Lake Black Town is a research composition project where the artist is deeply listening to the sonic air, soil, water, and plant data of these “drowned town” sites to inform their resonant response to the call of history’s emptiness.
Deeply listening to the liminal spaces and stories surrounding “drowned towns” by using creative field recording methods to listen to the recreation, racism, and hydroelectric progress built atop flooded American dreams, Montgomery constructs a modular composition of soundscape storytelling. This is an attempt at the modalities of Deep Listening and Great Black Music.
America’s post-Civil War history is rife with stories of successful Black cities being razed and flooded to create lakes largely used for recreational purposes. The most infamous is likely Lake Lanier outside of Atlanta, formerly home to Oscarville, an African American community with more than 1,000 residents who were forcibly removed after a horrific lynching in 1912. These lakes can be found all over the South, their original stories submerged under the waters.
For the past year, Nashville-based artist, creative musician, and composer Jayve Montgomery has led a creative residency that explores the history of these locations. The creative residency, in progress, has included a tour of lake sites of these so-called “drowned towns,” where African-American communities were forced out by local white supremacists and neighborhoods and towns were flooded to create spaces for water recreation.
At each site, Jayve uses a PlantWave device, which captures and translates the biorhythmic vibrations of plants into sound and MIDI data. Geophones, hydrophones, contact microphones and binarual microphones capture the sonic vibrations from area flora, fauna, air and water and are used as a sound bed and foundation for live, onsite, improvised musical call and response as well as written compositions examining the resonance of emptiness left after a town has been drowned.
Each date will be comprised of an artist talk followed by a performance.
Dates:
Wednesday 7.2 7:00 PM
Wednesday 7.9 7:00 PM
Wednesday 7.16 7:00 PM