park. What made you choose this area specific area in Manhattan?

It’s just where we landed. I lived way back also uptown before, I lived in Harlem when I was in college, on 116th and St. Nicholas Av.
You know, it’s funny, some of the listings of places in Brooklyn at the time we moved back from Europe – 2022 into 2023 –, were
more expensive than in Manhattan. I was like, what is this? What kind of upside down world am I returning to? 3200 or 3500 for a two bedroom apartment in Clinton Hill or in Crown Heights….
Sure, there was consideration about transportation, personal considerations, like proximity to certain amenities that … okay, well, maybe, we can do this.
It’s not a complaint, it’s just the reality that I now have to meet my friends and collaborators at like Washington Square Park or Union Square. We have to meet halfway – some people are just like, they travel more to Berlin than Uptown Manhattan.

Do your friends think that you made it – because you live now close to Central Park and not like in Brooklyn or Queens anymore like them.

I’m quick to wipe that notion off. Like, no, no, no, it’s still a struggle.
And I might end up in Brooklyn in a year or two, depending on what the landlord does, you know, because there’s no rent control here.

Like, there’s no stability.

Yeah, there’s no stability.

Lamin Fofana (Photo: Jonathan Forsythe)

Maybe this is a bit naive for me to say, but do you feel that the different environment over here has an impact on your work? Like there are more chilled areas than in the ever hectic Brooklyn. Or do you shut down the world anyway when you compose your music and create from all the experiences you made beforehand – and of course from your imagination and research?

I don’t know. I think that different environments affects your emotions and you approach the music differently.
I worked on a lot of music when I was at Solitude – splitting time between Berlin, Stuttgart and Munich, because I had a yearlong installation project at Haus der Kunst (with pieces changing every few months), but still, the music was composed at Solitude in Stuttgart.
But on the other hand, the times we are living in now, what’s going on globally, having a more international mindset, being in multiple places at the same time, paying attention to what’s going on in West Africa, in the Caribbean, in New York, in the US, in Europe…

I am taking a lot of inspiration from reading, reading history and poetry, transmuting these environments and movements and patterns. Reading history and gaining insight about things that are happening now, but also realizing that these things happen 100 years ago, or 50, or 30 years ago.
The last six to eight projects that I worked on were stemming mostly from texts, works from scholar-philosophers like W. E. B. Du Bois, Sylvia Winter, Amiri Baraka, Kamau Brathwaite, Édouard Glissant and other contemporary writers and historians.
With all of these things going on in the world, all these inputs and experiences, to process them, you need to extend or stretch texts, ideas, lessons from the past into the music or in the creative process.

As we speak about the creative process. What I really like with your music, your art, there’s a deep seriousness in it, you talk about your own identity, you talk about personal displacement as much as displacement in the larger picture, you talk about migration, about black history, you talk about all these very serious topics, but at the same time you communicate with a certain wink when you name your labels Sci-Fi & Fantasy and Black Studies and title an EP „Africans Are Real“. Or like attesting that you do not have to sample noises from Africa to transport your messages. What I try to say, you do not act stilted pretentious like many many others, you more like go with your own flow, especially after reading so many books, after so much research that got channeled into the works. Your body of work is warm, it invites the listeners and audience to an honest dialogue with themselves and you. Not like a statement as so much other music feels these days.
You know what I mean?

I’ve been lucky, to be honest, like the directions where my work send me … I’ve been very lucky.
Also: I’m in a space right now, like hesitating, where to go next or what to do next.
I did a double trilogy of sound works. It’s not done yet because I’m still performing pieces from that sextet, and it’s kind of a circular thing that I’ll probably be working with for a long time, a very long time, but also there’s like an itch – one thing to move on, do other things, like not taking a text and transmuting or rather stretching it into sound. Try a different, even more surreal approach.

Do I understand you right, you are saying that this enormous catalogue you build up with the two trilogies and all the EP’s, that it puts pressure on you to keep going on that level, that even an album or an installation is not enough, that you always needs a kind of über dramaturgy?

I’m only beginning to come out of this process. After you finish it it takes a while like a year or two until you are able to really reflect about it, like make some sense of it. While doing so is hard, we’re not blessed with clairvoyance, like seeing what or how things will be in 2027 or 2037. One has to learn to see further, like learn to see around corners like Moten… I don’t know, I feel this anxious energy or hesitation, what to do next. If you’re dealing with weighty, heavy concepts or philosophical ideas and poetry and abstraction, you have to read carefully.

Seeing you live at Meakusma festival, to me it felt like you have a great sovereignty. You seemed to be totally in charge. Especially over the range of these three different sets: the ambient set, the clubby B2B Katatonic Silentio and in the end the kinda narrative-ambient-set. Somehow I was listening quite concentrated and still I was able to get lost in the music, in the beauty of the sounds. Even a set like the one on Heuboden, that to me felt like an historic lesson, the communication through and with music was still one of majestic lightness.

Thank you. That last set was special. It felt like citations or like a musical performance version of footnotes, music that I listen to and that I am inspired by. The set was not planned like this. But in an environment where people are all seated … I thought it was going to be more like a DJ set. But when I walked in and I saw people sitting down, I was like, okay, this is what we’re doing? So I pulled up a chair.

So this was a spontaneous decision to play that kind of set?

Yes. If the audience is seated, I’m like, okay, we can take it. We’ll have the more gentle approach, like in the sense of: you can lay down, you can sit or stand and listen.

Interesting. I totally felt that you had a specific concept for that set, like educational entertainment. Also it felt to me that all three sets were composed to present a a kaleidoscope of your work.

No. But then again, there was everything in there: From Autechre to Horace Tapscott.

One listener shazamed parts of the set and send the infos to me:
„Frantz Fanon“ by Jacques Coursil, „Nunna Daul Sunyi (Le chemin où nous avons pleuré)“ by Jacques Coursil, „A Vessel“ by Roman Norfleet & Be Present Art Group, „Katura“ by Dumisani Maraire and Ephat Mujuru, also a track by Duval Timothy.

There was a lot. I mean, not everything, but there was a lot. It felt good and natural.

Talking about your variety of sounds. You produce ambient tracks, techno tracks, you work with field recordings and archives… one could say you are a pony with many tricks in reversal of the one trick pony saying. And somehow you ended up being successful in both the music world and the art world, maybe because you do not feel at all like making a difference between both artistic fields. Nowadays all electronic producers try so hard to also make it in the art world as this seems to be the promised land as clubs and festivals stumble more and more and/or lot of aging producers feel like they are too old for the clubs.
Anyway, what I wanna say: To me your versatility does not seem like ambition or the result of a plan, it rather feels like a mushroom cultivation.

I’m just going in multiple directions at the same time, like that lost album by Coltrane „Both Directions at Once…
These ideas of discipline and multidisciplinary approaches are like … the containment itself, like this is club, this is a museum / gallery thing, it has never worked for me.
I mean, I was doing unsanctioned site-specific installation work already in college. I put motion triggered sound pieces in bookstores – somebody walked by the sci-fi section and a soundtrack would begin to play – and it would be there for an hour or less, and then they would get rid of it.
I like the idea of mushroom cultivation, like things just growing wild and overgrown. If anything, I’m trying to have like an anti disciplinary practice. It’s tough to exist as an artist in a world where brand discipline is a thing.

By the way, did you study art?

I studied sociology and media studies.

I studied sociology too.

So, yeah, that stuff leads you in places.

Nowhere or everywhere.

Nowhere and everywhere. Exactly.
Basically post college, like after you graduate or drop out of school, that’s when you really begin to study.

You study reality.

After college, it’s something else, like hyperreal life. You are more free, you’re not reading to like earn a grade to graduate.

Would you agree with me that entering the music world is easier than the art world.

I don’t know.
As said, I was already doing installations while I was in college – that was happening before the the art world send their invitation, send their curators to come and get you. And I think that’s kind of where we are at the moment. I am thankful, I still get invited to do work, installations and performances several times a year. I think it has also to do with me getting more and more interested in Black Studies towards the end of my college years. I started reading W. E. B. Du Bois, arguably the greatest American philosopher. I didn’t read much of him until my senior year.
I guess what I’m trying to say is: the music, the art, it will be happening with or without art institutions or record labels. Not to be ungrateful, but it’s even tough trying to say: „this is art what you’re making.“ Yeah, it will be happening with or without the art world.

You just brought up an interesting point, when is something considered art and when is it not? Art can often be broken down into the momentum of defining a process as artistic, or defining an artifact as an art object. „I state: this piece is finished, it is now a work of art.“

Right.

And your music is more likely ongoing speaking with itself, with you and with the audience. So in a way, your music is the total opposite of this process I just described.

Yeah. I think that’s the thing.
These are things I learned from Kodwo Eshun – you know, black music, black noise is not something that can be captured and put in categories. It refuses conclusion and terminal ending. Like I made it, I pressed it on vinyl, I sell it to you… It’s more like a snapshot of what’s going on, it stays open. And I think that’s the only way – until I get exhausted and then I give up, like, okay, that’s it. Or until people get tired of listening to you, inviting you. It’s one of the two. But I think that by the time I get exhausted – with my attention span – I would have already move on to something else.

What you just described, remembers me of a quote by you: „I dream of a new form of relationship“.
Much of the art we encounter wants to be different, but in the end it is just a capitalist product on the market. But it seems to me that your ambition is not to give in to marketing boxes.
We do not make a deal. We just keep it like it is.

Yeah, absolutely.
The quote by Kodwo Eshun speaks about music not being merely about music, but as a tool to explore ideas, open up possibilities, or portals to new possibilities or ways of seeing things. Music as a portal to different ideas and concepts and relations. Like ways of being in the world, you know, relating to your environment and to the people in that environment. Each environment shape our voices. There’s an environmental expression happening based on like how the cars are moving and how my voice is going up or people walking by. There’s always something else going on here. Sometimes the idea of field recording is not really like trying to capture one thing in particular.
That’s a violent word, capture. What you’re trying to capture are the moments in between, the tings beyond that moment. Just like you (points towards the photographer Jonathan Forsythe).

Lamin Fofana (Photo: Jonathan Forsythe)

As you bring up photography, a lot of things we capture in sound as much as in photography are secretly or let’s better say unintentional captured. We maybe have a feeling that there’s something, but it’s not clear to us in that specific moment what it is. A lot of people lost the capacity to really go deep into one sound or one picture because they’re so used to the fast lane of perception.

But if you dig deep into sounds and pictures, they reveal more dimensions. Like when you take LSD…

Like slowing things way down in the music, like 2 or 5 BPM, or speeding it up to 900 BPM, trying to quicken, shorten, or stretch things. But you can also play with frequency range and try to maybe poke a pinhole in something, that’s where the experimentation comes in.

Now the police rolls by, the perfect moment to end an interview.

Here comes the NYPD.

Thanks so much, Lamin.

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