You can know it all, with language in place

You can know it now, with rhythm and grace 

Forever momentary space

— Damon Locks, NOW (Forever Momentary Space)

   Inception  

I first thought of the word combination All Tomorrow's Archives in the midst of a global pandemic, unemployed and housing insecure, stuck inside my head and paralysed by fear. I coped by contemplating ideas and things I wanted to do. After 20 years of working in music and the publishing content industry, spending most of my time thinking about how to engage with, document, and celebrate music (sub)culture(s), archives had worked their way to the front of my mind—those both real and imagined, experienced and felt, understood and misunderstood. Part of it was probably age, and part of it was a desire to grapple with the concept and reality of the archive as it relates to, in particular, modern music history.

For the purposes of this essay, and my thinking around All Tomorrow's Archives in general, modern music history refers to a period that began in the 1970s, with the emergence of hip-hop and electronic music as sonic and cultural driving forces, and continues into the present¹. This conceptual approach arose from the intersection of growing up in the 1980s, discovering hip-hop and dance music in the 1990s and my work as a journalist in the following decades. However, it wasn’t fully realised, in both theory and practice, until the late 2010s following time spent working on an archive of modern music history² and the subsequent writing of my first book³, which involved reckoning with an archive of my own making—a 10-year collection of stories, ideas and research about instrumental hip-hop and electronic music at the turn of the century. 

By late 2020, the book was published and, with help from my wife, I decided to go back to school. I signed up for a Masters degree in Digital Humanities, in the hope that it might offer some critical insights into how to think about the relationship between archive and modern music history. All of this animates All Tomorrow's Archives⁴ as a vessel for thinking and doing, a space for contemplating what has been, what is and what could be as it relates to ideas and practices of archiving modern music history. 

1 In this essay I use the word hip-hop to refer to the culture of the same name, its varied practices, the music (be it called rap or hip-hop), and the people who identify as belonging to the culture. To borrow from Walt Whitman, hip-hop is large, it contains multitudes. As will hopefully be made clear as we progress along, to people such as myself whose identity was, and continues, to be shaped by hip-hop this idea of multitudes (music, culture, people, practices) is a given that enables a way of thinking about and seeing the world. A similar logic underpins the use of the term electronic music, which is intended to refer to close to a century of electronically-enabled music across a variety of practices. Lastly, while I use separate terms for both, they are in effect closely related and inseparable. As to why that is requires more space than this footnote is already taking.  

2 This archive is the Red Bull Music Academy lectures, which we'll return to later.

3 Bedroom Beats & B-Sides: Instrumental Hip-Hop And Electronic Music at the Turn of the Century, published by Velocity Press. 

4 All Tomorrow's Archives is a play on All Tomorrow's Parties, a festival series that itself punned a Velvet Underground song. Stacks on stacks. 

SPECULATION I  

Breakbeats are archival tools for extracting forward motion from past recordings. A rhythmic pattern originally captured on tape is cut onto vinyl, digitised into bytes and reassembled using analog or digital machines, before emanating as sound frequencies for human bodies to feel in the now. The beat breaks linear time.

   Navigation    

In 2013, the artist and scholar Lynnée Denise coined the term “DJ Scholarship” to “describe a mix-mode research practice, both performative and subversive in its ability to shape and define social experiences, shifting the public perception of the role of a DJ from being a purveyor of party music to an archivist and information specialist.”⁵ ① The term, and subsequent work, was also partly inspired by “the troubling fact that Black women and queer DJs are missing from hip hop’s most popularized origin stories” and the belief that, as a Black queer woman, Denise could use the term to “spin a blend of thoughts and ideas about race and gender into the dominant narrative of what a DJ is in the collective imagination—a cis heterosexual man.” ① 

I first saw the term on Twitter, where it is Denise’s profile name. Her flip of these two semantically distant words made instant sense to me, in the same way that All Tomorrow's Archives made sense when I first thought of it. Why? Because to me both terms are clear examples of linguistic vessels for ideas that stem from practice, ideas born of activities such as listening, dancing, organizing events, or just living in and with a music community. Doing leads to a desire to research and think, which leads to more doing. And on and on. 

For many of us raised on and aged with hip-hop and electronic music, musical forms and cultures intrinsically connected to the modern understanding of the DJ and examples of what Denise calls "the underground cultures that form the interconnected electronic music of the African diaspora," ② there is an understanding you may eventually come to: what a DJ does—be it selecting, mixing, digging, scratching, or even producing—can naturally lead to both scholarship and praxis. Scholarship in the sense of theorising and learning, qualities also true of being a dedicated fan, and praxis because engaging with the music theoretically should ideally, perhaps inevitably, lead you to want to bring those ideas into practice, whether that be in the mix or in the real world. After all, this is music that builds on what came before and what might come next in order to navigate the now. It is music of the archive, for the archive, by the archive.

I think of DJ scholarship as an example of navigating All Tomorrow's Archives, of letting the practical work and engagement with music communities be a driver of ideas and theories, so that a reinforcing loop is established. Such navigation should be the opposite of what Birgitta Johnson has called "drive-by research" ③, whereby cultural information is extracted from communities and incorporated into academia without any meaningful relationship building. Johnson’s concept is also useful outside of academia, updated for today’s media landscape as something like drive-by content creation, where cultural information is extracted from communities by corporations for marketing purposes. By (re)using practices most often associated with the creative processes of hip-hop and electronic music—sampling, selecting, listening, connecting, blending, sequencing, cutting, (re/de)tuning—to inform critical thinking we can bring what emerges from it back into communal practices and interaction. In my case this meant treating the chapters of my book as textual versions of beat tapes so that they could, hopefully, be more approachable and enjoyable to the reader (and myself). In Denise’s case, she has identified “four cultural practices that evolved out of diasporic sound cultures” that constitute DJ scholarship—chasing samples, digging through the crates, studying album cover art, and reading liner notes ①. In both instances the work seeks to find new, creative ways to engage with, and preserve, modern music history through communal celebration: whether that be a book about a moment in time that has meaning to its community regardless of its perceived external value, or a personal and academic practice rooted in “erasure resistance” ①.⁶ 

5 In her website Denise further expands on this by saying, “[…] the role of the DJ from a party purveyor to an archivist, cultural custodian and information specialist of music with critical value.”

6 Denise explains erasure resistance as a rooting for DJ scholarship thusly: “In addition to exploring the inner lives of Black women artists, it focuses on the need to move Black women scholars of music, both inside of and outside of the academy, from the margins of expertise about Black luminaries and unsung artists, to the center.”

SPECULATION II

Pirate radio and nightclubs are archival tools that generate renewable community energy. Even as technology gradually atomises our patterns of contribution and connection, as capital accumulation threatens their existence, these spaces—both real (clubs) and virtual (pirate radio)—endure in some form or another. Set up the antenna and broadcast what you care about, or lower your eyes and make your surroundings disappear for a few minutes or hours. The pirate radio signal and the club dance floor are spaces of innovation and belonging where linear time does not apply.

   Automation    

"What I want is a hip-hop AI."

My friend is serious, even if he doesn't necessarily know what is needed to achieve it. He came up as a music journalist in the 1990s back when writing about hip-hop was a vital form of community participation and a fight for representation. To him, to me, and to thousands of others around the world, hip-hop implied a participatory approach that made it a way of life. And so, my friend became the kind of music journalist that broke with the tradition of separating the critic from culture and community. For most of our life, hip-hop has been our cipher for navigating the world and embedded within it is a critical approach to technology that has enabled its revolutionary potential for the past 50 years. We’re talking about archives and the institutionalisation of hip-hop when he makes the above passing comment about AI. The comment stuck with me, because in his desire for a hip-hop AI I heard an extension of hip-hop’s critical approach. 

I want a hip-hop AI⁷ too, but I also understand that to get there requires more than just the technical Machine Learning (ML) “bits” like assembling datasets and training algorithms for pattern recognition and knowledge extraction. For a start it would require the navigation of copyright and intellectual property laws (in particular in the US, which is friendlier to financial interests), of decades-long corporate exploitation of community creations, and of a messy landscape of archives hosted by institutions, private collectors, technology companies and pirate enthusiasts. And then there are the necessary ethical questions that assembling such “technical bits” entail: who decides what data the AI is trained on, who annotates the data, who reviews it—to name but a few. Should we even get past all of this we’d still be left with another crucial question: what should this hip-hop AI do? 

The answers to these questions, and others I haven’t thought of, require community-led efforts rather than business proposals or institutional activity. If there’s one thing the hip-hop community has shown in the past 50 years, it’s that hip-hop is often a messy collection of arguments and disagreements about who and what matters, of imperfect and incomplete archives that are in conversation with all aspects of time. A hip-hop AI born of these tensions is more likely to truly represent the vitality of the culture, rather than merely ape its most obvious (and thus racialized) aspects.

Technology has always come for the archive: print, digital, and now automation. In the time I've spent imagining All Tomorrow's Archives, the field of visual art has been challenged by ML in ways that make the sampling practices integral to hip-hop and electronic music—and the copyright battles they continue to engender—seem quaint⁸. As the artist Mat Dryhurst puts it, the issue is no longer about stealing copyrighted material to recontextualize it but of having enough data available that you can "spawn infinite derivative works from a training set." ④

Alongside the composer Holly Herndon, Dryhurst has spent the last decade plus at the intersection of creative culture and technology, experimenting with ML (among other things) to imagine new communal practices. One result of this has been their coining of the term ‘spawning’, intended to capture something of the process of using ML for creativity as separate from its predecessor, sampling. Doing so allows them to underline their differences, whilst making space for novel understandings of what the technology can entail and imply. To name one: while a machine may be able to mimic styles by navigating the latent spaces of its training sets, this does not replace the social elements of creation, but rather hints at potentially emerging new forms. Importantly, Dryhurst and Herndon apply their thinking into practice: in 2021 they launched Holly+, a digital twin of Herndon that engages with concerns around identity and contribution that current AI trends are exacerbating; and a year later they co-created Spawning, an organization dedicated to building tools that can help artists manage their AI identity, beginning with the inclusion of their works in training sets assembled by others ⑤/⑥/⑦. Just as DJing and sampling enabled critical engagement with the archive in order to extract meaningfully from it, so will spawning—or any other naming for ML-assisted creation. 

Another salient example of theory and practice intersecting with music, archives, and automation is the 2021 collaboration between electronic music veterans Mouse on Mars and writer and scholar Louis Chude-Sokei (aided by programmers and other collaborators) on the AAI album (Anarchic Artificial Intelligence). Central to the project was the creation of speech software modelled and trained on a dataset of texts by, and the voices of, Chude-Sokei and collaborator Yağmur Uçkunkaya, engaged by Mouse on Mars to embed a generated meta-narrative into the album. As with Holly+, key to this approach is the application of ML to a smaller scale than what we are often led to believe is necessary and with the full involvement of the artists whose works feed the generation, a spawning of new creative ideas that also offer critical engagement with the technology and its implications. In the album’s press release, MoM’s Jan St. Werner notes that “machines can open up new concepts of life, and expand our definitions of being human,” ⑧ hinting at how artists, and other cultural participants, can seize this new technology for their own means rather than having its uses dictated by external, primarily financial, interests. 

One version of what automation and ML might mean for All Tomorrow’s Archives can be found in the conclusion of Chude-Sokei’s essay Return to The Echo Chamber (2021), where he reflects on two decades of thinking about the knotty relationship between race and sound:

“What we look for now is what we have always listened for and what we must now create once again in the ruins of multiple empires: we may call it race or class or uptown or downtown or desire or freedom or identity but in truth it was simply this—community.” ⑨

The ruins of empires Chude-Sokei talks about are also found in the datasets that underpin the current, most dominant instances of AI. The creation of community within these digital ruins will require an understanding of new and existing practices as both creative and archival-related, echoing the importance of what scholar Bethany Nowviskie called the “skilled archival labor, not magic” ⑩ needed to engage with digital cultural heritage in the shadows of mass extinction.

7 Artificial Intelligence is used as a synonym for Machine Learning (ML), rather than actual intelligence. By hip-hop AI I mean a Machine Learning-driven ‘something’ that is rooted in the aforementioned ideas of praxis and critical approach central to hip-hop. It’s a way of thinking through the times we’re living in. 

8 And in the time it has taken to write and edit this essay the public discourse and impact of ML as AI has taken on a whole new dimension, some of which is touched on here and some of which will have to wait for another time. 

SPECULATION III

Music is a navigational tool for exploring the archive. Music is ever-generating cultural heritage, refuting manmade definitions and spatio-temporal limitations. The music is the culture, the culture is the music. The heritage is ours. It is not to be defined but rather to be lived and shared based on ever-evolving community values.

Intellectual property is a communal fund. Copyright is the police. There is no anthem without a community to identify with it. Hip-hop and electronic music challenged exploitative concepts of ownership by subverting a broken system using its own tools. In doing so they hinted at what a form of communal ownership of the music might look like, one where conversation between community members taking place across space and time is centred rather than a single, individual genius or atomised individual. 

DJing and sampling are curatorial practices for navigating All Tomorrow's (Communal) Archives.

   Community    

I never learnt to formally write, I just did it. I became a music journalist because hip-hop had taught me to participate, to use the culture to find my place in it so that I could give back. Just as music had led me to writing, writing led me to archives. I worked without formal training but with an understanding that the work could generate its own value, that practice could lead to new ways of thinking. So when I returned to school, I went in looking for something that could stimulate this thinking. I quickly realized that what the Digital Humanities (DH) offered wasn't necessarily a formal training in archival studies, but rather something broader and not unlike my professional experiences: a way to think through and with the archives, and their relationships to technology and the humanities. DH gave me a renewed understanding of historical power dynamics and their embeddedness in the printed cultural record, what Roopika Risam rightfully calls "the most critical issue" ⑪ for the field to address. As Risam, whose research lies at the intersections of postcolonial and African diaspora studies, humanities knowledge infrastructures, and digital humanities, explains, "the critical work of digital humanities is to ask who is and is not legible in the digital cultural record and to interrogate how cultural value is created at the interface of cultural objects, cultural memory, and digitization." ⑪

The work then is to dig in the gaps of the archive, much like a DJ digs in the crates to find who or what might have been forgotten, erased. The more I thought about this, the more I found myself attracted to work and theory that seeks to actively place communities who are the subjects of archives in charge of them, centering them in more meaningful ways. Part of this attraction no doubt lay in my professional experience with the Red Bull Music Academy (RBMA) project⁹. The RBMA model had succeeded largely because those running the project were most often active members of the communities they sought to celebrate (I am a prime example of this). Yet despite the Academy's humanist intentions and efforts at community building and illuminating gaps in the archive, it could never escape the shadow of its purpose as a mere marketing program. It could celebrate, but not interrogate itself.

As a writer and a fan, I always understood the RBMA archive (consisting of video lectures, a digital magazine, and a radio station) to be an important cultural document, just as I knew it would always inevitably end. By the time the project shut down in late 2019, I’d spent a decade thinking about what the tension I felt at its heart might mean. It took a few more years to click but as I finished this piece it came to me: the value of something like RBMA was in the act of working through the inherent tension found at the intersection of financial and creative interests. It’s like oil in water, you can’t separate them but you can paint with them. We painted a flawed picture, but a picture nonetheless, and one that allowed our communities to figure things out together, for a brief moment in time. The RBMA archive is important but it is also a product of its time, a time when corporate marketing programs were the de facto benefactors of modern music culture, and with this came implications that should not be forgotten.

So, what could it look like to do the same thing without a corporation behind it? The more I read, the more I realised that the field of "Indigenous digital humanities” ⑪, as Risam terms it, may offer insights into thinking through All Tomorrow's Archives. A lot of the work in this field seeks to remedy the inherent settler colonialism embedded into archives and the cultural record by working directly with communities to create tools and systems that respect and uphold indigenous practices and beliefs. One example is Mukurtu, “a content management system and digital access tool for cultural heritage, built for and in ongoing dialogue with indigenous communities” ⑫ and named after the Warumungu word for a safe keeping place for sacred materials. Another is the Traditional Knowledge (TK) and Biocultural (BC) Labels initiative (which emerged from the ideas behind Mukurtu), developed in partnership with Indigenous communities across multiple countries for the purpose of expressing "local and specific conditions for sharing and engaging in future research and relationships in ways that are consistent with already existing community rules, governance and protocols for using, sharing and circulating knowledge and data." ⑬ In both cases, these projects demonstrate how common digital and archival processes (content management, labelling) can be repurposed for different ways of viewing and representing the world than the hegemonic tradition embedded in them.

From these examples I have begun to imagine what archives of modern music history could look like if we treated the subject matter not as cultural heritage in the traditional European sense, but rather as a form of indigenous culture. To be clear, equating hip-hop with indigeneity is not something that should be done lightly, least of all because of the history and meanings the term indigenous carries, but it has been an inadequate linguistic vessel for me to work through the ideas around All Tomorrow’s Archives and I share it here in the hope that it can stimulate further thought and engagement. The connection between the two seems useful in my mind because, as Denise puts it, the scenes and genres that have emerged from hip-hop and electronic music over the past 50 years are emblematic of the African diaspora ② and so what I’m trying to gesture towards is that hip-hop and electronic music, foundations of so many musical cultures today, are a manifestation of community in constant conversation with itself and subject to their own forms of erasure from external forces (be they social, financial, or cultural). As such, instead of trying to make them fit into existing systems of archiving and preservation that are born of the Western desire for a totalizing archive, we could think about what might arise if we were to create our own systems, our own labels, our own tools in similar ways to what indigenous communities have fought (and continue to fight) for over centuries.

Hip-hop archives are a multitude. They are spread across our collective possessions, memories and experiences like an oral tradition whose inherent value derives from the people and places that make up the stories they tell. These are the hip-hop archives that live on in all of us, in our collecting and connecting, our sampling and selecting, in the blogs and personal websites hidden in various corners of the internet where radio recordings, mixtapes and scans of print publications from a bygone era of journalism can be found if you know where to look. Yet they’re also accumulated in private and traded for profit or exploited for content and education, depending on the whims of the market and with stratified access. And while some of these archives may benefit from traditional approaches, like the Cornell Hip Hop Collection, others, like the layered and complicated history of sampling, resist them. Hip-hop archives are a treacherous mix, always on the edge of clanging but forever righting into a fascinating blend. 

While corporations, institutions, governments, and private interests will likely continue to have a hand in efforts of archiving modern music history, the communities that make up this history will continue to do the work regardless of how and where and why. One such example I am fond of is Map Pointz, a “community archive dedicated to the 90s L.A. backyard parties and rave subculture.” ⑭/⑮ Since 2016, the artist and educator Lupe Rosales has been accumulating audio-visual records of this specific slice of hip-hop and electronic music history from its participants, everything from flyers to high school photos. The project primarily lives on Instagram because that is where its community—those who lived through the era and are the project’s intended audience—is most likely to be found. Rosales chose that space and it is where she is working through the inherent tensions of the choice. The act of saving is ultimately less important than that of sharing.

9 The RBMA project was a 20-years long marketing exercise created and managed by a small German creative agency on behalf of the energy drinks giant which ended up informing its engagement with culture outside of sports and created a template for other brands to follow. While most other marketing efforts were subsumed by Red Bull internally, RBMA remained outside of its creative control until its last few years. 

SPECULATION IV

All Tomorrow's Archives are the gaps in the archive of modern music history. They are the spaces where communities can work through the tensions. They are sample sources. They are the third track that emerges when a blend hits and an infinite affective space, a forever momentary space where everything is possible, opens up for a brief moment. 

   Forever momentary space    

All Tomorrow's Archives also come at a time of seemingly inevitable finality. Just as activists, thinkers, and scholars have been interrogating the gaps in the archive relating to the economic and political history of the Black Atlantic, there is a need to think about what the gaps in modern music history might tell us about who mattered and why. Whether it is DJ scholarship, critical studies, spawning, or new forms of skilled archival labor attuned to automation, navigating All Tomorrow’s Archives requires a change in how and why we think and do, as well as a belief that it isn’t all for nothing, that there is something for all of us in the future. Such change affirms the 2010 call by the Pad.ma collective to rethink archives as invitations rather than threats, to feel them rather than interpret them, to not wait for them but instead "enter the river of time sideways, unannounced, just as the digital itself did, not so long ago." ⑯

All Tomorrow's Archives are a thing and a thought. The thought is an invitation to imagine what the archives of tomorrow will look like for what we care about and how they can be enacted through an embrace of old and new, real and imagined, without losing sight of the communities at the heart of them. As for the thing, I borrow from Damon Locks’ Black Monument Ensemble in imagining All Tomorrow's Archives as forever momentary spaces, the now in which past, present, and future folds and blends, where some freedom may be found or alternate passages to
the next.