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.

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.

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