Sierra Leonean artist and producer Lamin Fofana is back with a new album called Shafts of Sunlight which is out now via Black Studies. According to the press release, it is the second instalment in an album trilogy, which will be followed by The Open Boat on August 26th. Sonically, Parts 2 and 3 question the impositions of western rationality in music, and reimagine geographies of African diasporic people respectively.
He explains: “What can we say here? Aiming at difficult things, difficult meanings. Not trying to say anything. The meaning is in the opening and the breaking and the making of the music. Music theory is not a universal thing. It’s culturally a very specific thing, which is 18th century European art music which is coterminous with European imperialism and expansionism. How do you respond to the violence and brutality of classical music theory and European imperialism and expansionism culturally and economically all over the globe for the last five hundred years? Music theory, the site of musical composition, is a site of struggle and resistance, and we must constantly look for ways to sabotage, refuse or as Fred Moten would say obliterate it by exposing its contradictions, because western worship of reason denies most of us the right to exist.”
Listen below.