A tribute to Gerald Donald from the Black Studies label founder.
During the country’s decade-long civil war of the 1990s, Lamin Fofana and his family fled Sierra Leone for Guinea before relocating in the USA. He began producing in his teens, and in 2012 founded the label Sci-Fi & Fantasy, which released early music from himself, Max McFerren and Lotic.
In 2016, Fofana relocated to Berlin and began to work on Black Metamorphosis, the first album in a trilogy that explored his own experience as a Black person in the West. He has also surveyed questions of Black displacement, migration and belonging in exhibitions at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Venice Biennale and Documenta 14.
“As a black person existing and moving in predominantly white spaces, you are under continuous scrutiny and harassment by strangers,” Fofana said in an interview with Flash Art earlier this year. “But that is part of a system, a structure of domination and subjection that is part of the human condition as we’ve come to know it — but we have to imagine the end of the human condition, especially at a time like this when we are compelled to rethink our relationships, with each other and with the planet.”
This year, Fofana completed the trilogy on his recently launched Black Studies label with Darkwater, an adaptation of a 1920 collection of autobiographical essays from W. E. B. Du Bois; and Blues, inspired by Amiri Baraka’s 1963 text Blues People.
Fofana’s Fact mix is mostly a collection of remixes and versions from illustrious Detroit techno figurehead Gerald Donald’s various Germanic aliases as well as Standing On The Corner’s recent track ‘Angel’ and the title track from Blues.
“On the whole this is a stitched together tribute to an important producer I have been returning to the last few months,” Fofana says. “Recently, I have been going on long solitary walks as a way to shake the funk and enjoy a bit of sunlight and fresh air, and this is some of the music I turn to to reflect on the current atmosphere.”
Find Lamin Fofana’s music at Bandcamp.
Tracklist:
XOR Gate – ‘Major Axis’
Flexitone – ‘Metacognition’ (acapella)
Scan X – ‘Wasteland’ (Dr. Finn & Dr. Otto Henke Prototype 1)
Station Rose – ‘Dave’ (Heinrich Mueller: Stanley Kubrick’s Vision Mix)
Univac – ‘Lunik’ (Der Zyklus Remix)
Alek Stark – ‘Halo 7’ (Heinrich Mueller Version)
Jeremiah R – ‘Memory, Read Only’ (Heinrich Mueller Remix)
Dollska – ‘So Long For A Small Storm’ (Rudolf Klorzeiger Remodel)
As One – ‘Where Did He Go… And Why’ (Heinrich Mueller Lamb Shift Model) Standing On The Corner – ‘Angel (Life and Death of the Earth in the Key of F)’
Lamin Fofana – ‘Blues’
Listen next: Fact mix 764: Lafawndah
