Back in the 1990s, there was a record that would reliably get the crowd whooping at Model One, a techno club run by D1 Recordings at the Funnel in Dublin. The record was K-Hand’s Come On Now Baby, made and released in Detroit in 1996. Even though I was a fan, it took me a very long time to work out that K-Hand was a woman — Kelli Hand.
Dance music, with its coded messages from the underground, made it difficult to decipher who producers were at the best of times. Any women who were making dance music, however, seemed to be completely invisible.
Hand, a black woman from Detroit, began releasing techno on her own label in 1990, and continued to do so until she died in 2021, making her part of the second wave of dance music producers to come from the city. Yet, while her contemporaries — “Mad” Mike Banks, Jeff Mills and Robert Hood, who set up the Underground Resistance musical collective — would achieve legendary status among techno fans, Hand’s profile was nowhere as high.
This Thursday at Imma, For What You Dream Of: Talks, Dance Rhythms and Afro-Future Sonic Imaginaries is about setting the record straight. The event is packed full of the music and film made by black women and non-binary people which is having a huge impact on the genre.
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For What You Dream Of takes its cue from Xenogenesis, the remarkable show of the Otolith Group’s work currently at Imma; it will be about what the artists call “a science fiction of the present”.
Detroit techno offers a unique window into this concept. The most enduring example is Drexciya, who made techno in Detroit in the 1990s: they created a myth about an underwater country populated from the children of pregnant slave women thrown overboard on the Middle Passage.
The Drexciyan myth features in the film Black to Techno, by Jenn Nkiru, which will be screened on Thursday. Afterwards, Nkiru, a Nigerian-British director who has worked with Beyoncé, Rage Against the Machine, Kamasi Washington, Neneh Cherry and more, will discuss how her work critiques racism and colonialism.
The specific black American experience of racism produced a whole musical language, starting with artists such as Sun Ra and Alice Coltrane, which became known as Afrofuturism and which seemed to crystallise in Detroit techno. Kodwo Eshun, one of the artists in the Otolith Group, wrote a defining book on the subject, More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, in 1998.
Increasingly, the buzz and futurism of contemporary dance music is coming from the continent of Africa itself: amapiano, gqom and kuduro are all genres of dance music from different locations across Africa, and they will be played in the DJ sets of Irish musicians Fehdah (Emma Garnett) and Mona-Lxsa (Mona-Lisa Das), on Thursday.
Nkisi (Melika Ngombe Kolongo), who will perform live, is a Congolese-Belgian producer whose unique polyrhythmic techno is informed by Bantu-Kongo cosmology. It’s likely that a lot of Irish artists will relate to the pre-colonial cultural landscape that she is tapping into.
Before Nkisi’s performance, she will take part in a panel discussion chaired by writer and activist Ashley Chadamoyo Makombe (who co-programmed the event with me), and also featuring Renn (Karen Miano), an Irish artist who founded the Origins Eile collective, which includes a remarkable archive of Vogue and Ballroom culture, called House of Origins.
Black women and non-binary people’s role in dance music may seem like a niche subject, but we feel strongly that the invisibility of women and non-binary people in dance music has had a far-reaching impact beyond nightclubs.
Dance music was created in black, Latin and queer communities in American cities and has become one of the most lucrative entertainment industries in the world (valued at $6 billion in 2021 by the International Music Summit). Yet, the black people who created the sound have not, for the most part, seen commensurate returns. Do an internet search for the world’s top-earning DJs and it will invariably come back with a list of white men.
Further, dance music production in the 1980s and 1990s was rooted in technology; at that time, the societal barriers preventing women working in technology-based careers were immense. The invisibility of women who were using technology to make music — not just in dance music, but across pop and more experimental forms — has perpetuated the false narrative that women aren’t good with technology.
Another type of harmful invisibility was experienced by black female vocalists when a gold rush was started in 1988 by the first global dance hits, Inner City’s Big Fun and Good Life, which featured the gospel-influenced vocals of Paris Grey (Shanna Jackson, who was credited). The following year, there were at least three examples of white male European producers having huge copycat global hits with dance records that sampled or featured black female vocalists without credit — Loleatta Holloway on Ride on Time, Ya Kid K on Pump Up the Jam and Jocelyn Brown on The Power. In each case, the producers and their record companies used a model to mime the vocals in music videos and for TV performances.
These incidents were not only a legal infringement — in most cases, the women successfully took action — but they also threw up sticky moral questions about how artists in countries that had colonial histories in Africa were treating artists whose musical heritage derived from the experience of slavery. The way that the techniques and aesthetics of dance music, developed in black communities, were being used to exploit black women was, as we’d say in Ireland, grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre, but perhaps not unprecedented.
It hasn’t been all bad. In 1993, the record For What You Dream Of was released, co-written by Bedrock and KYO, a black woman named Carol Leeming from Leicester. It went on to be featured on the soundtrack of Trainspotting, becoming a huge hit. KYO’s gospel inflection and generous message of self-expression became an anthem among anthems. Just at the start of this month [August 8th], meanwhile, Beverley Knight gave a superhuman performance, with Goldie, of Inner City Life, to an audience of a billion at the closing ceremony of the Commonwealth Games.
Black women and non-binary people singing on and producing dance records make us feel good, they make us feel free; despite so many industry barriers and problems, they broke important ground and continue to do so. As KYO sang in 1993: “You walk the fire for what you dream of.”
For What You Dream Of: Talks, Dance Rhythms and Afro-Future Sonic Imaginaries, Thursday September 1st, free at Imma, is part of Imma Nights
