Constitution

Members of the dispossessed, won't you lend me your ears!" This is the repeated call and the rallying chorus of the nearly 40-minute centerpiece to composer and percussionist Asher Gamedze's new album Constitution. The expansive double album, a minoritarian fellowship in breath, is Gamedze's follow-up to 2023's Turbulence and Pulse (IARC0057), and his first with The Black Lungs. The album - recorded in one day at Cape Town's Sound and Motion Studios - is an elaboration of the possibilities of autonomous constitution in and through polyrhythmic, modal, large ensemble music. On Constitution, the power of the question, the possibility of an improvised answer and the celebration of being together exists not in the solo but in the group, the ensemble. Here The Black Lungs collectively explore and deconstruct the conceptual, tonal, and atonal possibilities of themes which are at once of old and new dreams - curious and instantiative, melancholic and emergent. "The Black Lungs is inspired by the revolutionary thought and practice of the Black Consciousness Movement. In particular, the relationship between antagonism - constituting a united front of all the oppressed against white supremacy and racial capitalism - and the possibilities for resistance and elaboration - the creative militant capacities of those assembled - enabled and unleashed by that process of constitution.