Nkisi

I was born in Kinshasa and grew up in Leuven, which is a town in Belgium. My view was very interesting, because the house where I grew up was not far from the train station. Leuven is where they make Stella Artois, so it was quite industrial where I lived. Teenagers would go out to the factories, and at night you could hear the trains.

I wasn’t really aware of the intensity of the sound, but there were moments when I would wake up and I was connected to the vibration. These sounds must have been influential. Congolese people love their music. When I was young, there was a really beautiful Congolese community living in Brussels. There was always a barbecue, or people coming over to our house. I was very curious, and while the kids were all playing together, I always wanted to go and check what the parents were doing. I have beautiful images of people dancing the Congolese rumba, which is where I get a lot of my emotional connection to certain forms of repetitive melody.

My childhood was very musical, but being able to imagine that I could make music came late. I went through a lot of musical genres, which was the reality of being a minority at that time in Belgium, as well as being a bit of a weird kid. For a few years, I was part of the group of kids that were bullied, and that’s where I found my community. They were gabber kids, which at the time was seen as working class. It was such a beautiful commitment: having the bomber jacket, having the haircut, having their Air Maxes. I remember our spot was next to the toilet in this hallway. They had this little radio and they would put gabber on and start doing the hakken.

There's something beautiful about tracing these things back! I’m into the collective memory of genre, because I feel like when you touch genre there’s a base that everyone can connect to. When I look at all the genres, all the sounds, even the Congolese music I draw from, it’s obvious I really look for a form of melancholia connected to these moments where people can really let go and dance. It’s repetition, this trance you get into, but it’s also the ability to dance everything off.

When I was younger, I would sneak out and end up at gabber parties where the diversity was shocking. I remember being 14 and my Belgian friends telling me, "Don’t go over there with those gabbers." They had to teach me about the boots with the white laces. At the same time, we were all there, dancing to this music. That’s the question that I ask myself: Is it the form of personality that goes towards the music, or is it the music that creates certain types of people? It’s probably a dynamic process, but I’m very curious to figure that out. By the time you’re a teenager, you already have so much melancholy. You have to process so much trauma, which probably comes from your body changing, but your music taste has this healing aspect, allowing you to feel a certain type of way. I'm learning a lot from my relationship to music, to being younger, but also understanding the healing technology within music.

I’m doing another project as part of the Anomaly Index about this drummer in 17th-century England that couldn’t stop drumming, trying to trace historical anxieties around music. The drummer of Tedworth couldn’t stop drumming. The police confiscated his drum, but then the drum itself kept drumming. It’s one of the first poltergeist cases and I’m connecting it to the Caribbean, where French colonialists made this law, “Code Noir,” which ruled that slaves working on plantations were prohibited from playing drums. In more modern times you have the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act in the UK from '94, which outlawed raves. Autechre made a really amazing EP about it. Spiral Tribe ran away from the UK to Europe to avoid these laws, and a whole free techno scene was born. Fast forward to France, which has a big free techno scene, and today they're making new laws that allow for 3,000-euro fines for ravers. Music also becomes this interesting space to think about control, which is what I think is beautiful about paracoustics, looking at the anomalies in sound and asking: Are they unexplainable because of how we approach them?

The Society for Psychical Research has this really beautiful library in London. I spent some time there finding all this amazing theology from the northern United Kingdom connected to pagan cultures and traditions. There are beautiful research topics around paracoustics, which are connected to witchcraft and ghosts, but also spiritism. How does the invisible show that it’s there? It will always make sounds. When a spirit wants to make itself known, it’s probably going to knock. Listening to these ethnographic archives, particularly these early ones, it made me sad to listen to all this amazing music and to realize that the moment that something is preserved and goes into the archive, we look at it as no longer alive.

You can think through ethnographic music in terms of aesthetic musical strategies, but when I actually spent time with them, someone would be singing in the recording and the noise would literally shift the energy in the room. When you look at the phonograph, there was already this very extractive logic to it. Even dealing with the material of a wax cylinder, which you could understand as one of the purest forms of recording, you have this object form which you have to face a certain way to make sound. A lot of Indigenous people were scared for their lives because they thought it was going to take their voices. Rhythm was the most difficult sound to record, while voice and other instruments were easier.

There's a really great book by Brian Hochman called Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology that speaks about this, as well as Hungry Listening by my hero Dylan Robinson. Reading those books changed so much about my approach to sound, especially with decolonial musical practice work. The idea of “hungry listening” is from the settler perspective. It’s endless extraction, so it’s important to shift this perception. It has always been hard for me to have relationships with non-Western cosmological ideas of sound, which is why improvisation has become so important to me. It was hard to figure out how to place myself in relation to them.

Robinson speaks about intimate relationships with nonhuman things, and I’ve started dealing with these archives as not just something to be preserved and put on a pedestal, but as something with which I could have a more profound relationship. I wanted to sit next to these beautiful songs, which hold a lot of knowledge that really resonates with me. I was developing these really intimate relationships with music that may be close to my heritage, but also some music that is totally not. I still need to figure out why I have a very strong connection with music from Papua New Guinea. Even the art and the artifacts make me very emotional. Robinson explains this beautifully. He describes the erotics of relationships with the nonhuman, how it becomes sensorial.

The moment you go into Indigenous and non-Western cosmologies, you immediately get to an understanding of humanity beyond the embodied. You can more easily connect with the presence of the people that you’re listening to. This has informed everything about how I make and think about music. For Anomaly Index, I specifically looked for recordings closest to the invention of the medium. I wanted to acknowledge the fact that the further we get from the introduction of the recorder, the social relation to the music and how the music was performed for the medium also changes.

I really believe that there’s a kind of quantum entanglement with the birth of recording equipment that brings us to the point where the music industry is how it is now. Even with the phonograph, you had all these different brands that had monopolies in certain regions. Only the Edison phonograph could record on the African continent. We can trace these extractive logics throughout the music industry in general. When you bring other Indigenous cosmologies into Western and dominant ones, they become speculative cosmologies. So cultivating this relationship with the music archive is another way of ordering the knowledge that I’ve encountered. It allows me to not be scared to dive in.

I’m really interested in this idea of the intruder. What does it mean to intrude on a landscape? The Western anxieties of trying to conquer the world already necessitate a weird psychological interaction with the landscape and how it projects whatever is happening inside of you. It's almost like it becomes a form of self-defense. I was specifically amazed by the stories of the explorers who excavated Tutankhamun’s tomb, who then one by one all started dying. The curse of Tutankhamun is a beautiful way to think about what happens when there’s an intrusion. Does our perception of it become something that’s inside of the space of these two realities that come together? Is it a form of self-defense from the land? I like the ontology of that. Maybe the nonhuman has enough agency to create this anxiety, so it then becomes a question of what is projected and what’s present.

This relates to how Europe was formed. Travelers like Marco Polo would go to different places in the world and come back with their notebooks, which they would then give to painters, who would then paint the Indigenous people they wrote about. They were building identity through an imagining of the unknown and the other. What’s interesting is that it’s attractive, it becomes mysterious. But as sexy as it is, we’re also scared of it. That tension creates social relations that are dangerous and which make people die, or make dominant systems scared of otherness and things that they cannot understand. Violence comes from trying to grasp that understanding, because the moment that you try to grasp it, you’re also killing it.

It made me so happy to finally find a space in a Western scientific realm which was actually a very early acknowledgement of non-Western cosmologies. However, I still want to be careful not to fall into this learned behavior of hungry listening, to be aware of the extraction inherent to my engagement with a lot of music. Some histories are written, some histories are not, but some histories are hidden inside of songs. The relationship to sound in Congolese cosmology is really beautiful. There’s an Indigenous tradition from my mom’s tribe that, after you have a baby, an initiation of three years starts, the outcome of which is learning to sing one song and dance one dance. It was through songs that a lot of knowledge was transmitted to the next generation.

The sound needs to speak for itself. Robinson speaks about the colonial practice making us unsure what listening is. This is what I love about working in music. I can take all this research, but instead of thinking about it in a university or an academic setting, I can think about it through listeners. Whatever we’re doing now, it’s not new. For Anomaly Index, I didn’t really do much to the material itself. It’s intended to make people think about what it means to listen. A musical experience is always a lived experience.

It’s more about access analysis, which is already part of the purpose of paracoustics, paranormal studies, and parapsychology. I’m looking at discarded things, going back to my childhood as a bullied kid. It’s a revenge of the anomalies, giving space to whatever is rejected, or seen as not interesting, to find the potential of life in them. I wanted to understand the power of music and the agency of these sounds that I felt were trying to get my attention. It’s always good to reshuffle hierarchies. Noise music started in fascist Italy, so I presented Anomaly Index as a live set at the Venice Biennale. It’s a little wink, “Let me just shift around the genealogy of the avant-garde.”

Maybe it started in the 1910s, maybe noise back then represented the mechanical or the anthropocentric, but this noise, in 2025, is nonrepresentational and reflective of nature. You cannot represent a North Star; there’s no way of putting an identity on the ocean, even if it’s possible to name all these beautiful divinities, the orishas. They represent so much more than we can even grasp. I was using Anomaly Index to sit in that relationship with the unknown. Instead of trying to go through the sound, I wanted to have space to talk about it. There’s no melodies to grasp in noise music, you’re fighting the form of logical interaction with sound. I’m learning so much from this project. Being able to work with this music is showing me that there’s agency in the sound of my own tracks. I think of noise as a beautiful space for nonhuman identity. I’m learning so much from how it manages to guide me to different places.

I think it has actually made me think more about the opposite. When I do a live set, it’s always improvised. I'm in the trance, I prepare something but I never really know how it’s going to end. I’ve had a lot of moments where I loved a set, but I don’t have recordings. Sometimes I would get quite upset about it. This project has made me feel more relaxed with the fact that music can exist outside of the recording. In a world where everything is tangible and, as a musician, your value is your latest record. I realized I need to be calmer with that.

At the same time, this idea of archiving becomes more important. In the future, I want to think about what Anomaly Index even is. I’m trying to archive through allowing sound to exist as a more embodied thing. I become a better musician every time I play a show, so I’m also archiving in my body. I'm archiving the sounds, but also the musical gestures and muscle memory connected to how I make the music. Maybe the only thing that I do remember is the gesture.

In my family tradition, we always bury umbilical cords under a tree. Mine was a mango tree. As a diaspora child, it’s amazing to hold this connection to the land, even if I'm not around. I want to go back to that. In Congolese cosmology, there’s this idea that we got to the land from the minerals, from the animals, from the plants. When we die, we give back the body that we borrowed.