Satch Hoyt's My World interview: “It’s very much about being able to present the magic of the instruments”

Satch Hoyt has just returned from Nottingham, where he performed at the launch of Your Ears Later Will Know To Listen, a new group exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary centred around “listening back to uncover silenced or lost histories”. Hoyt’s work, which is grounded in researching African diasporic histories to create “a new all-inclusive Black cultural identity”, is a perfect fit – his room in the exhibition features a series of eight large canvases depicting the movement of people and cultures across the African diaspora; they are accompanied by a 22-minute sound work titled Beyond Misspelt Borders. This composition incorporates manipulated recordings of ancient instruments that he has ‘un-muted’ from the British Museum’s ethnographic collections. It is the latest in a series of projects that takes dormant instruments out of museums and restores their intended purpose: to be performed and heard.

This Nottingham exhibition is an example of an uncompromising body of work, where technology, post-colonial politics, mythology, dub poetry, sample culture and cosmic spirituality merge cohesively, all the while linking the journeys of enslaved African peoples to the Americas, the Caribbean and the wider diaspora.

Born in London in 1957, Satch spent his early teens in Ladbroke Grove’s shebeens, informal hangouts that catered to the area’s Carribbean community. Here, he immersed himself in sound system culture; later his mum bought him a sax when he was 14, which he learnt to play himself (these days he primarily plays flute and percussion). Growing up in such a culturally rich neighbourhood shaped his creative endeavours. “I was surrounded by reggae, dub, funk. I learned to play by listening to Donald Byrd, Herbie Hancock. I was introduced to jazz by Horace Ové [the first Black British feature-film director]. [I listened to] Albert Ayler and stuff like that when I was 16. I met Herbie Hancock. I played him my little cassette demos, and he just looked at me and said, ‘What about dynamics?’ And it was one of those epiphanal moments that you sometimes have at different times of your life.”

After leaving school at 15, he spent time working as both an actor and musician in Berlin and Kenya before being offered the opportunity to move to Paris in 1983 after a French record label picked up his demo, resulting in the album Still Waiting For Moja (1983). He stayed in France for a decade, co-writing songs with Grace Jones, such as ‘7 Day Weekend’, which featured on the soundtrack for the 1992 Eddie Murphy film Boomerang. He also performed with Japanese fusionist Stomu Yamashta – “I remember going to Sadler’s Wells to see the National Kabuki Ensemble and just being completely blown away”. In Paris, he befriended hip-hop visual artist Rammellzee at a time when he was growing disillusioned with the music industry, ultimately resulting in another relocation: “Rammellzee was very instrumental in me moving to New York. He said, ‘Man, you need to come over here.’ I was hanging out with JonOne, Haitian Freddy, you know, all of these people who were in his crew.” In the US he found a community of artists. “In New York, I did feel like I belonged to a movement, predominantly an African-American and Caribbean movement.” Though planning to completely switch practices to visual art, fate intervened. “[Writer and musician] Greg Tate came and visited me in Dumbo, in Brooklyn… I played him this collaboration I did with Louise Bourgeois [and Ramuntcho Matta] called ‘Otte’. And he said, ‘Why don’t you come to our next rehearsal?’ I said, ‘Come on, man, I didn’t come to New York to join a band!’” Realising that he could combine his two practices, in 2001 he joined Greg Tate’s improv outfit Burnt Sugar, with Tate nicknaming Satch the “Tony Williams of the Triangle” due to his vigorous playing!

Satch’s artistic, spiritual and political interests converged in 2017 through his Afro-Sonic Mapping project, which he describes as “tracing our histories by sonic transmigrations.” A collector and player of ancient instruments, as well as a visual artist, he concocted the idea of exploring the instrument collections of European colonial-era museums, bringing music-less objects, decontextualised and removed from their cultural and historical origins, back to life. “My interest in Un-Muting stems from, and is inextricably linked to, Afro-Sonic Mapping. Both projects are invested in concepts of restitution, and my strong belief that music is a true chronicler. I can reclaim the sound, but not the artefact.”

After three years of tenacious negotiation, the British Museum allowed Satch to play and record some of the African instruments in their collection. He had already done a successful Un-Muting at the Brücke Museum in Berlin (taking recordings of the earliest ever phonogram recordings from the Congo region) and with the MARKK collection in Hamburg, but the London gatekeepers were less convinced. “They were constantly saying, ‘we’re the custodians of these instruments, they have to be put to their proper use.’ And then I [told them], ‘Instruments being put to their proper use? I think the proper use for an instrument is to play it, isn’t it?’ [And I said,] ‘By the way, just about every Stradivarius that’s on the planet is in the hands of the first violinist of a philharmonic orchestra, and they’re being played?!’”

“It’s very much about being able to present the magic of the instruments, which people will never see. And then the sonic restitution of that is that the museum is never going to give me the instruments to take back to the geographical location, but I take the sound. So people are experiencing the sound of those instruments, which they would never experience if they saw those instruments in a museum.”

Despite his constant musical experimenting, Satch isn’t listening to much new music, with Kendrick Lamar being one exception. He still loves Herbie Hancock (“Sextant, Crossings, you know, that period?”), Erykah Badu and the Jamaican trombonist Rico Rodriguez, harking back to his early days at Notting Hill Carnival. A proud owner of all of Fela Kuti’s recordings, two favourites are Shuffering and Shmiling and Everything Scatter, while from the Congo he likes rumba giant Franco and, unsurprisingly for a sanza player and experimental sound technologist, the abrasive brilliance of Konono Nº1. Not to mention a little jazz fusion: “I think that Weather Report will never age.”

With even grander paintings and projects in motion, Satch maintains his vitality. “When I go into the studio with these different motifs, it’s very much about how I see myself as a channeller to keep my channels open and receive from the ancestors and then to just be a vessel for whatever I catch in the air.”

+ Your Ears Later Will Know To Listen is at Nottingham Contemporary until Sep 7, with Satch’s installation at Plymouth’s KARST from Oct 3. Konono Nº1’s ‘Lufuala Ndonga’ is on this issue’s compilation, track 15