Satch Hoyt

Un-Muting

Traza

The ‘un-muting’ or ‘sonic restitution’ of historical African instruments held in Western museum collections, this project began with a recording session in October 2023 at the British Museum in London, where Hoyt was granted access to a selection of African instruments from the Museum’s Department of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. These recordings were then developed further in Hoyt’s studio, blending in African and Western instruments from his own collection.

‘This record is not an album but a diagram, a blackground score for a people who have never stopped dancing. Instruments exiled into the vitrines of empire, their voices stilled by taxonomic theft, now murmur and hum again. This is restitution by vibration, and the sounds you hear refuse to be forgotten, to be fixed, to refuse to die. You won’t find Western time signatures here; you’ll find time folding, spilling, catching fire. His compositions bespeak an afro-sonic-philo-sophy, more drastic than gnostic. These desperate times call for desperate pleasures.’