DJ Techné

https://djtechne.bandcamp.com

DJ TechnéDJ Techné is a Nanaimo-based turntable sound artist and writer.Portals: Sounds for Tomorrow, released 22 August 20201. Another World2. Covid Clack3. Get Down4. Real Hip Hop5. Good Feelin'6. There's Magic in This World7. Lovely Day8. Imagination9. God is Change10. Now's the Time“Sound is to people what the sun is to light.”—Ornette ColemanPortals was made over the summer months of 2020 during the COVID-19 global pandemic. The first track—“Another World”—opens with a sample from the Man Booker Prize-winning Indian novelist Arundhati Roy speaking about the coronavirus pandemic as a portal: “It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” With systemic injustices more visible than ever, she asks us to use this opportunity to imagine another world. This album is about that possibility, but it is also an album where I looked at music as healing, imagination, creativity, community, and play. For me, music has been a sustaining joy during the pandemic. Unlike my previous Dedications projects, I didn’t begin with a sample or style to manipulate, but simply made music that I felt (with a lo-fi hip-hop aesthetic) while trying to have as much fun as I could along the way. Beyond the vocal samples throughout (including Dr. Bonnie Henry, Mr. Rogers, and Totoro), I played much of the album using sample and drum kits (on my MPC Live and Roland SP-404SX) and an Arturia KeyStep controlling a KORG volca fm. Two of the tracks feature my children—“Good Feelin’” and “Lovely Day,” which also features my wife—and are about living in the moment and finding daily happiness. Both “Lovely Day” and “Imagination” were played live and remixed in real time on my SP-404sx. The penultimate track samples from the audiobook of Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Talents and reminds us that not only are we capable of change, but in order to survive we surely must change. The final song features vocal samples from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, as well as words from John Lewis and Killer Mike. While the context is explicitly American, King’s fierce urgency of now reminds us of the need to resist Canada’s own Anti-Black police violence and Anti-Black racism and Anti-Indigenous racism, which includes the recent deaths of Andrew Loku, Jermaine Carby, and Regis Korchinski-Paquet, among many others. “Now’s the time” to respond to the fierce urgency of this moment. Will we ignore the rupture the pandemic created and return to “normal,” or will we step through the portal into another world? The music is FREE and is a not-for-profit creative project (although you can donate to my musical praxis and future projects when downloading).

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Country: Canada (CA)

Currency : CAD

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