Medien|Denken – Kodwo Eshun – Handsworth Songs as Black Industrialism (Audio)

In conversation with Kobena Mercer in 2016, John Akomfrah and Trevor Mathison of Black Audio Film Collective characterised the Collective’s 1982 slide tape work Expeditions: Signs of Empire and Images of Nationality in terms of ‘a sonic back- drop which one could only call “black industrial’. In the Second Lecture, this notion is extended beyond Expeditions so to argue that the Collective continued to pursue the notion of a black industrial aesthetic towards Handsworth Songs and beyond. To hear Handsworth Songs from the perspective of the British industrial music culture of the late 1970s and 1980s is to rethink the parameters of audio in the Collective’s theorization of the becoming of black audio film collectivity. The idea of black audio can be heard as a cinesonic ecology in which the seditionary effects of punk, the mutational effect of post-punk and the blacklessness of industrial music converge to constitute an aesthetic sociality that works to reconfigure the frontier effects that reproduced the cine-culture of the British Left along the informally segregated racialised aesthetics of twentieth century British cinema.