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Unassuming as they may seem, these technologies are far from neutral. Like social media platforms, dating apps, and all data-driven algorithms, music production tools have the unconscious biases of their creators baked into their architecture. If a musician opens a new composition and they are given a 4/4 beat and Equal Tempered tuning by default, it is implied that other musical systems do not exist, or at least that they are of less value. […] It is vitally important to Allami that Leimma and Apotome are accessible to everyone, which is why the programs are available for free and run through web browsers, rather than as plug-ins for expensive music production software (though they may be released as plug-ins in the future). He is particularly interested in the educational potential of the software. For too long, the world’s tuning systems have been presented as an academic concern—something to be studied rather than heard. Leimma offers an intuitive, tactile introduction for anyone. Even if you know nothing about the musical systems of Indonesia, Japan, or Iran, you can jump in and hear the differences immediately.

Misrepresenting the process of European colonization of North America, making everyone an immigrant, serves to preserve the “official story” of a mostly benign and benevolent USA, and to mask the fact that the pre-US independence settlers, were, well, settlers, colonial setters, just as they were in Africa and India, or the Spanish in Central and South America. The United States was founded as a settler state, and an imperialistic one from its inception (“manifest destiny,” of course). The settlers were English, Welsh, Scots, Scots-Irish, and German, not including the huge number of Africans who were not settlers. Another group of Europeans who arrived in the colonies also were not settlers or immigrants: the poor, indentured, convicted, criminalized, kidnapped from the working class (vagabonds and unemployed artificers), as Peter Linebaugh puts it, many of who opted to join indigenous communities.

The more Bong Joon-ho’s masterpiece is regarded, the more it seems to vanish in the spectacle of its acclaim. --- The emphasis on universality is achieved through a negation of the particular in a typical display of liberal chauvinism. Consequently, the more Bong Joon-ho’s masterpiece is regarded, the more it seems to vanish in the spectacle of its acclaim. Parasite has made history; never mind how history has made Parasite. This is not a charge against any attempt to relate Parasite to other contexts. Bong’s social critique concerns the international conditions of globalized capitalism, but particular to Korea’s neoliberal and neocolonial present. Examining the film as a story of class in the neocolony shifts it from a decontextualized tale of rich and poor to one of compradors and the colonized. This lens takes Parasite from an allegory of “class conflict” to one of imperialism, and illuminates the film’s recurring motifs of English, militarization and appropriated Indigenous material culture. […] The specter of war represented by Geun-sae and the space of the bunker are crucial to interpreting the film’s climax. The ongoing war in the Korean peninsula, sometimes called the Forgotten War, is often narrativized as “over” in a manner reminiscent of how the colonization of the Americas is regarded as complete. The recognition of either process as unfinished undermines the solvency of ruling class power, even as that power is sustained by an endless cycle of colonial violence. There is more than simple analogy at work here; there is a direct genealogy that links the US invasion of Korea to its invasions of Indigenous nations. […] Faced with the impossible situation of division and occupation, the only solution Ki-woo can imagine is rooted in the neoliberal ethos of hard work and constant striving. He pledges to miraculously become rich and buy the Parks’ house one day, so he can reunite with his father. Ki-woo’s solution is not only deeply unrealistic; it does not address the fundamental problem at hand. Even in this fantasy scenario, Ki-taek would still be contained in the house by a legal system that would seek his prosecution and imprisonment. The forces that created and upheld the Kim family’s separation would not be undone, merely adapted to. The class system and the war enabling it would continue unchanged. Bong’s final shot, which clarifies that the solution Ki-woo envisions is just a dream, seems to dare us to dream harder. Media narratives that spin Parasite’s acclaim through the lens of liberal assimilation miss the mark; a Hollywood that is more open to Asians or other people of color is no more of a solution than Ki-woo’s dream of buying the house that imprisons his father. The promise of inclusion is a distraction from the wars that haunt Parasite, Korea and this continent. As I write this, Wet’suwet’en land defenders are protecting their unceded territory from an invasion by Canada, which seeks to steal land for the Coastal GasLink pipeline.

The ability to harness new technology, of course, is a mighty power. That Buffy Sainte-Marie was using synthesizers and quadraphonic sound to upend conventional narratives about North American colonialism only made her more terrifying to the status quo. Perhaps that is why she has continued to make her life’s work bringing computers and digital technology to indigenous communities, as she has done with her Cradleboard Teaching Project or her 1999 manifesto “Cyberskins.” Emerging technology, she writes, can “counterbalance past misinterpretations with positive realities, and past exploitations with future opportunities. The reality of the situation is that [indigenous people] are not all dead and stuffed in some museum with the dinosaurs: we are here in this digital age.” Fifty years ago, Illuminations was a declaration of that same life-affirming truth, and so it remains. It’s a portal to another world, as full of possibilities and alternative realities as that telephone-switchboard-like matrix into which Sainte-Marie plugged cord after cord. Lay down your cool cynicism, your rationality, your linear Western thinking, Illuminations instructs, before leaning close to whisper its secret: “Magic is alive.”

DeForrest Brown Jr., aka Speaker Music, breaks down the timeline of techno's history, Nina Kraviz controversy and speaks to Discowman and more. --- An honest revision of techno’s history would follow a trail of themes like white extractive capitalism, white flight and re-urbanization and the economics of cultural theft. Technocracy relies on the withholding and hoarding of information and resources to uphold standards set by a controlling an often immoral elite class. An item or an experience is given value by certain standards within a technocracy and by decentralizing current narratives and allowing for creators to tell their own stories, there is opportunity for a more even and ethical cultural exchange across the unfortunate circumstance of an economic market established by violent and willfully ignorant white European colonial ideology.

It’s not pumpkin or pumpkin spice that’s the problem; it’s the commodification of our resources as somehow exotic when used in non-white foods and comfort when used in white foods. And when we mock certain foods as “white foods,” particularly in America, we’re capitulating to a lie—the lie that anything we eat in the diaspora isn’t touched and flavored by people of color. It’s the ahistorical denial of the complexities of the role of colonialism, slavery, and genocide in the spice trade. And it further snarls the delicate balancing act all diasporic people are forced to embody, in constantly having to understand their selves in relation to the trauma of separation from home and capitalist violence.

Rahawa Haile considers how, by sliding between the real and unreal, Black Panther frees us to imagine the possibilities — and the limitations — of an Africa that does not yet exist. --- How then does one criticize what is unquestionably the best Marvel movie to date by every conceivable metric known to film criticism? How best to explain that Black Panther can be a celebration of blackness, yes; a silencing of whiteness, yes; a meshing of African cultures and signifiers — all this! — while also feeling like an exercise in sustained forgetting? That the convenience of having a fake country within a real continent is the way we can take inspiration from the latter without dwelling on its losses, or the causes of them. Black Panther is an American film through and through, one heavily invested in white America’s political absence from its African narrative. When Killmonger goads a museum curator early on in the film, calling out a history of looting, it is condemnation that falls squarely on Britain’s shoulders. Rarely must the audience think about the C.I.A.’s very real history in Africa. The fact that viewers were steered, at any point, into rooting for Martin Freeman, a British actor playing an American C.I.A. operative who attempts to purchase stolen resources from a white South African arms dealer, means that even a cinematic turducken of imperialist history gets a pass. [...] The convenience of having a fake country within a real continent is the way we can take inspiration from Africa without dwelling on its losses.

In Vampire Weekend’s 2008 debut, I recognized the African soukous and rumba that had been my father’s calling.