"The Drums of Occupy" reconsiders the noisy intervention into democratic politics performed by ad hoc assemblages of drummers at various Occupy camps throughout the Fall of 2011. Constructed out of amateur archival footage buried deep in the digital debris of YouTube, these recordings capture the improvised, spontaneous music of the drum circles, as well as speeches by political and cultural figures (Angela Davis, David Harvey, Tom Morello, Danny Glover) and other observations shared by anonymous participants.
The drum circles, hardly remembered today, were a center of controversy for encampments at the time and a significant source of conflict, debate and police scrutiny. The drums were a keynote of the Occupy soundscape, hovering above and behind nearly any other sonic practice, disrupting teach-ins, speeches and general assemblies. Yet the drums also provided an anti-political node of entry for people committed to Occupy’s reclamation of public space and democratic life yet ambivalent at best to the mostly antiphonal and dialogical approach of much of the movement. The drum circle was and is an alternative model for direct democracy.
"The Drums of Occupy" takes its inspiration from the ethnographic field recordings developed by phonographers, folklorists and anthropologists intent on documenting vernacular musicking as it was being transformed and disappeared by the combined forces of colonialism, urbanization, commercial media consolidation and cultural homogenization. Even as our political landscape has been utterly transformed in the ten years since Occupy Wall Street (and in many ways because of Occupy) the legacy of Occupy and decentralized protest movements like it (BLM, Idle No More, Youth Strike for Climate) is often left to the mercy of "the cloud." The field recordings curated, compiled and mixed here are an attempt to salvage the spirit of this important event from dead web domains, abandoned blogs, and algorithmic neglect.
The music is made available her as freely as it was offered in the space of the Occupy camps, but if you choose to purchase your download proceeds will go to Housing Justice For All, a "statewide movement of tenants and homeless New Yorkers united in our fight for housing as a human right."
housingjusticeforall.org
The research that influenced the creation of this album has inspired an essay published by Folklife Magazine, also called "The Drums of Occupy".
folklife.si.edu/magazine/occupy-movement-drum-circles
Thanks to Elisa Hough, Jonathan Williger, and Amalia Cordova at Folklife; to Eric Porter; and to Mark Nash, Isaac Julian and my colleagues in the Isaac Julian Lab for their support and input throughout the creation of this work.
released September 17, 2021
Edited & compiled by Gabriel Saloman Mindel