Tag: music

Chisom Umeh in Conversation with Adedapo Adeniyi

Adedapo Adeniyi (also goes by Dapo The Abstract) is a Nigerian artist working in literature, film and photography, music (DJ) as well as art curation and counterculture archiving. He expresses his art through abstract avant-garde sensibilities. His debut novel, Wanderer, is available in stores.

Dapo holding his novel, Wanderer

Chisom Umeh is a Nigerian fiction writer and poet. His short stories have been featured in Omenana, Apex, Clarkesworld, Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2023, African Ghosts anthology, Isele, Mythaxis, Scifi Shorts, and elsewhere. His short story, “Ancestor’s Gift”, won the 2024 Tractor Beam short story contest. He was a finalist for the Seattle Worldcon Short Story Contest and is the winner of the 2025 Nommo Award for Best African Speculative Fiction Short Story.

Chisom, holding a copy of the Wanderer. Image: African Imaginary

Chisom: Hey Dapo.

Nice to have you do the interview.

I finished reading your novel Wanderer a couple of days ago, and I must say, the journey feels like one long dream. It’s a steady flow of alternating sentences and logic that sometimes contradict each other and yet, strangely enough, feels complete and cohesive. Can you tell me how you were able to keep the story you were trying to tell in focus, even while spinning such a wild tale?

Dapo: Thank you, Chisom. I’m excited to have this interview with you.

I want to start by saying the story mostly wrote itself; I was just a conduit. Most of this book was written in an automatist, stream-of-consciousness style. They were retellings of dreams, memories, and reality, and I wanted them to appear that way. I never lost sight of the story because I welcomed getting lost as I was writing it to find myself.

Chisom: Oh, that’s pretty interesting. To me, the novel reads like Amos Tutuola’s The Palmwine Drinkard crossed with Vajra Chandrasekera’s luminous prose. It definitely felt like older hands were guiding yours on the page. Were there literary influences you were channeling when writing the book?

Dapo: Yeah, I mean, I try to stay away from direct influences while I’m writing, and I didn’t read The Palmwine Drinkard until after I wrote Wanderer. I took influences more from films and cinematic sensibilities than literary, but in that regard, Borges, Philip K. Dick, Timothy Leary, André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, Aldous Huxley’s The Doors Of Perception, and my editor and friend, Manuel Marrero. I think these are the ones I can remember right now, plus I don’t want to go overboard. But these people and their works across surrealism, psychedelia, paranoid fiction, sci-fi, metafiction, and so on influenced me in many ways and were formative for how I approached writing and this book.

Chisom: It’s interesting that you mentioned Surrealist Manifesto, psychedelia, and paranoid fiction, because in an essay in Medium titled Abstractism Manifesto, you talked about how ‘abstractism’ is a term that subsumes all of these concepts and more. I like the way you explained it in the essay and how it relates to your work. But could you do a quick description of the term (abstractism) so we could understand it in relation to your work?

Dapo: Absolutely! So when I wrote the Abstractism Manifesto in early 2023, I defined it as being an amalgamation of solipsism, surrealism, psychedelia, subjective reality, and the physics of psychosis. I believe abstractism brings these concepts together to take reality and the world around us from a state of form to an abstract sensory state of formlessness, and that’s what I try to do with my work — the dissolution of some absolute real into an abstract cosmic real.

Chisom: In your experience as a filmmaker, what is the major difference between visual storytelling and written one? Do you prefer one medium over the other?

Dapo: I mean, writing is definitely cheaper. Making films is more expensive and taxing. I also think it’ll kill me faster so that might be why right now it excites me more than writing does. But, frankly, the major difference is the painting. With words, I’m guiding the readers’ imagination. At the end of the day, everyone will come out of it with different images. But with film, I have to literally represent those images on the screen. I’m doing the painting for the audience, they just have to watch and engage.

Chisom: Besides making movies, I know that you do some DJ work on the side. You had a collaboration with NTS, which is really great. How did that happen?

Dapo: Let me put it in context: I work with this new-age collective called Freewater, which was founded by my friends. I serve as its curator and co-director. Freewater secured a residency with NTS Radio, and since I also DJ, they featured one of my mixes as part of the collective. We’re having an underground, new wave music festival/concert on the 11th of December (I think the interview will be out after it?), and NTS is our major partner.

Chisom: That’s incredible, actually. So, does your music influence your writing in any way? Some writers like to curate playlists for particular writing projects. Something they listen to just to put themselves in the mood. Are you that kind of writer?

Dapo: Music definitely plays a huge part in my process. When I was writing Wanderer, all I listened to was shoegaze. I found a shoegaze playlist that had over a hundred songs and it was all I listened to while I slept and dreamt and while I wrote as well. I’ve been DJing for almost 2 years now, and it’s made me understand music as well as how different people interact with it. There are sensibilities of transience I borrowed from writing and translated to how I DJ.

Chisom: I kept wondering about the shoegaze reference when I was reading the book. Something told me there was more to it than just being an element in the story, and I’m glad you just confirmed that. Which brings me to your process with writing your stories and how you edit them. Do you edit while writing or after?

Dapo: Oh yeah, shoegaze has a very dreamlike, haze-inducing feeling and I wanted the book to feel like that. I do very minimal editing while writing. I finished the entire thing then read it over a couple of times before sending it to my editor, and we had this period of sending drafts back and forth and conversations on the subject matter.

But enough about me, I want to hear what type of music you listen to and how editing works for you. I mean, you just won the Nommo, haha.

Chisom: Oh, lol.

Well, I’m very mundane with my music. I don’t have any playlists or do any sort of curation. In fact, when I’m writing, I wouldn’t want to hear any music at all as it easily interferes with my thought processes and breaks my stream-of-consciousness, AKA “flow”. But when I do listen to music, outside writing, it’s very Davido and Asake and Victony, and whatever Dlala Thukzin just released. For edits, I can’t move forward with writing if I feel like there’s something wrong with a previous sentence. So I tinker with that till it feels fine to me. So we’re maybe kind of opposites on this.

Dapo: Correct me if I’m wrong but you seem like a very calculated writer. You’re delicate about detail, you’re careful. I think it’s beautiful. I wish I could be that type of writer. Like I said before (this may sound a little pretentious but I fully believe it), I don’t really do any writing, these things write themselves and use me as a conduit. I don’t know where they come from or where they are going or why; they come raw and I write in real time. My flow can be erratic most times.

Chisom: I like to think I have an eye for detail, but, trust me, I’m not really that meticulous. I know writers who would draw up elaborate plots that cover the first scene to the last, and fill up a board with sticky notes. Me? I mostly just sit down and write a story as it comes into my head. I think both our approaches are valid, so long as the outcome is something folks can read and enjoy. When I’m done writing and send the work out, that’s where my effort ends. But I’ve seen you go through hell and high water to publicize your book. And it has really paid off. Maybe that’s something you’d teach me someday?

Nardwuar holding a copy of Dapo’s first novel, Wanderer

Dapo: You’re amazing, so we’re kin.

Thank you, I think it’s been a learning curve. A lot of how this book has been handled is experimental, constantly trying to see how to reinvent whatever a rollout is supposed to be. Some days before the book came out I’d post videos of just my legs as I was walking around. Wandering, if you will. I made cards and handed out googly eyes. I’ve had readings and talks. I even had an abstractism lecture and played a psychedelic techno set. I keep thinking of ways to present a work of literature outside of just the confines of literature, especially as a multimedia artist. I look forward to reinterpreting the book and presenting it in so many other formats: photograph, sound, installation, you name it.

Chisom: Say I wanted to try my hand at writing abstractism, are you holding one of those lectures anytime soon?

Dapo: Hopefully sometime early next year. I’m working on writing another edition of the manifesto that’s more professional, but I think that through reading the manifesto that’s up right now, as well as Wanderer and some of my short stories, anyone could get the gist of what abstractism is.

What’s next for you now Chisom? In the world of African Speculative Fiction.

Chisom: For me, I’m also trying to piece together a collection of short stories that hopefully might be my debut in the book-publishing space. I want most of the stories in the collection to be centered around two themes, so that means I’m writing mostly new stories.

Anyway, it’s really been wonderful having this chat with you. I’m looking forward to reading more of your stuff in the future.

Dapo: Sending you love and the best of wishes Chisom, excited to see your collection. I’ll send you mine as it comes along. You’re a refreshing voice in the scene here.

Wanderer, cover art

Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds

Reviewed by Rebecca Hankins

Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds by Jayna Brown. Duke University Press, 2021. Paperback 212 pg. $24.95. ISBN: 978-1478010548

Brown’s Black Utopias is one of the most scholarly and comprehensive works exploring Black Utopian futures. Very apt for a Covid-19 pandemic period that has seen the initial overwhelming loss of Black and Brown lives. In light of this mass death, Brown’s study asks — and through this work, answers — “What might Black futures mean, and how might we challenge our imaginations to create futures that are not only different to what we know and what we expect, but even allows us to evolve beyond our physical existence? Packed into these pages is a narrative that encompasses Afro-futurism, death, theology, spirituality, music, philosophers, science fiction, fantasy, and gender, stories that had to be absorbed, analyzed, and contemplated before beginning the review. There were layers after layers of new ideas packed into a narrative that also centered the stories of Black women’s religious and cultural beings in which they constantly sought a physical and metaphysical utopia within an Afro-futurist and Afro-centric framework. 

Cultural critic Mark Dery is credited with coining the term Afro-futurism as “techno cultural aesthetic that blends science fictional imagery, technology, philosophy, and the imagery, languages, and cultures of Africa and the worldwide African diaspora.” Scholar Yusuf Nuruddin also notes that Afrofuturism “includes black science fiction or Afrocentric science fiction, more broadly defined as African American signification about culture, technology and things to come” (or, in the case of alternative histories, “things that might have come” from a reconfigured past). Brown’s adds to our understanding of Afro-futurism that undergirds her work: Brown defines Afro-futurism as “a program for recovering the histories of counter-futures […] most notable for resisting disciplinary boundaries” (p17). Moreover, combined with this Afro-centric, interdisciplinary attitude toward futures and counter-futures, the genre of Afro-futurism centers works of science fiction, fantasy, and other speculative fiction created by African Americans, Africans and the African diaspora. Afro-centricity embodies works that are often critical writings that focus on race, the institution of slavery, class, gender, oppression, inequality, and sexuality, all woven throughout Brown’s book. 

Continue reading “Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds“ →

Rejigging the Algorithm

How Jennifer Walshe is Reinventing the Music of the Past and Reclaiming the Music of the Future

By Paul March-Russell

One of the highlights of the 2022 Proms season was the London premiere of The Site of an Investigation (2018) by the Irish avant-garde composer Jennifer Walshe. This thirty-three minute piece in twenty-six sections offered a synopsis of Walshe’s preoccupations. Walshe herself, sounding like a cross between Laurie Anderson and Diamanda Galas, took the role of soloist, offering an elegiac commentary upon such topics as the race to Mars, the threat to the oceans and the prospect of digital immortality. The orchestra, largely acting as the symphonic backdrop to Walshe’s fragmented monologue, were further inveigled into the proceedings by waving party streamers, building and demolishing a tower of bricks, and wrapping a four-foot high giraffe in crinkly paper. Both the absurdity and incoherence of the piece, culled from an array of internet sources, recalled ‘the blip culture bombardment’ of the mediascape in Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985).[1]

Jennifer Walshe/Arditti Quartet, EVERYTHING IS IMPORTANT (2019). Credit: IMD 2016/Daniel Pufe

Exactly a hundred years since the first composition of Kurt Schwitters’s sound poem Ursonate (1922-32), a text that Walshe cites as an inspiration,[2] such anti-art performances can still drive audiences either to delight or despair. In Walshe’s case, however, The Site of an Investigation is only an adjunct to her two main projects in recent years. The first, Aisteach, archives an alternate history of an Irish musical avant-garde that never existed, presenting original sound recordings and learned academic discussion. The second, The Text Score Dataset 1.0, involves the compilation of over 3000 text scores with which to retrain machine learning algorithms so that new scores can be generated by AI. This article offers an introduction to these two projects from the perspective of Walshe’s acknowledged debts to science fiction. The final section presents a speculative synthesis since, at the time of writing, Walshe has not linked the two projects together. But what if Aisteach was included as part of the dataset? What kind of future music emerges from an invented set of past sounds? How might we reclaim the future as well as the past? Could we obviate that ‘slow cancellation of the future’ as described by Mark Fisher and others?[3]

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From our archive: An interview with Saul Williams by Richard Howard

slamSaul Williams is a poet, hip-hop M.C., producer and actor who first came to prominence through his victory at the poetry Grand Slam at the Nuyorican Poets Café in 1996. This event kick-started an acting career for Williams with the lead role in the feature film Slam in 1998, and a music career in which Williams began to blend his poetry with his love of hip-hop. What makes Williams’ work interesting from a science fiction standpoint is the obvious affinity he has with the genre, evident in his lyrics and the soundscapes that he chooses to rhyme over. From the outset, Williams wrote and produced with a speculative bent. In the song ‘Ohm’ from 1998’s Lyricist Lounge compilation, Williams announced ‘I am no Earthling, I drink moonshine on Mars/And mistake meteors for stars ‘cause I can’t hold my liquor/But I can hold my breath and ascend like wind to the black hole/And play galaxaphones on the fire escapes of your soul’. The glimmering production on ‘Ohm’ is no less science fictional, especially as it accelerates at around the three-minute mark.

Continue reading “From our archive: An interview with Saul Williams by Richard Howard” →

Vector #269

Vector #269Download

This issue of Vector is dedicated, in part, to revisiting the subject of women writers of science fiction. Few female UK-based science fiction authors currently have contracts, but worldwide, there’s a great deal going on, a geographic, cultural, and linguistic diversity which Cheryl Morgan surveys in this issue. I came away from reading it with a massively expanded to-read list, and I hope it inspires you similarly. Tony Keen examines the roles of death and transformation in Justina Robson’s books Natural History (one of the books on last year’s list of the previous decades best science fiction by women) and Living Next Door to the God of Love. In contrast, Niall Harrison examines a very different author, Glasgow-based Julie Bertagna. Her post-apocalyptic trilogy, which begins with Exodus, provides an intriguing comparison with Stephen Baxter’s current series of prehistoric climate change novels which began with Stone Spring.

The second part of Victor Grech’s three-part series on gender in science fiction doesn’t focus on women science fiction authors, but does deal with quite a few of them in the process of discussing the variety of single-gendered world in science fiction. In particular, he examines the in-story reasons, the biological explanations for their existence, and the degrees to which those mechanisms are found in the ecologies of our own world.

Shana Worthen

Out of this World: Last Day / Gift Shop

One of the things that the British Library does fairly well is providing a decent range of things to buy in conjunction with a given major exhibit.  Thanks to Out of this World: Science Fiction but not as You Know It, for the last several months, the British Library has been selling a good range of science fiction novels and criticism; “Destruction of Earth” magnets; War of the Worlds tote bags and posters; and lots of posters of mostly out-of-copyright science fiction illustrations and book covers.

There’s Mike Ashley’s book which accompanies the show, but the same name, and, from the BL venture The Spoken Word, CDs of interviews with modern science fiction authors and H.G. Wells.

There was also, to my surprise, a postcard of the cover art for an early Rondò Veneziano album, an album not otherwise represented anywhere in the show as far as I noticed. Rondò Veneziano was a group I discovered by wandering into a shop in the late ’80s, being struck by the baroque-electronica-rock music playing, and asking what it was.  For years afterward, I would buy their cassettes whenever I ran across them. I ended up with 12-15 albums, but only realized this week, after running across that postcard, that they’d gone on to do around 70 (!) albums in total so far.

The ’80s cover art of Venezia 2000 shows a pair of humanoid robots, dressed up in baroque finery, playing their stringed instruments in a gondola while an entirely unfamiliar, presumably futuristic Venice, overshadows them across the waves. It was absolutely in keeping with the range of old predictive prints and books on display in the exhibit. If you like old future predictions and don’t already know it, you should be reading the blog Paleofuture.

Today is the very last day to catch Out of this World: Science Fiction but not as You Know It at the British Library.  It’s open until 17:00.

Out of this World: Two Days Left / A Signal from Mars

Inamongst all the books in display cases in Out of this World: Science Fiction but Not As You Know It at the British Library were things which which were not books: K-9, a space ship crashing into the wall, works of science fictional art work blown up to a large scale, snippets from movies and documents, and a fairly large number of headphones.

Listening to pieces of music or interviews takes several minutes at a time. It’s a commitment which the majority of visitors to the exhibit didn’t make. And so they missed out how things like a recording of the original Dr. Who theme song; an excerpt from an experimental music/voice album called Return to the Centre of the Earth (1999); and a 1910 recording of John Lacalle’s band playing Raymond Taylor’s tune, “A Signal from Mars”, set next to its sheet music.

If you have the time today or tomorrow to see the exhibit before it closes, you can listen to these yourself. If not, here’s the John Lacalle band playing “A Signal from Mars”; and a modern piano cover of it.

It’s fascinating to think of this as founding science-fictional in its time, and how much our conception of science fictional music has changed since then.

Reading List: Dead Channel Surfing

Another article, unfortunately, that makes heavier weather of its argument than is really necessary. Karen Collins sets out to convince us of, as her subtitle has it, “the commonalities between cyberpunk literature and industrial music.” Except, straight away —

Although cyberpunk began as a literary movement, it is often referred to as more than that — it is, rather, a concept reflected in many disciplines sharing a similarity of approaches and attitudes.

— and the argument she goes on to construct depends rather heavily on the inclusion of films, from the obvious (Blade Runner, The Matrix) to the slightly less so (The Terminator). Which is fine in principle, obviously; it’s just not what the title promises. There are other carelessnesses. In an initial list of characteristics associated with cyberpunk, Collins eyebrow-raisingly includes “technophilia”; but later in the article comes round to the more sensible “Cyberpunk, therefore, has an arguably ambiguous relationship to technology”. Mondo 2000 is described as “the original cyberpunk fanzine”, and Cheap Truth isn’t mentioned. Etc etc.

Some of the points made are actually more general than they need to be, to the point of banality. In describing shared influences on cyberpunk and industrial — focusing on “Dada, William S Burroughs and the punk movement” — Collins ends up pointing out that “Cyberpunk fiction similarly incorporates many references to popular culture”, and perhaps even better in terms of failing to establish a unique relationship, that both forms are “rife with neologisms”. This is despite the fact that the shared influences seem undeniable, based on the numerous specific examples from both cyberpunks and industrial artists that Collins is able to provide.

The section on “recurrent dystopian themes” is a bit more wobbly, I think, in part because Collins starts with this list of “themes fundamental to dystopia”:

Although these themes are not necessarily in every dystopia, at least one will always be present. The primary themes of a dystopia can be summarised as; the socio-economic system of the West will lead to an apocalypse. The apocalypse will lead to, or be caused by, a totalitarian elite controlling the masses through technology, which brings about a need for a resistance, usually led by an outsider-hero.

Personally, I’d have thought canonical cyberpunk texts fit this schema somewhat less well than the mainstream of dystopias — although they do fit, sure, particularly if you allow, as Collins does, that “in cyberpunk, the apocalypse is often a metaphoric one”. Collins also has less evidence on the industrial side, here, able to establish the anti-capitalist bona fides of the genre pretty easily, but not doing so well on the other points.

More interesting is the discussion of “unconventional sound-making devices” — that is, bits of discarded technology — used in industrial music, although a consideration of the use of robot voices seems like a sidetrack; it makes for an interesting contrast with the version of HipHop described in “Feenin“, but robots don’t seem to me a core concern of cyberpunk.

Lastly, and most entertainingly, Collins identifies a similar mood of “anguish, darkness and the future”, on the basis of lists of keywords, although it’s not clear whether the cyberpunk list is based on a spectrum of reader responses, or just the one guy:

Cavallaro links cyberpunk and gothic horror with a series of keyword similarities relating to the moods evoked by the narratives: decay, decomposition, disorder, helplessness, horror, irresolution, madness, paranoia, persecution, secrecy, unease and terror. [8] Similarly, my study of connotations of industrial music, using free-inductive methods of listener response tests on a selection of industrial recordings, found that the most common responses were sad, dark, anxious, futuristic, death, urban, violent, and anguish.

That footnote, incidentally: “Cyberpunk and industrial could also be argued to sometimes have an underlying humour that helps to lighten this mood.” Which, yes, that’s probably a good thing. And although Collins never quite says this explicitly, although each of these correspondences on its own is rather loose, all of them together do make the case that “these artists are branches on the same tree” fairly convincing.