Satellite 8 in collaboration with Blank Forms: Onyx Ashanti and Dee Diggs

Join us at Bar Laika for the eighth edition of Satellite in collaboration with Blank Forms, featuring Onyx Ashanti and Dee Diggs. This event will include a performative demonstration of Ashanti’s Sonocyb, followed by Q&A with Ashanti and a DJ set by Dee Diggs.

Onyx Ashanti is a musician, performer, programmer, and inventor of the Sonocyb, a continually evolving, malleable interface of prosthetic synthesizer controllers that Ashanti 3D prints at home and uses to articulate electronic sound in conjunction with bodily motion. Growing up playing jazz saxophone in rural Mississippi, Ashanti was swept up by rave culture in the 1990s and transitioned to playing wind controller, with which he collaborated with Marshall Jefferson and Soul II Soul, performing in nightclubs around the world. Ashanti’s creative curiosity led him to, first, develop the Beatjazz controller as a music-making device for hands and mouth, before studies of cybernetics and an epiphanic discovery of free jazz ushered in his current devotion to Sonocybernetics.

A neologism that for Ashanti represents an empowering turn away from the shackles of entertainment towards an ontology of becoming, Ashanti uses the construct of Sonocybernetics to feed sonic and technological questions into a network of perpetual self-programming. Calling himself a “patternist” after the work of Afrofuturist science-fiction writer Octavia Butler, Ashanti believes in the potential of granular sound to herald a new age of communication beyond the cumbersome limits of spoken language. Using the Sonocyb, Ashanti translates the gestural body language of his hands, feet, and head into fractal emissions of synthesized sound reminiscent, at times, of the more eccentric, privately released strains of late ’70s and early ’80s French musique concrète. But Ashanti doesn’t make records, preferring to document his daily experimentations, street performances, and sonified grocery shopping via his blog, social media, and YouTube.

Dee Diggs is a DJ and event organizer based in Brooklyn. Unapologetically black, queer and femme, she uses her DJ sets and influence to create a space for marginalized groups to express and organize themselves. Her non-linear style of mixing and the way she switches between genres playfully challenges the norms of genre DJs within electronic music. 

Diggs has a monthly radio show on Half Moon BK.

Free admission, RSVP encouraged and can be accessed here.

Satellite is a monthly experimental music series curated by Sanna Almajedi. This event is organized by Adrian Rew.

For more information, contact laika@e-flux.com.