Jesse Rifkin, author of “This Must Be the Place,” interviews me about my experiences in mid-90s Williamsburg, Brooklyn and the bands and scenes I was a part of creating.
Oñi Ocan: The Heart of Sweetness
It has been a pleasure to collaborate with my partner Courtney Desiree Morris, finally, on more big art things that put our heads and talents together. Below are shots from Oñi Ocan: The Heart of Sweetness, a multi-modal performance art piece she designed/directed and performed in. The multi-channel video piece and altar installation just went up at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Below are shots from the performance of the work at Berkeley Art Center. I did live sound and sound design in collaboration with sound artist/scholar SA Smythe.
Oñí Ocan: The Heart of Sweetness (dir. Courtney Desiree Morris, 2023)
live performance programmed for Rabbit Hole (exhibition feat. Courtney Desiree Morris)
Berkeley Art Center, Berkeley, California, USA
Curator: Adrianne Ramsey
all photos © Carla Hernández Ramírez
The Yoruba term oñí ocan is typically applied to initiates of Oshun, the orisha of rivers, freshwaters, sweetness, and everything that makes life worth living. Like all orisha she operates in duality: she is the divine embodiment of abundance, sensuality, fertility/pregnancy, wealth, pleasure and good fortune. She is also an orisha who has experienced grief, disappointment, abandonment, rejection, and loss. Because of this complexity, Oshun is known as a healer who works with honey and cool water to restore the body and bring mental clarity and self-awareness through the use of her mirror. She is also the patron orisha of sex workers and LGBT practitioners. Oñí Ocan is a multimedia performance ritual that focuses on the use of honey as a material and metaphysical healing modality, as well as a way to honor current and former sex workers and pleasure activists. It is composed of a five-channel experimental film as well as live performances of honey rituals.
The Honey Drippers (actors): Arianne Benford, Kendall Benford, Kiara Brown, Monica Canilao, Odaymar Cuesta Kruda, Rachel De Souza Bolden, Ashara Ekundayo, Dillon Gardner, Sura Hertzberg, Ignacia, Alie Jones, Aja Lenae, Janelle Luster, Sam McGinnis, Pi Palomo, Callan Porter-Romero, Kiara Sample, Savannah Shange, Annie Sprinkle, Undine, & Avery Zeus
Support for Oñí Ocan provided by: The Panta Rhea Foundation, The City of Berkeley, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, & the Foundation for Contemporary Art
Film shot on location at Toro y Moi Studios in Oakland, California
Liver performance at the Berkeley Art Center in Berkeley, California
all photos © Carla Hernández Ramírez
New album: Martez "RIVERS" out now on Bandcamp / Streaming 6/15/23
The sound of my life as my family and I experience displacement due to flooding and atmospheric rivers. Travels around the world - some rivers swell as some shrink. Meditations on rain, rivers, and love.
NEW ALBUM: Martez "DRONE POEMS" out 2/17/23
The Drone Poems series represents meditations, feelings and moods expressed through expansive breathy textures. These pieces reflect a radical aesthetic departure from the Lamentos series, which primarily features wind instruments (flutes, saxophones) as the primary engines of sound.
I composed and recorded Behind the Veil and the other pieces on Drone Poems over the summer of 2022 and early 2023 in Oakland and Berkeley, California during what we now call fire season, when a barbecue spark, a misguided bottle rocket, or a random lightning strike can set off a chain of ignitions to poison every breath with smoky air for days on end. Fortunately last year wasn’t that bad, but each day nonetheless began with the anxiety and dread and the question: “Is today gonna be the day?”
The daily news: Russia brutalizing Ukraine, government fuckery, ongoing plagues, colonization of space, schools shot up, cops gone wild, catastrophic storms and everyone stressing about money.
Drone Poems is the effort to bear witness to the world while remaining connected to the eternal.
New Music: Martez - Lamentos
A new album very unlike any of my others- minimalist instrumental sonification of various moods, feelings and moments of the first eighteen months of the pandemic reality. Recorded in Oakland, CA.
1/21/2020: Live in Los Angeles at Hodgepodge
This Tuesday 1/20 I’ll be at Apotheke in Los Angeles with my man Todd M Simon and friends for his Hodgepodge musical night. I’ll be playing saxophones, flute, percussion and who knows what else.
New music from Antibalas: ‘Fu Chronicles’
Antibalas releases the 7th LP “Fu Chronicles” on Daptone Records, Feb 7 2020 with worldwide tour dates.
¡Orquesta Akokán! Out 3/30/18 on Daptone Records
On March 30, Daptone Records will release the new album by Orquesta Akokán. It is among my favorite albums of the past few years--so much flavor, amazing arrangements and creative orchestration. Read more about them here at NPR program alt.Latino.
I was honored to have been asked to write the liner notes for the, which I'm including here:
Listening to the new LP by Orquesta Akokán, you can't help but feel the spirits of Cuba's musical giants radiating from the speakers. But honoring and caring for these spirits is not easy work, nor is it a task to be left solely to one generation. It is a collaboration of young and old; The elders know the traditions, the gestures, the incantations, but it is the younger generation that have the duty to learn, the strength to carry on, and the fire and soul to make new songs for new spirits.
In November of 2016, Michael Eckroth traveled to the hallowed Areito studios in Centro Habana with a stack of charts tucked under his arm. Arriving in the cavernous wood-paneled live room, he took stock of the players assembled by producer Jacob Plasse: a dozen or so of Cuba’s most ferocious and pedigreed wind and rhythm players from storied groups including Irakere and Los Van Van, the sensational veteran vocalist José “Pepito” Gómez, and a handful of seasoned young New York Latin music freaks. These musicians would transform his charts into the living, breathing document you’re holding in your hands.
An arpeggio tumbles sweetly down the keys of the piano, and the set bursts forth en masse with exclamatory trumpet blasts, introducing saxophones that immediately establish themselves as the center of a rhythm section. The arrangements carry the exquisite beauty, pathos, and playfulness of the renowned dance orchestras of the 1940s and 1950s who had recorded in this very room, evoking the ghosts of Arsenio Rodriguez, Perez Prado, and Beny Moré. And the robust, time-tested musical architectures of son cubano and mambo are present and skillfully honored through all nine of these original compositions. The melodious tres cubano, the swinging tumbao of the congas, the tight blend of vocal harmonies — they’re all there. Yet there’s something unequivocally fresh — saxophone sections playing montunos where you’d imagine a piano, an angelic, swinging flute you’d expect in a charanga recording, sones — vocal improvisations that have the seasoned flow and cadence of mid 1970s “salsa dura” singers, and of course, the appearance of the inimitable César “Pupy” Pedroso on piano. Somehow this synthesis of musical grammar and compositional styles, of Havana and New York, of old and new, makes perfect sense.
Akokán is a Yoruba word used by Cubans to mean “from the heart” or “soul”, so it comes as no surprise that a recording like this would find its way back to Brooklyn’s Daptone Records. For nearly a generation, the venerable label has brought us soulful music in a myriad of styles, made in the present, but with all the craft and flavor of the classic recordings of the past. In doing so Daptone has enshrined both the genres it honors as well as artists creating new works in the universal canon of dance music. It’s a perfect kitchen from which to serve this captivating baile between old and new — una sopa levantamuertos (soup to raise the dead), prepared with rhythm, with care, and above all, con akokán.
-Martín Perna, Antibalas