SX Blog

10.13.2024

Listening to Small Axe 53

17 July 2017
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by Tiana Reid 

This second Small Axe playlist is more “listening with” than “listening to.” The music accompanying the new issue, 53, conjures hallucinations, sonic graffiti, gestures to freedom, dancing time, the afterlife of the beat, memory redoubled, kitchen talk, and the insistent pressure of noise. Those are just some keywords. The sounds—by Port-au-Prince-born and Montreal-raised KAYTRANADA, The Funkees and their afrorock digressions, the immortal Prince, and more— have an elastic correlation to the essays in the journal. But it's that filament connection between text and sound, the jump betweens vibration and vision, allusions and affect, references and romance, that constitutes the magic of music. That is how I hear it.

Small Axe 53 playlist