Black Women

Today we examine the prison song ‘Black Women’, with artists from Colombia and Australia delivering two very different takes on the original song.

Anthony Lyons, Sydney, Australia

A”‘Weigh-Five Hundred’ reimagines the original recording of Black Women. It is partly ambient but also glitch and beat heavy in parts.

“I was drawn to three main qualities in the original recording – the soulful, bluesy sound of the grouped vocal, the persistent percussive stomping, and the imperfections or artefacts in the recording itself.

“I used both small fragments and longer sections from the recording.

“Some of these resampled parts were heavily manipulated through processes such as grain delays, pitch shifting, and reversing, while other parts were left as more clearly identifiable recurring short loops.

“Some of the smaller processed fragments became material for the glitched beats and pulses that build up and break down in layers.

:I included a few randomisation processes and the final recording comes largely from playing the prepared sounds and instrument devices ‘live’ then making just a few edits in the DAW.”

Sofia Botero, Bogota, Colombia

“My inspiration for this piece comes from my very own experience as a mother and housekeeper, and from the repetition that taking care of someone implies, as far as cooking, cleaning, caring, and cooking, cleaning, caring again and again, repeatedly, a never ending task, a rewarding, nonetheless heartbreaking commitment.

“As much as I find this song distressing, I also find it soothing. For reasons I can’t quite pinpoint, I found an echo, a graceful reverberation, of my own confinement.”