Published on
March 6, 2024
Category
Features
Revisit Stan Douglas’ fictional ’70s jazz-funk band, originally featured in The Infinite Mix exhibition.
The Vinyl Factory has repressed the soundtrack to Stan Douglas’ Luanda-Kinshasa on double 12” heavyweight vinyl.
Featured in 2016’s The Infinite Mix exhibition, Luanda-Kinshasa is a video depicting a fictional ’70s jazz-funk band jamming on a set developed to resemble Columbia Records’ legendary New York studio, The Church.
The band’s music echoes the then-current confluence of American jazz, funk and Afrobeat–a musical fusion made possible, as the video’s title indirectly implies, by the emerging independence and rising profile of African nations.
Led by jazz pianist Jason Moran, the piece, which also features contributions from percussionist Kahlil Kwame Bell, guitarist Liberty Ellman and drummer Kimberly Thompson, among others, has an improvisational styling that implies endless performance.
The improvisation, however, is an illusion, as Luanda-Kinshasa has been intricately remixed by Douglas in the editing room using over six hours of ‘alternate takes’. Conjuring a never-ending sequence of variations, Luanda-Kinshasa is a vision of culture as a potentially ‘infinite mix.’
Paying homage to Miles Davis’ masterpiece On the Corner, whilst also envisioning a utopia of multi-cultural collaboration, during The Infinite Mix exhibition Douglas extended the loop and multi-track editing of the original album to create what he called “a geiser of music”–where ten minute improvisations were edited into a 6-hour jam.
“Most of Miles’ electric records were finished in the studio, finished with the razor blade,” Douglas explained at the time of the exhibition. “So this [Luanda-Kinshasa] takes what was happening in a musical form and applies it to the visual form.”
Since the late-1980s, Canadian artist Stan Douglas has interrogated the intersections of narrative, fact and fiction through photography, film and installation. Often inspired by examining place–Potsdam, Cuba and Detroit have provided the impetus for, respectively, his works Der Sandmann (1995), Inconsolable Memories (2005) and Le Détroit (1999)– Douglas’ work frequently plunges the viewer into events whose beginnings are obscured and whose ends seem to dissolve into mutability.
Douglas has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Salzburger Kunstverein, the Irish Museum of Modern Art and London’s Serpentine Gallery and he has had work featured in the Venice Biennale (1990, 2001, 2005, and 2019) and Documenta (1992, 1997, and 2002).
Luanda-Kinshasa has been repressed on double heavyweight vinyl, is housed in a gatefold sleeve and features the essay The Eye of the Trumpet written by German author Diedrich Diederichsen and Stan Douglas himself. Order a copy now.
Tracklist:
1A: Luanda
1B: Luanda
2A: Kinshasa
2B: Kinshasa
