Now music blogs are semi-well known. There are search engines like The Hype Machine that index their entries. The writer of Fluxblog has joined the staff at Pitchfork. There was probably been an article in The New York Times “Style Section.” At the time though, they were new and fresh, still developing the accepted posturing and presentation that comes with a codified form. Benn Loxo’s initial conceit was that it contained exclusively African music (now, the music is sourced internationally, from any country the writer, Matt Yanchyshyn, has visited). Even though Mr. Yanchyshyn would routinely feature very different African cultures or musical movements in his posts, I enjoyed all most all of his choices and would routinely download from him. Whatever his guiding taste was in picking the music, it closely matched my own. His blog is one of the few that I don’t download selectively from, instead trusting that anything he picks out I will like.

Mr. Yanchyshyn is a Canadian record collector who started blogging about music when he started to live in Senegal. He traveled around and then moved to Paris, he continued writing about African music (until very recently). His posts are characterized not just by the good music, but the apparent research and knowledge about the music and the African music scene he tries to transmit in each entry. (This information is from this piece at AfricanLoft).

 The distance that the Internet has collapsed between the knowledges that Mr. Yanchyshyn was trying to transmit and my own experiencing of his offerings fascinates me. I want to make clear that in this multimedia project, I’m not trying to condemn the appropriation of African pop musics by the West.  Instead, I hope by displaying my space against the sonic space of the songs, I can start to explore how the Internet collapses distance. There is very little distance between a computer in Paris or Nigeria uploading, and my own computer at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts swiftly, swiftly downloading, At the same time, what I’m recognizing in this music as familiar is often the result of large historical events that unfurled across large, material distances. These links between West African cultures and American cultures mean that I might be hearing pieces of Africa in rock music or Tropicalismo and bits of America in Highlife music. There has been a constant sonic exchange across the Atlantic, creating little pockets of familiar in distant places.

As musicologist Stephen Brown wrote:

One of the most important events of the twentieth century was the marriage of African and European musical languages. It wasn’t just one marriage, but a series of marriages—in the American South, in Cuba, in Jamaica, in Brazil, and, of course, in Africa. There is something about each of the two music cultures that seems to need the other…European music provided harmonic progressions organized round a tonal center—an idea which, once you’ve heard it, is irresistible. African music offered its polyrhythms, rhythms that occur in layers—a kind of beat which, once heard, is hard to live without.(quoted from “The Many Voices of Africa,” by John Ryle in Granta 92: The View From Africa).

Still, I can’t ignore the attraction of the thrill of strangeness in this music. Hearing strange languages, unfamiliar configurations of sounds, and even seeing the pictures that are posted next to the music is the source of some of my delight. How do I process these different motivations? I hope by placing these images of me listening to this music in the unobserved texture of my life against the songs I can begin to see and understand how my own tastes and actions function between these two places and spaces.

I also don’t want to forget the space of the Internet—this new place is what makes these long distance communications places so different. At the bottom of each page of juxtaposition there will be a place for you, denizens of the Internet, to comment and root these disjunctures this other place that connects them.

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