The Rhythm of Frantz Fanon

by Arcadia Molinas

Contrafacts: A Night of Experimental Protest Music curated by Nicko Mroczkowski

An evening at Reference Point starts at 6pm when the bartenders walk in. Soon after, the alcohol is neatly arranged in rows, the cocktail menus sit on display at the bar, the furniture is cleared away, the lights are dimmed and tinted, and an array of cables start to snake around the floor, suggesting the buzz, din and ring of what will take place there soon.

This was how the 14th of December started, the night of the debut of Contrafacts: A Night of Experimental Protest Music curated by Nicko Mroczkowski. Yet in many ways, it was not just another evening at Reference Point. The band, an exceptional line-up of jazz-trained musicians composed of Nicko Mroczkowski on guitar and electronics, Arnold Chukwu on the clarinet and vocals, Will Reubin on drums, Daniel Kabakov on keys, Sravudh Tanhai on bass, EKAS on vocals and electronics, Luke Soden on upright bass, Phoenix Yemi on vocals reciting a poem and myself, Arcadia Molinas, on vocals reciting a poem too, summoned the spirits of the likes of Frantz Fanon, Amiri Baraka and Miles Davis, to conjure a spell-like set of performances that evidenced how music can be used to create community and change prevailing opinions in one cacophonous triumph of an evening.

The night, with its unique energy and political aliveness, owed a lot of its success to the kernel at the heart of its project: the contrafact. A contrafact, explained in simple terms, is a musical work based on a prior work. In jazz music, it is widely used as a way of superimposing a new melody on top of a familiar harmonic structure. The political and spiritual potential of this practice relies on the defamiliarization of familiar tunes, tunes that are widely palatable because they are apolitical, or “quietist” as Nicko refers to them, and allowing space within that familiarity for improvisation, a spontaneous exercise that “requires you to absolutely listen and feel and think as one”.  

Speaking to Nicko about his process conceptualising the event, he emphasised the importance of the contrafact as “a way of acknowledging the citationality of the artistic process – art is always produced in relation to the artist’s circumstances and in our case those circumstances include buried but legible imperial ideologies.” He continued, “in a way everything is a contrafact – hero’s journey etc. – but the liberal imagination of total artistic autonomy obscures the potentially harmful influences, ideologies or prejudices that we inevitably inherit. So performing contrafact with explicit intentions – as a kind of ‘parody mass’ – and political values of our own, we can hope to express a type of protest that is actually consciousness-raising”

Starting with Bye-Bye Blackbird, the band departed from familiar songs such as The Beatles’ Come Together, Talking Heads’ Once In a Lifetime and ended with an angry, frenzied take on Charli XCX’s 365 for the first set of two that evening. The effect was at once seamless and familiar at moments, a well-known harmonic progression here and there, yet the overarching narrative was wild, provocative and cohesive. Nicko opened the set with an impassioned introduction, prefacing the music with remarks on his disillusionment with the power of language to affect any real, significant change on the world, and his resolve to use music in the ways language fails, namely community and transgression. My own contribution to the night, a massacred version of Charli XCX’s summer sensation hit 365 had verses like:

“Lights, strobes, gunpowder

365 kerosene

(another key, another line).

Lights, strobes, light it on fire

(another key, another line).”

And

“It’s so inviting to self-immolate in front of everyone.

So seductive to let it all fall apart and debase yourself and stand totally naked

with scratches across your body, grin wide watermelon seeds rammed in between your teeth,

bloodshot eyes, reeling.

Be your own car crash

set yourself on fire

be a martyr

be a martyr”

At its conclusion, the band came to a halt and everyone took a twenty minute break.

“If I had to give a unified narrative: to produce a conscious and overtly political contrafact is

a) to participate in the jazz tradition and avail oneself of its historic tools of resistance

b) to provide an alternative form of musical synthesis to the ideology-ridden imagination of total artistic autonomy and automatic authenticity

c) if improvised, to do the above two things in a living context and with distributed agency

d) to provincialise and anthropologise our own culture – to see the west as just another tribe – and thereby to make people reckon with the fact that we are, ultimately, the baddies in this situation, and in need of self-criticism”

Nicko, aside from a talented musician is a great orator and thinker and is generous with his knowledge. You’re always in for learning something when you’re in conversation with him. When asking him of his main references when composing his ideas, he cited The Wretched of the Earth. “Franz Fanon talks about how colonisation also dehumanises the coloniser, the aim is not to get revenge on western music, but to rehumanise it for its own sake because the colonial situation is fucked for everyone.”

The second half of the night started with the sounds of an Israeli drone hovering outside a friend of Nicko’s home in Beirut. The music this time around was more urgent. Nicko took out a bow and began shredding his guitar until he snapped the bow in two and draped it around his guitar, making it wail with a saw-like motion. Phoenix Yemi, followed by Arnold Chukwu, gave grounded, loud and emotional performances of their poems and the band swayed together in a greater unity than before. When the music came to a shuddering halt, like the sound of a tank rolling over centuries of history, crunching bone, blood and marrow beneath its bed-sized wheels, the audience was stunned into silence for a moment. We all had to take a couple of beats to land back in that room. For we had all been transported. To the consciousness of those oppressed under the hand of colonialism. To the consciousness of those silenced by prevailing ideologies and narratives that are soaked in blood and recklessness andd apatheticness.

Music can be a tool of resistance — it must be a tool of resistance. The debut of Contrafacts curated by Nicko Mroczkowski was just that: a musical scream of the word ‘resist’.

Arcadia Molinas is the online editor of Worms.