Matana Roberts on “Panoramic Soundquilting,” Living on a Boat and Exploring the South
It’s difficult to come up with a better descriptor for Matana Roberts’ dense, enveloping music than the one she uses: panoramic soundquilting. Though the New York-based artist is most associated with the world of jazz, the work she has been doing as part of a 12-album series called COIN COIN stretches far beyond most genre boundaries, especially the recently released Chapter Three: River Run Thee.
Where the first two albums in the series (all of them are out on Constellation Records) hearken back to the potent sounds and politics of late-‘60s work by John Coltrane and the Liberation Music Orchestra, the third chapter is more like a modern classical work. The 12 songs melt into one another creating a collage of drones made by saxophone and synthesizer, a panoply of voices reading and singing, and field recordings that Roberts captured during a nearly month long sojourn through Mississippi, Tennessee and Louisiana. And like the initial chapters, the album attempts to navigate our country’s still troubled history of race relations, and Roberts’ own journey through her past and present.
Paste connected with Roberts at her current home in Brooklyn—a boat docked in Sheepshead Bay—to discuss this new album, her experiences visiting the South for the first time and the art of improvisation.
Paste: So much of COIN COIN Chapter Three revolves around your first trip to the southern U.S. What was your conception of that part of the country before you went there?
Matana Roberts: It was kind of like a fairy tale, but like a nightmare fairy tale. That’s how it was described to me in different ways by family. I spent a couple years of my life as a kid living in Durham, N.C., and I had some inkling of what it might be like but not really the deep South. I didn’t have an understanding of the deep South, so this trip was really eye-opening. I’ve been all over the world, and there has been no place ever as foreign to me as the state of Mississippi. At the same time spending this time in the South made things that were foreign to me that I experienced in the Midwest make more sense because I realized it was a Southern aesthetic that I was experiencing. It was really interesting to see just how beautiful that part of the United States is and notice these little things that are happening to push it in a progressive direction while still paying attention to its history.
Paste: Before you went, did you already have the concept for the album in mind, knowing that you were going to be capturing field recordings and doing interviews with people down there?
Roberts: Yeah, I absolutely did. All the segments of the project have been planned out for a very long time, and I have a certain working aesthetic that I am dealing with. I’m using history as a place of inspiration but also as a way to use it to make sense of data. History is really just the collection of data. I saw it as a chance to go down there to collect content, but not clearly be sure how I was going to weave that content. I just felt like I was going to find fabric and then come back to NY and try to weave that fabric together in different ways.
Paste: What was some of your favorite things that you got ahold of in this process of collecting?
Roberts: Standing next to a couple of Hell’s Angels in the Mississippi State Senate house saying the Pledge of Allegiance was really special. Having my bags and person checked through as hardcore as those Hell’s Angels. That was really fascinating. You know, small Southern towns…one thing that they have that small Northern towns don’t really have are church bells everywhere. You hear church bells all the time. I only really hear things like that when I go to Europe, these small towns in Germany and Poland. I love language and I love accents, so having these moments of understanding that someone is speaking English to me but I have no idea what they’re saying. That was really fascinating. And then having these moments of wondering…I have my own culture filter about some of these things, and having to kind of check myself a few times. And understanding that maybe the way someone was speaking to me or directing themselves towards me had nothing to do with the color of my skin. But because I know that history so well, I’d hear things in a certain way and go, “Oh no, wait, what was that?” There was just so much to take in. And the food, god, the food. I’m going to these places where asking for a salad is the wrong thing to do. I remember I was at some restaurant in Louisiana and I’m looking at the menu and I go, “Alright, fried this, fried that. Steamed vegetables! Alright I’m gonna go for that.” The steamed vegetables come out covered in a layer of cheddar cheese. On that trip, I said I’d have one gut-busting fried meal a week and that was impossible! I just gave up.
Paste: I wanted to ask about how you use language and the texts that you were reading from on this record. On so many of the songs, the words start piling on top of each other. You can pick out little bits and pieces, but it’s nearly impossible to follow one narrative thread. What was your thinking on that?
Roberts: I’m really devoted to a certain sort of collagist aesthetic and I like what happens when all these sounds cross that are not necessarily completely related to each other. Then you listen back to them and it creates this whole other sonic palette. I call my, for lack of a better term, method of composition “panoramic soundquilting.” I’m definitely trying to quilt with all these different sounds and textures and it’s the only way I’ve been able to make sense of the different weaves which I’m trying to use within a historical narrative. And sometimes it doesn’t work out so well, sometimes it does. I never can really tell until I completely finish an idea or a series of ideas together. And in the case of this record, it worked out OK.
Paste: Some of the words on the album come from the book Dhow Chasing In Zanzibar Waters. What can you tell about that text?
Roberts: It’s a sea captain by the name of G.L. Sullivan who was a kind of bounty hunter of illegal slave shapes. He would intercept these illegal slave ships that were generally going to the U.S. because slavery had been banned in the U.K. five years before it had been banned here. But there were still ships making their way to the U.S. He wrote this diary, he kept a ship’s log about his experience and he published it as part of the abolitionist movement in the 1870s. It kind of disappeared and then got picked up again in the ‘60s and published once more and then it disappeared again. I collect photos from the turn of the century and am really fascinated with ephemera. I was looking for photos of African slaves. I’d seen drawings, but I’d never seen on the ship photos. I had heard that this book had those photos and had this narrative. At the same time I was doing an artist residency at Amherst College in Massachusetts where I had access to this amazing library system, and they indeed had it. I made a copy of the book, but it was so painful to give it back. I wanted to figure out a way to buy it, there were no other copies of it. It was just so fascinating to read because at the time I was already into boats and waterways and thinking about American migration in terms of tributaries and rivers and waterways. Around that time, I also traced some of my lineage through Ellis Island. I just became so fascinated with it that I wanted to figure out a way to pull it into the COIN COIN work. I’m nerding out in different ways on this record, and I’m thankful that people are accepting of it. I was very nervous about putting this out.
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