sarah politz

Virgin Forest and the “Intrusion” of Gaïa: ecomusicological questions, relational listening, and the music of Lionel Loueke of Benin Sarah Politz School of Music, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA ABSTRACT The recent emergence of the sub!eld of ecomusicology has raised provocative questions about theory and method in music studies, as well as relationships between sound, humans, and the environment. This paper responds to these questions through an examination of two albums by the Beninese guitarist Lionel Loueke, informed by ethnographic interviews with Loueke and !eldwork in Benin and the U.S. Each of the two albums deals with a distinct set of musical materials and strategies to convey their respective ecological orientations. The album Virgin Forest does this through creating ambient atmospheres that blur the lines between human and animal sound, while the second album, Gaïa, deploys guitar distortion and “out-of-joint” grooves to channel an angry earth goddess. This analysis explores connections between the albums and concepts of sacred sound and interdependence in the Nichiren Buddhist practice that Loueke has adopted, and in vodun ancestral practices in Benin. I propose a concept of relational listening, building on Edouard Glissant’s la Relation and Steven Feld’s acoustemology, which embraces humans’ interdependence with the environment while respecting the radical alterity of other beings, including human, non-human, and more-than-human. Loueke’s music suggests that this relational listening necessarily leads to relational sounding: interactive improvisation. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 22 January 2022 Revised 19 Apr 2022 Accepted 27 June 2022 KEYWORDS Benin; relational listening; Lionel Loueke; ecomusicology; jazz; acoustemology; Buddhism; ambience The growing !eld of ecomusicology sits at the fascinating and weighty intersection of several current and past debates in music studies, ranging from the roles of culture and sound, separately or together, in musical analysis, to the status of anthropocentric, historical, and secular humanist approaches to the study of music. In this paper, I will focus primarily on one set of these questions, namely the ways that sound – as voice, texture, and atmosphere, and as a way of understanding and communicating with divine environmental worlds – can be useful in ecomusicology’s understanding of the relationship between humans and the environment, and how some of these ideas of sound could be further deconstructed, expanded, and made more intentionally relational. I seek to pursue these questions about the place of sound in ecomusicology through a study of the music of the Beninese guitarist Lionel Loueke, engaging ethnographic interviews with Loueke as well as an analysis of his music based in relational listening. It is CONTACT Sarah Politz spolitz@ufl.edu SOUND STUDIES 2022, VOL. 8, NO. 2, 196–218 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2022.2095763 © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group my hope that this example will advance the current conversation about the relationships between people, culture, nature, and sound in music research, particularly in Africa and the diaspora, as well as in di"erent spiritual traditions. I have conducted interviews and listening sessions with Loueke since 2015 as an outgrowth of my larger research in Benin on jazz, brass bands, and spirituality.1 Here I examine two of his albums on Blue Note records, both environmentally oriented: Virgin Forest (Loueke 2006) and Gaïa (Loueke 2015), each of which deals with a distinct set of musical and sonic materials, compositional approaches, and performance techniques to convey their respective ecological orientations. Virgin Forest does this primarily through creating atmospheres2 (what Morton (2007) refers to as “ambient poetics”) that blur the lines between human and animal sound via the interplay of voices and voicing. A translation of the Fon-language3 song texts on the album, inaccessible to most of Loueke’s international jazz fans, reveals paradoxical imaginings of a past or possibly future world without human presence. The second album, Gaïa, continues in the space opened by Virgin Forest, deploying technologies of guitar distortion and “out-of-joint” grooves that re#ect the chaos caused by an angry earth goddess. This album assembles a live, “raw”, punk anti-aesthetic that resists the commodi!cation of Loueke’s creative work while also commenting implicitly on the role of capital and capitalism in the destruction of the environment. Both albums partake of aspects of “nostalgic” and “apocalyptic” modes (Rehding 2011) of ecomusical representation, but in di"erent measures and in markedly di"erent a"ective registers. Lionel Loueke, known to friends in Benin as “Gilles,” was born in the historic city of Ouidah, on Benin’s southwest coast, in 1973 to his parents, both public schoolteachers. Like many educated Beninese people, he was raised in the Catholic church. Although he had played drums and percussion from an early age, he began playing the guitar relatively late in his youth at the age of 17. He was drawn to the Wes Montgomery and George Benson records that friends brought back from Paris, and began transcribing them by ear. In 1990, Loueke left Benin to study at the National Institute of Art in Côte d’Ivoire in a program primarily focused on Western art music and composition, where he began writing his own music. In 1994, Loueke moved to Paris to study at the American School for Jazz, where he learned jazz theory, improvisation, and composition, and met up with other African musicians in the city. He was admitted to the Berklee College of Music in Boston in 1998, where he met the members of his trio, Gilfema (drummer Ferenc Nemeth and bassist Massimo Biolcati), who have remained his collaborators for the past two decades. Loueke has essentially completed professional music school three separate times. In 2001, he applied to the newly founded Thelonious Monk Institute at UCLA, under the direction of Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter among others. The committee not only accepted Loueke to the Monk Institute, but Herbie immediately took him on tour with his band. Herbie and Lionel shared many complementary interests, for example Herbie’s interest in all things to do with African music and culture. As he said during a 2006 concert at Carnegie Hall, “When we came over to America from Africa, we lost a lot along the way. . . Lionel has brought some of those things with him” (VF 2006). In addition to admiring Herbie’s approach to life and music, Lionel was attracted to his devotion to Nichiren Buddhism, a Japanese sect of the spiritual practice popular in many parts of the world. In fact, in 2017, Herbie published a book about his Buddhist practice with fellow Nichiren practitioner Wayne Shorter and Daisaku Ikeda, the Japanese Buddhist activist and SOUND STUDIES 197 longtime president of the Nichiren organizing body Soka Gakkai in Japan (Hancock et al. 2017). Lionel’s exposure to Buddhism through Herbie meant that he became a vegetarian, started a daily practice of mindfulness meditation and chanting, and developed new ways of thinking about the relationship between humans and the environment. I had the chance to interview Lionel where he lived at the time in Brooklyn in 2014 to discuss many of these matters, but we only scratched the surface of his environmental ethics. In 2018, he moved to Luxembourg, and so we began an email exchange; he wrote to me: “[Buddhism] was a wake-up call for me for the respect of any living creature” (Loueke, email, 9.22.19). Loueke’s reference to “awakening” is one he has returned to often in describing the environmental context for his music, and one which deserves some further discussion. In Virgin Forest and Gaïa, Loueke’s music is one of questioning, asking implicitly whether the separation between nature and culture, or the centrality of an individual, anthropocentric sense of human rights, is still tenable for understanding the ecological crisis and humans’ place within it. Loueke invites listeners into a world where nature and culture – animals, plants, rocks, and humans – are interdependent aspects of the same integrated world, together in their strangeness to one another. The two albums I examine here o"er windows into the divine world of vodun spiritual practice in Benin as well as into Loueke’s personal Nichiren Buddhist practice. These spiritual systems o"er models for an understanding of more interdependent relations between humans and nature, although they each contain their own contradictions. In what follows, I !rst outline some of the current questions about theory and method in ecomusicology and, relatedly, in sound studies, and propose “relational listening” as a possible starting place o"ered by Lionel Loueke’s music. I then move into a descriptive analysis of the two albums, their atmospheres, and the relational listening practices they suggest through voicing, texture, and improvisation4 . I conclude by returning to the concept of relational listening and considering how improvisation as a tool for listening and sounding relationally might o"er some guidance for ecomusicological methods. Ecomusicology, deconstruction, activism Ecomusicologists, as an emergent group, employ a constellation of methodologies – stretching from interpretation, including the deconstruction of signs, symbols and meaning, on the one hand (Ingram 2010, Edwards 2016) – to mobilisations of music and music studies in an activist vein on the other (Pedelty 2016; Mark 2016), in this case the urgency of the real taking precedence over calling attention to that reality’s constructed or mediated character. It is perhaps best to speak of “ecomusicologies” as a variety of interests and questions that populate a diverse !eld with implications for all branches of music studies, rather than one discipline called “ecomusicology”, as leaders in the !eld have observed (Allen and Dawe 2015). Through a consideration of Lionel Loueke’s music, I seek to describe how a critical approach to listening that centres positionality, politics, power, and especially spirituality, can bring these di"erent strains of ecomusicological inquiry into conversation with one another. In my view it is precisely ecomusicology’s critical, deconstructive impulse that 198 S. POLITZ makes possible a more global and decolonial context for the ecomusicology’s activist project, and gives it its political grounding. I conclude that taking the time to listen relationally is essential, but so is learning to respond, to sound relationally in the world. Allen (2016, 647) locates ecomusicology’s origins in literary ecocriticism; so ecomusicology is “a facet of the cultural study of the environmental crisis”, but, Allen writes, it is “one that considers music and sound”. Taking a cue from (Rehding’s 2011) article “Ecomusicology Between Apocalypse and Nostalgia”, Allen (2011, 647) writes of a continuum in ecomusicological scholarship between, on the one hand, poetic approaches that celebrate and cultivate appreciation for environmental beauty and diversity, and on the other hand, critical, activist, or pragmatic approaches that engage with politics and the urgent need for action. Allen acknowledges that a wide middle ground exists combining both approaches in di"erent measures, for scholars and for music makers. The two Lionel Loueke albums I examine in this article, Virgin Forest and Gaïa, re#ect something of the wide space between these two di"erent modalities of ecomusicological representation, although they approach their respective subjects in quite di"erent registers. Rehding (2011, 410) suggests that ecomusicology “may represent a genuine departure from general musicological practice”, and must confront challenges to “hone its guiding questions”, “to work out its political leanings and de!ne the nature of the tasks it hopes to pursue”, while also confronting the di$culties of music’s “materiality and modes of representation”. Music and sound are slippery signi!ers to say the least, and the question of whether they can (or should?) speak “for”, “to”, or “as” any human or non-human subjects remains an unsettled one. Attention to African and Afro-diasporic music and cultural contexts in ecomusicology has been slowly receiving more attention (see, for example the work of Olusegun Titus (Olusegun Titus and Titus 2017; Titus 2019), Rebecca Dirksen (2018), and Angela Impey (2013, 2018)). This kind of work has begun the project of correcting a marked lack of attention to the ecological in African and Afro-diasporic music studies, and to African indigenous knowledge in ecomusicology. This gap is especially glaring because of the particular vulnerability of African people to rapid changes in climate and the environment, and because of the strength of traditions of incisive social critique, expressive ironic play, and ethically oriented improvisation in music in many African and Afro-diasporic cultures. Lionel Loueke’s music brings together, often in subtle ways, two di"erent spiritual traditions’ perspectives on the environment, Buddhism and vodun practice. This o"ers an opportunity for a comparative analysis of these religious traditions’ relationship to one another, to sound, and the Earth, forming a potentially powerful counterpoint to JudeoChristian inheritances of anthropocentrism and human-nature dualism. This blending of di"erent cultural, spiritual, and musical traditions is characteristic of Loueke’s music, and of much music in the African diaspora, which combines Western, African, and other traditions from around the world. In analysing Virgin Forest and Gaïa, I show that in his music Loueke places the focus on sonic materialities – voices, timbral experiments, textures, and atmospheres – as a way of calling attention to the “environment”, our surroundings, the spaces and places we inhabit and those human and non-human others who dwell there with us. I suggest that in these two albums Loueke is primarily interested in relational listening, sounding, SOUND STUDIES 199 and improvising with other beings in the world as other. These sonic materialities, along with the di"erent spiritual traditions Loueke invokes in these albums, have provoked my thinking on listening in general, and on relationality. Listening relationally Lionel Loueke’s work on Virgin Forest and Gaïa is helpful in thinking through what it might mean to understand, analyse, and experience sound and the environment in a relational way that accounts for di"erences of positionality and power, that listens not just to other beings but with them, that surrenders whatever we can of our selfhood, in e"ect “consent- [ing] not to be a single being” (Moten 2017, invoking Glissant). This is akin to what indigenous sound studies scholar Robinson (2020, 15) describes as “forms of listening otherwise” that “attend to the relationship between listener and the listened to”, relationships in which we “feel the need to be responsible to sound as we would to another life”. Haraway (2016, 2) is onto this, too, when she writes of the need to learn “to stay with the trouble of living and dying in response-ability on a damaged earth”. Response and response-ability: These are the terms of a relationship with the environment, which includes us, that can !nd a way to listen, communicate, compose, and improvise – to respond – as a member of a larger global community. Relational listening is a way of attending and attuning to the many beings that form what is usually called “the environment”, a way of listening that is informed and deeply humbled by an analysis of interdependence, relationality, positionality, and power.5 Relational listening recognises that we must listen to and for “as many other beings as possible”, to use Timothy Morton’s (2007, 184) language, including other humans, animals, and deities, as well as a wide variety of sounds and bodies, but it also understands “listening as an ecology in which we are not only listening but listened to” (Robinson 2020, 98). Relational listening hears the environmental crisis not as a rupture in the relationship between humans and the environment, but as an opportunity to improvise interdependently with the natural world. It requires hearing animals, deities, rocks, and plants, not as things that are “out there”, but as co-constructors of intersubjective forms of knowledge. The task is precisely to meet the radical alterities of the sonic, the divine, the indeterminate, the animal world, as they are, without turning them into us or us into them, without domesticating them.6 This is what the Antillean literary theorist Edouard Glissant refers to in his concept of la Relation, grounded in a respect for the irreducible di"erence of the other, which pushes back against claims of universality (see Glissant 1997 [1990]; Britton 1999; Rush 2017).7 Our challenge, it seems, is precisely to stay in the zone of questioning, of discomfort, trying our very best to perceive clearly without putting ourselves at ease. In this view, we cannot say that simply that we as humans are an integral, holistic part of the natural world, or on the other hand indulge in the anthropomorphising of animals, nature, or the earth; the truth is in between, at the edge of our perception, a place that may as yet escape our language. Steven Feld (2015, 14) writes that his initial intention in developing his concept of an “anthropology of sound” was to “advocat[e] for an expanded terrain when engaging global musical diversity”, but that this anthropological formation was “too humancentric”.8 “Other intellectual equipment”, he writes, “was needed to address the 200 S. POLITZ sounding worlds of indigenous and emergent global geographies of di"erence across the divides of species and materials”. Feld responded to this need with his creation of “acoustemology”, a term, he writes, that is closely aligned with concepts of “relational ontology”, the idea that existence itself cannot exist prior to some form of relationality (ibid., 12–13). For Feld, acoustemology is a way of knowing through listening in which “one knows through an ongoing cumulative and interactive process of participation and re#ection” (13). “Situated and re#exive”, acoustemology “is grounded in the basic assumption that life is shared with others-in-relation, with numerous sources of action . . . that are variously human, nonhuman, living, nonliving, organic, or technological” (15). Acoustemology is key for developing a theory of relational listening, as it contains the seeds for understanding the roles of both the political and the sacred in listening for other beings.9 Lionel Loueke’s music suggests a relational way of listening to the environmental crisis, in which all are implicated, and all have the responsibility to learn to recognise and respect the radical alterity of other beings – humans, non-human, and more-than-human – and to sound ethically, conversationally, collaboratively in response. For Loueke, sound is one of the most powerful ways of staying in touch with this environmental and social reality. Virgin Forest Loueke recorded his 2006 album Virgin Forest in collaboration with several guest artists, including pianist Herbie Hancock, vocalist Gretchen Parlato, Brazilian percussionist Cyro Baptista, and two di"erent percussion ensembles from Ouidah and Porto Novo in Benin – just a few of the “many beings” who contribute their voices and creative energies to the project. Many of Loueke’s international jazz fans have come to appreciate his music for his complex use of polyrhythm and harmonic counterpoint, as well as for the intimate sonic quality of his voice, but few of these listeners understand the Fongbe language of Benin in which he sings. As the album’s Fon lyrics, and its sonic and spiritual invocations, reveal, Virgin Forest contains important messages about the sacredness of place and the integration of human and animal life in Benin and in the world. In 2019 I began working, with the assistance of the Beninese jazz vocalist and keyboardist J.B. Gnonlonfoun, to translate the lyrics to Loueke’s album Virgin Forest. These translations, in combination with interviews and email exchanges with Lionel, have given me a new appreciation for how his personal spirituality as a Buddhist, his cultural inheritance of vodun, and his sense of environmental ethics inform many aspects of his life and music in subtle but powerful ways. Understanding the title song’s lyrics in the Fon language gives important insight into Loueke’s understanding of environmental ethics. Over the top of an easy, 9/4 groove in E minor, comes Lionel’s voice: “Zun kan mɛ meɖe ma biɔ, wɛ nyín kanlinlɛ sín dagbè” (:49). The forest where no one has been – Zun kan mɛ meɖe ma biɔ, the Virgin Forest – is best for the animals, he sings. This koan-like mantra gestures towards the impossibility of humans’ position within the environmental problem itself. If people are (or even have been) there in the forest, they cause problems for the animals. But how can they (or we) be anywhere else? How could we possibly undo our presence? If an untouched forest could exist, untouched even by the hand of economic exchange or SOUND STUDIES 201 of colonisation, what would that mean? There is a deep, ultimately very provocative ambiguity here about the identity of the speaker(s) as well as the implied listener(s). If the “forest where no one has been” is best for the animals, then it seems a fair question whether the album’s listeners (some, at least, of which are human) have any ground on which to stand? The mantra essentially requires the listener to dissolve, to cease to exist, to surrender their subject-hood in the act of listening. And perhaps this is precisely the point. This is something of what Timothy Morton (2007, 41) refers to as the “Aeolian” quality of an ecological “ambient poetics”, where neither the author nor the subject is clear; instead the work creates an environment, often calling attention to its mediated quality, in this case through sound, timbre, and vocality. The scene that Loueke creates in the piece “Virgin Forest” gestures towards its very impossibility, and towards the reality that exists just beneath its surface: we cannot go back to a time before the environmental destruction of humans took place. We cannot remove ourselves. We are there, somehow, listening, even seeming to have merged with the nonidentity of our surroundings. The song gives human listeners no choice but to listenwith, to listen relationally. Buddhism, Vodun, sound, and environment A brief detour is necessary to consider the practices of Nichiren Buddhism, as well as of vodun in Benin, for their insight into possible interpretations of the album’s approach to the interdependence of humans and nature. The founder of the Nichiren Buddhist denomination, Nichiren (1222–1282), formulated the idea of esho funi, “oneness of life and environment” (Odin 2014, 254).10 This unity of self and nature hovers in the space between the extremes of holism and dualism, similar to the Zen concept of reality as “not two, not one” (Suzuki [1970] 2002, 25). This is one path towards recognising the interdependence of self and the environment while still maintaining respect for the alterity of that which is nonidentity, that which is other than the self, akin to Glissant’s la Relation. One of Nichiren Buddhism’s core practices links the sect’s doctrinal approach to sacred sound. Nichiren is most well-known for his apocalyptic teaching that the only way to enlightenment in the current age (the Latter Day of the Law, or mappo, when dharma is in decline) is through reciting the Daimoku, the title of the Lotus Sutra: Myōhō renge kyō. This is the source of the Nichiren practice of chanting these words daily, which Lionel adopted through his association with Herbie Hancock. The purpose of chanting this mantra is to awaken the Buddhahood of all sentient beings, including, in some interpretations, humans, animals, lakes, rivers, mountains, and rocks.11 In Japan, the in#uence of indigenous Shinto deities (kami), many of them associated with natural forms like rivers and mountains, impacted attitudes towards music, sound, sensory experience, and the divinity of nature, as the Buddha could take the Shinto deities’ form in order to disguise his blinding light and make himself perceptible to humans.12 The largest of the Nichiren Buddhist groups currently active in the world is Soka Gakkai.13 In his 2002 Peace Proposal, President Daisaku Ikeda (2002) grounds his environmental thinking in the Buddhist principle of interdependence, also known as “dependent origination or dependent co-arising” (Darlington 2017, 487) (Japanese: engi), referring to 202 S. POLITZ the dependence of all phenomena – beings, laws, and things – on all other beings, laws, and things in the world.14 This principle of interdependence is key to understanding the sound worlds in Lionel Loueke’s album Virgin Forest. African culture, particularly the Fon and Yoruba cultures that Lionel Loueke grew up with, is another powerful place to listen for indigenous resources for understanding sound and the environment in integrated and relational ways. The Nigerian scholar Ademola Adegbite re#ects on the role of sound in traditional Yoruba rituals in this way: . . . a Yoruba traditional musician will open his performance which is often done spontaneously by studying the psychological situation of the environment in which he is performing. This is because he sees himself dynamically related to a cosmos that is a living dynamic organism and regards musical sound as one of the most e"ective means of bringing that dynamic relationship into play in practical terms. (Adegbite 1991, 52-3) Here the “psychological situation of the environment” extends across both physical and spiritual worlds, from humans’ mental states to balance in the fullest cosmological context.15 Based on my !eldwork since 2007, the chief cosmological division in the local culture of southern Benin is not so much between the self and nature – those are assumed to be fully interdependent; more frequently discussed is the related but di"erent idea of the overlap of the spiritual and physical worlds. The self exists both spiritually and physically, as do nature and the vodun. The spiritual world, where the ancestors and other vodun deities live, is profoundly di"erent from our reality, yet overlays it and interacts with it. Ouidah, Lionel Loueke’s hometown, is known as the “cradle of vodun”, and is home to an exceptionally rich and diverse group of deities. Vodun practice overlaps and has syncretised to some extent with the Yoruba tradition of orisa worship, which is also practiced in Benin. Many vodun deities are linked with natural forces, for example Sakpata with the earth, disease, and healing, Mami Wata with the ocean, and the vodun Atin with trees.16 Other vodun are spiritually powerfully humans who transformed themselves into animals as they transitioned into the afterlife, such as the panther agbasu, the ancestral tovodun of the royal family in Abomey. Vodun practice involves not only worship and sacri!ces for the deities, but also a vast indigenous network of environmental knowledge, particularly when it comes to healing with plants. Vodun practice also involves divination, or Fa, whose bokonon priests are trained in the laws of natural equilibrium, each action having an equal and opposite reaction – physically and spiritually. Thus the exploitation of the environment, especially for personal gain, could have serious spiritual and material consequences. It is on this basis that systems of indigenous justice were founded prior to colonisation. Sacred sound is a key component of vodun rituals in song, chanting, drumming, and dancing in southern Benin. Prayers are often accompanied by clapping and the striking of bells and rocks to translate the words of the prayers to the vodun. In vodun practice, music and human creativity themselves come from forest spirits called aziza; this word also refers to improvisation in Fon (see Loueke’s composition “Aziza Dance” on Gaïa).17 The most common word for sound in Fon, gbè, refers literally to the “voice” of humans, SOUND STUDIES 203 animals, and natural phenomena, as in jĭ gbe, or “the sound/voice of the rain”.18 It is this sense of gbè as intervocality, the interlocking sounds and voices of humans, animals, and all beings and bodies, that Loueke invokes on Virgin Forest, as I will discuss. Sound worlds: human, animal, divine The meaning of the lyrical mantra in Loueke’s “Virgin Forest” – “the forest where no one has been is best for the animals” – is intricately tied to the sonic world Lionel creates in the song. The piece opens with Gretchen Parlato’s hocket-like vocal, which is similar to the opening of Herbie Hancock’s 1973 recording “Watermelon Man” from his Headhunters album. “Watermelon Man” starts with percussionist Bill Summers’ voice and blown-bottle solo, similar to the texture at the opening of “Virgin Forest”. As Steven Feld (1996) has discussed, “Watermelon Man” musically paraphrases a !eld recording of the Babanzele pygmies recorded by the French ethnomusicologist Simha Arom and released on Smithsonian Folkways in 1966. The recording features the Babanzeles’ hindewhu voicepanpipe hocket technique. As Simha Arom writes in the liner notes to the Smithsonian recording, “Having returned from a successful hunt, the hunters use this instrument [hindewhu] to announce the news to the women and old people who stayed in the camp. The women answer by whistling and singing” (in Feld 1996, 5). With this musical reference, Lionel makes his connection to Herbie’s music, and, I would argue, to Herbie’s Afro-centrism, clear. This hocketed texture re#ects the sounds of the forest, animal, human, and otherwise – it is an encapsulation of an African ecological imaginary, !ltered through diasporic experience. It calls attention to the mediated nature of sound itself, which supports the lyrical content calling into question the subjecthood of the listener and the inhabitants of the forest alike. With this song, Lionel calls into being – in a spiritual, phenomenological sense makes real – a sense of sacred place, much like the sites of vodun and Afro-Christian practitioners’ pilgrimages to forests, mountains, and springs in Benin. This album seems to be not so much about music or sound healing a perceivedly broken connection between humans and nature, so much as it is feeding and maintaining one that is known to be integral to the quality of life on earth. So if the “forest where no one has been” is “best for the animals”, then what of the sounds of humans in this forest? The presence of humans and human culture, both of local indigenous people and outsiders, can also be heard on the album. As Loueke says in the video accompanying the digital version of the album, Virgin Forest represents “All the vision I had in mind for years . . . The music represents me in all dimensions including my home life experiences” (Loueke 2006). The musical manifestations of these wide-ranging human experiences extend from the rhythmic and harmonic form of Loueke’s compositions, to the improvisational interaction he engages with his human and human-as-animal collaborators in the album’s many duets, to the sounds of sacred drumming ensembles from Benin’s traditional culture. The sounds of these local drumming ensembles are evident particularly in the preludes that Lionel o"ers for several tracks, recorded in Benin with two di"erent percussion ensembles from the Raimi and Tessi families in the cities of Ouidah and Porto Novo. The prelude for “Virgin Forest” features Lionel’s voice chanting a version of the song lyrics, “Zun kan mɛ han we a, wɛ nyín kanlinlɛ sín dagbè” (The forest where no one has been is 204 S. POLITZ best for the animals), along with calls and yells set against a tchinkoume groove featuring a bamboo whistle, and interlocking bell and drum patterns. This style, tchinkoume, is a traditional music of the Mahi people of Benin, who are known as powerful hunters, and tchinkoume is a music that is played when people return from the hunt, explicitly situating humans in an interdependent relationship with the environment. The album’s other preludes use rhythms from other parts of Benin: for example the gbon rhythm of Lionel’s hometown of Ouidah, featuring talking drums usually played for the sacred egungun masks representing returned ancestors, introduces “Rossignol”; a Yoruba juju ensemble of dundun drums forms the prelude to “Vivi”; the prelude to “Abominwe” is a combination of a northern teke rhythm from Benin and djembe parts recorded in New York City; and the characteristic bell patterns and clay kpezin drums of the royal zenli rhythm for royal, ancestral vodun bring in “Madjigua” (Loueke, personal communication, 5.7.17, Cambridge, MA). In each prelude, Lionel sings and chants the melodic and lyrical material of the song that follows, calling it up, and connecting the song to the rhythm. The preludes and postlude productively disrupt and interact with the existence of the main pieces as independent, composed “works”, showing the ways that the pieces’ meaning may surpass their boundaries as static “tracks” on an album, reaching into the past and the future. The preludes also present the pieces’ melodic and lyrical materials as materials for chant in contexts of local drumming traditions, each with their own sacred resonances. Virgin Forest’s sound world is also created through the improvisational interactions in the album’s many duets and collaborations. Here, as an improviser, Loueke suggests that relational listening can serve as a springboard for relational sounding. Several pieces on the album call out speci!cally to the wordless sounds of animals, which in vodun cosmology each have their spiritual qualities, and can be manifestations of other beings – spirits, priests, deities – in animal form. The album opens with a duet with vocalist Gretchen Parlato, an ode to the “Rossignol”, the nightingale whose voice is so sweet it must be a gift from God.19 Other songs refer, for example, to “Le reveil des agneaux” (The waking of the lambs), in which Herbie Hancock’s clustered piano chords support Loueke’s wordless, mellow vocalising along with his guitar, imitating the soft bleating of young lambs, all delivered in a loose, expressive #ow of improvised interactivity. In “Danse des Animaux” (Dance of the Animals), Lionel’s voice alternates between onomatopoeic rhythmic play and vocalising the lines he plays on guitar, supported by Cyro Baptista on percussion. I asked Lionel about these vocalised sounds, and he had this say: “This is more about the peaceful words of the animals before we start destroying the natural living cycle. There are less and less birds, roosters, cows . . . sounds even when you go to the countryside now in any country. Even driving in the dark use to be scary because of all the insects coming to your windshield” (Loueke, email, 9.22.19). As Allen (2016, 645) writes, many of the opportunities that ecomusicological thinking and listening open are a"orded by the fact that “sound moves in a liminal realm that opens up interpretive possibilities and brings us closer to connecting with non-human life”. “Dispute des loups” (Dispute of the wolves) is a brief but animated exchange between Loueke’s voice and guitar, and Grégoire Maret’s harmonica; the two musicians skulk around one other, occasionally meeting head on in moments of dissonant, canine family SOUND STUDIES 205 squabble. In “La poursuite du lion” (The pursuit of the lion), Hancock returns, as he and Loueke chase one other through breathtaking lines of narrow, improvised escape; it is not clear, though, who is the hunter and who is the prey, and perhaps that is part of the point. Lastly, “Le chant du corbeau” (The song of the crow) summons a new set of mysterioussounding timbres, opening with a rhythmic texture featuring Cyro Baptista on buzzy, undulating Jew’s harp, accompanying Loueke’s guitar lines; it then shifts as Loueke’s voice enters with sustained, wordless intonations (1:05), with Baptista drawing on a rich variety of percussive sounds, including the frame drum, chimes, and cymbals. Loueke begins responding to Baptista with vocal percussion (3:14–3:30), and eventually moves into exploring the upper range of his smooth falsetto as the song ends (3:40). These sounds and improvised exchanges show the listener the connections between instrumental music, the human voice, and the sounds of animals and nature, embodying the Fon concept of gbè, meaning voice or sound. Gbè is key to understanding the connection between sound and ontology in Fon culture, because sound is never just sound, but always the voice of something, or more accurately someone. Gbè is a relational concept. The Gangbé Brass Band takes their name from the proverb which says, “Gan jayí mo nɔ gbɛ gbè”, meaning, “The sound/voice [gbè] of the gan cannot stay silent”, meaning that, once struck, the bell cannot help but to speak, to sound.20 Here resonance has a causal relationship in the world: this is very close to the law of Myōhō-renge-kyō in Nichiren practice. As Gangbé’s trombonist Martial Ahouandjinou put it, “The proverb . . . says that sound is the vibration of an object, and we encounter sound through this vibration” (email to the author, 6.24.17). For all the interdependence between humans and the environment in Benin’s traditional culture, the average Beninese person today is compelled to place human survival needs – often their own and their families’ – ahead of the environment. The question of deforestation in Benin is a complex one that intersects with social class and di"ering local and global attitudes about land use, human agency, and human-environmental relations. Lionel wrote to me that the song “Virgin Forest” is “a call on how the animal agriculture has devastated some forests simply because some lands are needed to grow some grains to feed the cows etc . . . The problem is if we don’t change our behavior, we will have to devastate our own lands to feed those animals simply because the demographic population keeps growing” (email, 9.22.19). Virgin Forest shows us a world where humans do live in the forest, but where the world has somehow been spared the far-reaching e"ects of capitalism and colonisation. This is an issue that Loueke and his bandmates confront more directly in their 2015 album Gaïa. The “Intrusion” of Gaïa Loueke’s 2015 album Gaïa presents a dramatic contrast to 2006ʹs Virgin Forest in several ways. Whereas the debut album captured much of what earned Loueke the title of the “gentle giant” in his creative vocalisations of animals, sounds, and their environments, Gaïa represents a di"erent side of Loueke as a musician, while also re#ecting the shifting outlook on the environmental crisis towards a more sobering realism in science and public discourse from 2006 to 2015. Loueke connected the two albums this way: “It’s almost like Virgin Forest is the introduction of the wake-up call, of, ok, let’s see what’s happening around Earth. Gaïa being, ok, we know what’s happening around Earth and 206 S. POLITZ we’re not doing anything about it, which brings the mad or the angry side” (4.8.21, video call). The years since 2015 have seen increasing discussion of what actually constitutes the “point of no return” when it comes to global warming, and Gaïa joins a growing discourse among musicians and ecomusicologists about how to respond to the possibility of this new reality, whether through anger (Robinson 2020, 16–17), mourning (Mark 2016), or simply choosing to embrace life on a dying earth (Haraway 2016; Morton 2007). For this album, Loueke chose the sounds of distorted electric guitar and compositions with odd metres to represent an “angry” Gaia reacting to the environmental degradation of the Earth. He explained: Gaia, being the mother of Earth, supposed to have that image of peace, right? The whole idea behind the album is that even Gaia couldn’t take it anymore. This beautiful Earth she gave us, and how we are treating the Earth, how we are not taking care of the Earth. So that’s pretty much the main idea behind the whole album. And then it starts from there. Actually, I had almost the title before I even started writing the music, which kind of gave me a good direction of where I wanted the music to go and how I want the music to represent my ideas, the ideas behind the title . . . . . . . probably most of the people who heard my music until then never heard me play distorted guitar, electric guitar with distortion. So of course, I could present how Gaia was mad with acoustic guitar, it’s doable. But I decided to go more in the rock side, by still being who I am, but by having a distorted guitar that expressed more, or I would say naturally, the anger – you can de!nitely express that, or the joy, too, but the “anger” [using air quotes] behind how mad Gaia is, it was clear to me I had to use electric guitar !rst, and second I had to use distortion. And third, the rhythms behind, it’s a lot of odd meters, weird metrics that I wanted to present as well, which kind of gives the music the idea of how #exible it is and how dangerous the situation is, that it can collapse at any time. Because if I just play 4/4, it will be very clear, that we know how things are falling pretty much in four, but when it’s odd, like I don’t know 17 or 35 – I think one tune was 35, very weird meters, which kind of present the collapsing of the situation. (Loueke, 4.8.21, video call) Loueke describes a di"erent relationship with the environment than in Virgin Forest – this one deeply frustrated by a lack of sensitivity and relationality. Strikingly, his highly recognisable voice does not appear at all on Gaïa, neither to deliver lyrics nor to scat along with his guitar. Loueke channels Gaia’s anger and grief in his guitar, much in the way a vodun initiate is possessed by a vodun or aziza forest/improvisation spirit, playing through distortion e"ects and also through the creative risks he takes in his improvisations, making use of sudden, dramatic slides and dissonant chords that take full advantage of the crunchy timbres produced by the distortion. Re#ecting on Gaia’s anger o"ered Loueke a chance to re#ect musically on his own emotional character, showing a di"erent side of himself as a musician. In the past Loueke has cultivated an image of gentility and calm in his performance, so some of his followers were surprised to hear him engage this more “aggressive” side.21 Anger is an important a"ective register for ecomusicology to consider, and a signi!cant one for postcolonial studies as well. Robinson (2020, 16–17), drawing on Audre Lorde, identi!es this as a practice of “writing . . . redress”, or “a strategic SOUND STUDIES 207 orchestration of anger” in outright refusal of multiple forms of epistemic violence. Loueke o"ered some of his thoughts on portraying a variety of emotions in music and creative freedom: People have this tendency of seeing you one way. Sometimes they think, yeah, he’s cool [referring to himself]. Yeah, everybody’s cool. Anybody can be cool, anybody can be mad. We have both sides. There’s nobody on Earth who’s never been mad at some point. It’s a matter of the control you have, how much control you have on it, how much you shift and see the positive side of life, how you manage when that happens. Everybody has to !nd their way of expressing their anger, but not living their anger. You express it to pass a message if you want to, but staying angry is not the solution either. Like I said, it’s easy for people, or easy for Earth’s musicians to stay in the same zone of something that is working in terms of you know, people know you for this type of music, people know you because you play this style of music, and they’re always waiting for you to fall in those paths. You know, the next album, we know what it’s going to sound like. I personally always refuse that and want to present something completely di"erent from the one before because, !rst of all, I get quickly bored of myself, and I refused to be put in a frame that we know how it’s going to sound. Because personally, I don’t, and I want to keep that freedom from one moment to another. (Loueke, 4.8.21, video call) The conditions of Gaïa’s production are also instructive when it comes to understanding its approach to environmental representation. Produced by the experienced rock performer and current head of Blue Note Records Don Was, the album was recorded in two days of live performances with a studio audience. As Loueke explained: . . . the situation where we recorded the album was very unique that I’ve never recorded anything that way . . . . actually, here’s the real story behind Gaïa: when [Don Was] heard the music, when we were working on the music, we were trying to play every two weeks at the 55 Bar, just to experiment, to play the music. And he came. And actually his !rst idea was to record from what he heard. That night, he wanted to record the band in that place. Put some mics and just record what we heard. We were down for it. I can’t remember exactly why it didn’t happen, but for some reason we decided to do it in a studio, but keep the same vibe. So we recorded all in the same room, no isolation. So mics were bleeding, if there’s a mistake, we just redo the whole thing. On the whole album, there is no, like, let me go back and !x. We can’t do it, because mics were bleeding between each other, so we were in the same room, no headphones, and with audience. What we were doing was in the morning, we would record for like two hours, take a lunch break. Then we’d have the audience sitting in the studio, we put some chairs like 15-20 people, and we would perform like 90 minutes, take a break, and then have a second set with another group of 20 . . . . And we recorded the whole album in two days. The third day it was mixed. So we wanted to keep this kind of raw sound, nothing clean and shiny, just raw, you know. That was the idea behind it. . . . Like I said, it’s not clean. There are some mistakes. I personally wanted to leave it the way it is, because that’s who we are, that’s the way we live. Nothing’s perfect. It shouldn’t be super clean, like we always do in the studio, most of the time, ‘go !x this, play this.’ Which is cool. But this time it was like one block, no jumping, no take the !rst A. If one person makes a mistake, we will redo it . . . . I remember the last day, we just have to listen, ok, this one from day one, and this one from day two and put them together and mix the album. That was it. It’s cool to not think too much sometimes. (Loueke, 4.8.21, video call) 208 S. POLITZ Loueke’s ideas of embracing imperfection and the impermanence of musical experience are also important to note here, because they are closely related to several spiritual themes that run throughout the album, including brokenness, love, and forgiveness, suggesting the complexity of humans’ relationship with the environment. The album moves through these themes progressively, opening with the disjointed “Broken”, then moving through a more measured, meditative “Sources of Love”, into a rock-infused “Wacko Loco” (perhaps the most wildly adventurous piece on the album, rhythmically and timbrally), before a trip through “Aziza Dance”, a tribute to the Fon spirits of improvisation whose second half features drummer Nemeth soloing over Loueke’s broken-up guitar ostinato, and then “Forgiveness”, a lightly simmering vehicle for some thoughtful improvisations from Loueke and bassist Biolcati, as we move into the middle of the album. Gaïa ends improbably with an instrumental version of the Bee Gees’ (1977) “How Deep Is Your Love”, which ri"s over the song’s many harmonic possibilities (putting the song’s original simple 4/4 feel in 9/4 instead) and then moves into a soukous-infused second line groove (also in 9!) to !nish (3:10–4:20). Though Loueke does not sing them, the song’s lyrics are still relevant to the albums’ thematics and will be implicit for any listeners familiar with the song. The !rst lines describe the pull of “your eyes in the morning sun”, your touch “in the pouring rain”, and the longing for the embrace of the beloved, a partner or a family member, or perhaps more broadly “another” other – the Earth, the Buddha, God, Gaia. The song’s lyrics conclude appropriately, “’Cause we’re living in a world of fools/Breaking us down/When they all should let us be/We belong to you and me”. Just as with Virgin Forest, it would be easy to miss the environmental and Buddhist themes on the album, especially for listeners who might be focused on the metres or song forms (deserving of a study in their own right), but these themes of brokenness, love, and forgiveness are there to be appreciated with just a bit of attention. This tends to be part of Loueke’s approach, in which he does not put the rhythmic complexity or his activist messages front and centre, but prefers to “pass the message through the music” (Loueke, video call, 4.8.21). Another of the concepts in Loueke’s comments deserving of more extensive discussion is the idea of Gaia as a being whom we can understand as one who gets “angry”. The concept of “Gaia” has an overabundance of signi!cations in ecomusicology, potentially harkening back to Lovelock and Margulis’s (1974) “Gaia hypothesis”, but more generally operating as an attempt to name something of which we can barely conceive: the sum total of the “natural” world and our imaginings of its agency. Yes, Gaia is divine – made in our image, yet profoundly unlike us – but she is an older, pre-Christian form of divinity, capricious and indeterminate. Philosopher Stengers (2015, 45) writes that Gaia was “honored in the past . . . as the fearsome one . . . well before the cult of maternal love, which pardons everything. A mother perhaps but an irritable one, who should not be o"ended. And she was also from before the Greeks conferred on their gods a sense of the just and the unjust, before they attributed to them a particular interest in our destinies”.22 In many cultures, Gaia is described as “she who intrudes” on the a"airs of humans. But seen from a cross-cultural distance and with some historical imagination, what is seen as an intrusion may simply be the doctrine of interdependence – the Nichiren mantra – SOUND STUDIES 209 coming to pass. From a Buddhist or a vodun perspective, Gaia could never intrude into human a"airs, because the human world and the natural world are as inseparable as they are radically di"erent. This re#ects the sense of respect for radical alterity that Loueke evokes in Gaïa, one which does not seek to turn the environment into something domesticated which we can understand, nor paint ourselves as innocent, fully integrated creatures in the natural environment. Instead this view asks us to deal with reality without romanticising it, to understand how we can be together with the environment, and it with us, while still being so fundamentally di"erent. The closest analog to such a !gure in vodun or orisa culture might be the river goddess Yemaja, as Olesugun Titus (Titus and Titus 2017; Titus 2019) has written.23 In many cultures, and indeed for many thinkers including Stengers and Haraway, Gaia is described as “she who intrudes” on the a"airs of humans. But seen from a cross-cultural distance and with some historical imagination, what is seen as an intrusion may simply be the doctrine of interdependence – the Nichiren mantra – coming to pass. One piece on Gaïa, “Wacko Loco”, has a corresponding music video that depicts the album’s vision of the person of Gaia through the movements of several dancers and performance artists, produced through the initiative of Loueke’s bassist Massimo Biolcati.24 The video opens with jumping cuts of a dilapidated house, from which a series of fantastical creatures emerge one by one, various whimsically costumed dancers in corsets, striped tights, top hats, eyeliner. One dancer, wearing a feathered headband and with leaves and other organic material covering her torso and lower body, clearly represents the goddess Gaia herself, her eyes set o" by earthy, moody tones of red and teal eyeshadow. Over the course of the video, as Loueke and his trio-mates play the opening melody of “Wacko Loco” (in 35/8 time), Gaia alternates between dancing with the fantastical creatures and serenely surveying the scene, before a nondescript “man” character in a white button-down shirt emerges tentatively from the dilapidated house. Gaia dances with him, too. The “man” character dons a necktie as Loueke launches into a blistering guitar solo. Gaia then summons a windstorm as leaves #y around her, and all of the other creatures are knocked to the ground. Gaia looks straight into the camera in a close-up shot and sticks out her tongue. As Lionel described, “the idea was . . . to have a lot of chaotic situations around, like a hurricane on stage, things moving, people collapsing. My main idea . . . was to have the camera in a way [showing imploding and folding land with his hands] that it’s almost the end of the world, the ground collapsing, things are falling out” (Loueke, 4.8.21, video call). The “Wacko Loco” video reveals some important aspects of the aesthetic that Massimo Biolcati and drummer Ferenc Nemeth brought to Loueke’s project. In this video, the group’s image of Gaia develops some clarity – more Buddhist punk trickster than Mother Nature. Could Gaïa be understood in some ways as a punk album? It’s worth remembering that the punk movement of the 1970s, in Britain and North America, was a reaction to the ’60s hippy counterculture in the United States and everything it stood for – its idealism, its soft edges, its privilege and insularity, and above all its Romanticism (see Savage et al. 2012; Norton 2019). Punk called out the counterculture, too, for its bourgeois complicity with capitalism. Like the American counterculture, punk has an activist aspect, but comes from a completely di"erent social class position. 210 S. POLITZ This punk outlook is also similar or perhaps antecedent to the position that Timothy Morton (2007, 184–5) lands on in Ecology Without Nature when he suggests that the solution to the preciousness, exceptionalism and holier-than-thou-ness of the environmental movement (which he pinpoints as “beautiful soul syndrome”) is to embrace “a ‘goth’ assertion of the contingent and necessarily queer idea that we want to stay with a dying world: dark ecology”.25 This is an approach that is unafraid to grapple with the reality of the world as it is – “not one, not two”, – in all of its (or their?) radical alterity, overwhelming beauty, and terrifying indeterminacy, their trauma, grief, and anger intertwined inseparably with our own; this is an approach that sees with clear eyes our own ”response-ability” (see Haraway 2016) and complicity in the current state of things, and embraces the strength and healthy sense of irony that is required of us. I suggest, following Loueke’s lead, that improvising with these other voices may be a form of relational listening that o"ers some directions for ecomusicology. Improvising with Gaia Relational listening seems to require that music analysis move into the new adaptive temporal dimension of improvisation: analysis, deep and understanding, yet responsive to the urgency of the moment, radically present and dynamic. Here the deconstructionist and the activist can !nd their common goal, and perhaps in improvisation !nd a way to work out their temporal di"erences. Relational listening opens possibilities for sounding our interdependence with beings human, non-human, and more-than-human, for enacting the ways that sound as divine, as environment, as relation, might change our action in the world. Lionel Loueke’s fans have long focused on the virtuosic aspects of his musicianship, narrowly delineated: his wide-ranging use of timbre in his voice and his extended guitar technique, his use of odd metres and innovative harmonic motion in his compositions, and his rhythmic and melodic abilities as an improviser. But listening relationally to Loueke’s music – that is, listening for the other beings Loueke improvises with, for the vodun, for Gaia, for the Buddha and the kami, for Africans and African soundworlds – opens quite di"erent interpretations of Virgin Forest and Gaïa, which reframes those “other”, seemingly spectacular timbres and textures Loueke creates as strange, perhaps, yet also ontologically embraced, as atmospheric, as environmental, as divine. Texture and atmosphere in music matter because of their embodied a"ect, because of the power relations they index, because of the relationality they invoke. Improvisation is a way of listening relationally, of interacting with the radical alterity of other beings and other bodies in a way that allows them to remain themselves, but attending to di"erentials of power as well as to di"erentials of scale and time. It may, indeed, be helpful to thinking of relational listening as a practice that unfolds over time, emergent, un!nished. This process challenges us to lean into the crucial practice of not-knowing as a way of being. Robinson (2020, 53, 64) points out that notknowing is a powerful aspect of a critical listening practice he calls “guest listening”, which, in refusing the practices of consumption in pervasive “settler” listening practices, suggests “a listening practice that does not – and seeks not to – know what it hears”. He adds, “This does not mean we listen without intention, but rather that the work of listening is not predicated on use value or the drive to accumulate knowledge” (72).26 SOUND STUDIES 211 The practice of dwelling in questioning seems to be characteristic of the environmental conversation in general, as Morton (2007, 175) writes, “environment is theory – theory not as answer to a question, or as an instruction manual . . . but as question, and question mark, as in question, questioning-ness”. This questioning-ness seems better suited to improvisation than to composition. As critiques of R. Murray Schafer’s compositional impulses in the “soundscape” have shown (Jackson 2017; Novak and Sakakeeny 2015; Robinson 2020), composition has too often been “compositional violence” (Robinson 2020, 1), to !lter out whatever is perceived as “noise” to claim territory for the Music. While Isabelle Stengers (2015 [2009], 50) is intrigued by the possibility of “learning to compose” with Gaia, she insists that this process will require the voices of many beings of di"erent species, cultures, and ontologies. She writes, Do not ask me to sketch what other world may be able to come to terms, or compose, with Gaia. The response doesn’t belong to us, that is to those who have both provoked her intrusion and now decipher it through data, models, and simulations . . . Learning to compose will need many names, not a global one, the voices of many peoples, knowledges, and earthly practices. It belongs to the process of multifold creation, the terrible di$culty of which it would be foolish and dangerous to underestimate but which it would be suicidal to think of as impossible. There will be no response other than the barbaric if we do not learn to couple together multiple, divergent struggles and engagements in this process of creation, as a hesitant and stammering as it may be. (Stengers 2015, 50, emphasis original) Perhaps improvisation o"ers a productive transformation as a next step for relational listening. It is the aziza spirits of the forest in Fon culture, after all, who are the source of human creativity, and who give their name to the practice of improvisation. Practiced improvisers know that it is not enough to simply repeat what one hears (mimesis), but that a true response must quickly hear, understand, and express a perceptible relationship to the sound one listens to, and then immediately be prepared to hear the next part of the conversation. As scholar, improviser, and #utist Ellen Waterman says during the dialog at the end of Dylan Robinson’s (2020, 240) book, “Crucially, to improvise well requires good listening skills, responsiveness, and adaptability . . .” Improvisation requires an investment in the “not-knowing,” the bracketing of expectation, that is so essential to relational listening and to environmental thinking, and which Loueke embraces in his musical collaborations with beings human, animal, and divine. Waterman goes on to say, “Listening and sounding responsively (responsibly) are coterminous processes. If we’re doing both well, we are constantly being pulled o"- center and then recentering to a new position, which entails being open to exploring new ideas. The problems occur when we think we can pre-hear the outcome . . .” (Robinson 2020, 240). Listening relationally, it seems, is only the beginning of a larger practice of relational sounding. As I discussed Virgin Forest and Gaïa with Lionel Loueke in 2021, Lionel began to re#ect on how the COVID-19 pandemic, another “wake-up call”, has altered the lived experience of humans and the environment. He said: And, today, as we pass through Virgin Forest, Gaïa, today, we !nd ourselves in this situation we are in [the COVID-19 pandemic], and again with my Buddhism spirit, the positive thing, aside from all of this year of pandemic and this crazy year, the !rst positive thing that comes to my mind is that the Earth is breathing better because we’ve had this lockdown, we !nd 212 S. POLITZ that things that we have to do and we know that we have to do it, and we didn’t do it, that this situation kind of forced us to face the reality, and to do it. We have no choice but to stay home. I remember last year [2020], I think June, around June or July, watching the news, seeing pictures of birds on the highway in Paris. People are talking about how nature is living, breathing better, and people can see things they never paid attention to before, sounds they never paid attention to before. It’s just for me that we didn’t have a choice. It’s unfortunate, but this for me is the good side of this whole situation. The Earth can breathe. Now we’re slowly back to whatever we were doing before, but at least we got pretty much a year of giving the Earth a break . . . . Now we’ve been a year in this craziness. We have to look back, and see, we had a lot of things going on. We woke up in the morning, jump on the plane, go to the other side of the Earth, next day, we’re just running. And now, we don’t have any of those. So it’s another wake-up call to appreciate what you had before. One thing, personally for me, is I’m not willing to go back on the road like I used to. I’m not going to do it anymore. I love to go, but I don’t think I’m going to put myself in a situation where – I used to be running. Because I realized that being home with my family, being home in my room, practicing, getting things done, things that I never could get done before, because I was always like, I’m going to do it tomorrow, I’m going to do it next week. And now, I don’t have anywhere to go. [smiles] This is time for me to get things done. Things that I always dream of, like practicing, write music, enjoy family. I’m enjoying that so much. I want to go back on the road, but I want to !nd a balance. (Loueke, 4.8.21, video call) This call to balance, to wake up, is also a call to hear ourselves anew, to hear ourselves as inseparable from the natural world, in all of its strangeness, its beauty, its anger, and its grief, to awaken, indeed, to our own alterity. Loueke’s music opens us to these insights; it shows us what a gross oversimpli!cation it is to think that we as animals are a “natural” part of the environment, or that the environment could ever be domesticated according to our own culture. Rather, we and the environment are “not two, not one”. Notes 1. I also had the opportunity to perform with Loueke with the Harvard Jazz Band during Herbie Hancock’s residency as Norton lecturer at Harvard University in spring 2016. 2. See also Riedel and Torvinen (2020) on music as atmosphere. 3. Fon is the major local African language in Benin. 4. See David Rothenberg’s (2002) work on music, improvisation, and nature, including interspecies improvisation (2016), and recent research by Ryan (2020) discussing its importance for jazz pedagogy. 5. To the best of my knowledge, the term “relational listening” was coined rather recently by Australian composer and sound artist Lawrence English (2017), who uses it di"erently, to refer to the relationship between the !eld recordist’s listening and the “listening” of the sound recorder or microphone. Listening studies has seen a proliferation of taxonomies for listening as “ubiquitous” (Kassabian 2013), “skilled” (Bijisterveld 2019), as “expectation” (Huron 2008) and control (Hagood 2019). However, few, if any, of these listening modes approach the themes of ecology, spirituality, and politics that I hope to de!ne through relational listening. Riedel and Torvinen’s (2020) work in Music as Atmosphere perhaps comes the closest in its discussion of “atmospheric relations.” SOUND STUDIES 213 6. This is something like what Donna Haraway (2016) refers to as “oddkin,” those we make part of our family, but without forcing them into familiar forms. 7. See also Ingrid Monson’s (2018) excellent discussion of themes of relationality in music studies theories over the past several decades. This discussion also follows calls for a “relational musicology” among scholars such as Georgina Born (2010, 2012) and Nicholas Cook (2012). 8. I have especially appreciated the attention Ochoa Gautier (2016, 132–133) brings to Feld’s work, and his shift from concepts of an “anthropology of sound” to “acoustemology” in her work on “acoustic multinaturalism,” following the work of Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Vivieros de Castro (2014). Anthony Seeger (2016) follows a similar line of thought. These conversations about sound and indigenous ontologies are part of a larger developing literature that seeks to attune to the perspectives of more beings, more listeners, more voices – subjects variously human, animal, divine, abiotic, postcolonial (see, for example, Sykes 2019). 9. Relational listening overlaps with “deep listening” as it has been used by composer Pauline Oliveros (2005), and its meaning as expressed by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh (2001), as practice of compassion to alleviate su"ering in relationships between humans, nations, and the environment. 10. There has been much written on connections between Buddhism and environmentalism from several disciplinary perspectives, but a full consideration of this literature is beyond the scope of this article. Further, it is notoriously di$cult to generalise about Buddhist beliefs, and in any case such monolithic principles would be highly suspect. See, for example, Darlington (2017) on the ways that Taiwanese and Thai Buddhist practices of animal release and forest rituals can both support and impede environmental sustainability, Curtin (2014) on the long historical relationship between the work of the 13th century Japanese philosopher Dogen and concepts of the self in deep ecology, Callicott and McRae (2014) for an overview of environmental philosophy in Indian, Chinese, and Japanese Buddhism, Chen (2001) for a deep consideration of the role of music and sound in Chinese Buddhist liturgy, or Mabbett ([1993] 1994) on the functions of music in Buddhist liturgy across Asian cultures and history. 11. In a strict reading of Buddhist scripture, music was considered jin, or dust, something that distracts or stands in the way of true perception. But these concepts underwent a transformation in the development of Mahayana Buddhist forms that came to Japan, among other places, from India in the !rst century A.D. Through the rising popularity of the Lotus Sutra, the Mahayana traditions saw the Buddha ore as an object of personal worship, rather than simply as a mortal man who had escaped from the cycle of rebirth and attained Nirvana. This made the Buddha more accessible to the everyday worshipper in sensory experience or even in nature. See Chen (2001) for a consideration of the concept of dust (guna) in Chinese Buddhism, and Mabbett ([1993] 1994, 13) for more on Buddhism and music in general. 12. See also Browning’s (2017) work exploring ecomimesis in the practice of the bamboo endblown #ute shakuhachi, which has also become an important part of Zen Buddhist musical practice in Japan that is closely tied to Shintoism and the environment. 13. For more on the history and leadership of Soka Gakkai, see Dessi (2013). The organisation includes a following among jazz musicians like Hancock, Wayne Shorter, my former trombone teacher Robin Eubanks, Loueke, and others. For many of these musicians, Nichiren practice o"ers a critique of Western consumption practices, individualism, and histories of colonisation, as well as an alternative spirituality compatible with an Afro-centric view of the world that sees di"erent, transformative possibilities for the future. 14. See also the de!nition of “dependent origination” in the online Soka Gakkai Dictionary of Buddhism (Soka Gakkai 2021). 15. Indeed, many performance contexts in Fon and Yoruba culture play a didactic and social corrective role, such as in the performance and mockery of the egungun masks, often accompanied by gbon drumming styles, which Loueke makes use of in one of the preludes on Virgin Forest. 214 S. POLITZ 16. See art historian Dana Rush’s (2017) work on vodun deities and rhizomatic structure in Benin. 17. See Beninese literary scholar Mediohouan (1993, 250) for more on aziza and literature in Benin. 18. See the Beninese theatre scholar Bienvenu Koudjo (1988) for more on the concept of gbè in Fon and Gun-language songs. See also Politz (2018) for further discussion of gbè and resonance. 19. Loueke’s lyric does use the Fon word for a Christian God, or “Lord” (aklunon), here, adding to the interfaith collection of spirits and deities in the forest. 20. I discuss this in greater length in Politz (2018). 21. I am especially grateful to Kyra Gaunt for pointing out the implications of Loueke’s selfrepresentations for black masculinity when I presented a preliminary version of this paper at SEM in 2019. 22. Donna Haraway (2016, 51, 44), reading Stengers, concurs: Gaia, who “!gures the Anthropocene” for Haraway, “does not and could not care about human or other biological beings’ intentions or desires or needs, but Gaia puts into question our very existence, we who have provoked its brutal mutation that threatens both human and nonhuman livable presents and futures.” Haraway (2016, 52) ultimately suggests that we are well beyond the Anthropocene at this point, and thus beyond Gaia as a !gure. She suggests snaky Medusa as the icon the “Cthulucene,” the age of tentacled underworldian beings, of which Gaia is only one. 23. Loueke’s vision of Gaia also resembles Rebecca Dirksen’s (2018) description of the anger and sorrow of the vodun spirit Ezili in Haiti as a representation of the “unbalanced” nature of the Earth. 24. At the time of writing, the video was available to view at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= N5Pxy23CGPA. 25. See Morton’s (2016) Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence for more in this line of thinking. 26. Robinson (2020, 22, 53, ibid.) explains that guest listening instead seeks to cultivate a “deep reciprocity” and enter into “temporalities of wonder,” as we learn “how to live our lives in a nonauthoritarian, nondominating, nonexploitative manner.” Acknowledgments I would like to o"er my sincere thanks to Rujing Huang, Rachel Carrico, Laura Dallman Rorick, Colleen Rua, Alvaro Luis Lima, and Aaron Colverson, all of whom read drafts of this article at di"erent stages during its development. My thanks, too, go to Lionel Loueke for generously sharing his time and thoughts over the past few years. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers whose comments were instrumental to the article coming together in its current form. Any and all shortcomings are my own. Disclosure statement No potential con#ict of interest was reported by the author(s). Notes on contributor Sarah Politz is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Florida. Her work focuses on creative practice in African and Afro-diasporic music, particularly in the context of popular music and new African diasporas in Europe and North America. Her current book project in progress is about sound, spirituality, and migration in the lives of brass band and jazz musicians from Republic of Benin. Politz completed her PhD in ethnomusicology at Harvard University in 2017 and holds an SOUND STUDIES 215 MA in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University (2011), and a BM in jazz studies and a BA in English from Oberlin College and Conservatory (2007). She performs actively as a jazz trombonist. References Adegbite, Ademola. 1991. “The Concept of Sound in Traditional African Religious Music.” Journal of Black Studies 22 (1): 45–54. doi:10.1177/002193479102200105. 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