Music for Commons Sensed: No Nation Left But the Imagination

In their concert performance, Jan St. Werner and Louis Chude-Sokei examine social boundaries, thresholds, and separate realities, using music to explore topics such as race, migration, and space. Manipulating Chude-Sokei’s voice in real time using electronic tools, Werner projects the edited speech fragments through loudspeakers. During the process, the musicians not only listen to each other’s voices and stories but also examine the way they themselves listen. Their performance thus becomes a “public manifestation of a dialogue characterised by a continuous exploration of sound, space, and shared listening,” as Louis Chude-Sokei notes.

No Nation Left But the Imagination is part of the collaborative project Music for Commons Sensed, in which musicians come together across national and genre boundaries and immerse themselves and their audience in unexpected listening experiences and an altered perception of space.