Afro Sonic Signifier: Satch Hoyt

The eternal Afro Sonic Signifier. A sounding cartography of Afro-futurist Black Atlantic Journeys from Slave Ship to Space Ship. 

Liquid Architecture presents the legendary multi-instrumentalist musician and sound artist Satch Hoyt in performance at Testing Grounds.

Of Jamaican-British descent, Hoyt was born in London (1957) and currently lives in Berlin. Having also spent time in New York, Paris, Mombasa, and Australia’s Northern Territory - all points on the many-sided and ever- expanding star that is the African Diaspora - he is an intimate observer of the sites of convergence where the Diaspora comes together to sing, shout, and be, reflecting itself to itself. Employing the shared tool kit to connect, express, and commiserate across centuries and oceans, Hoyt taps into aural and oral echoes as well as into those retained in the historical and material record.

Satch Hoyt is a spiritualist, a believer in ritual and retention. A visual artist and a musician, his diverse and multifaceted body of work - whether sculpture, sound installation, painting, musical performance, or musical recording - is united in its investigation of the “Eternal Afro-Sonic Signifier” and its movement across and amid the cultures, peoples, places, and times of the African Diaspora. Those four evocative words (a term coined by Hoyt) refer to the “mnemonic network of sound” that was enslaved Africans’ “sole companion during the forced migration of the Middle Passage.”  lt was, and is, a hard-won somatic tool kit for remembering where you come from and who you are - and maybe, where you’re going - against all the many odds.

Through research of histories, mythologies and cosmologies Hoyt’s eclectic oeuvre employs a plethora of epistemological materials such as guitar plectrums, police batons, drum sticks, burnt electric guitars, vinyl records. 

Generously supported by the City of Melbourne.