Resonating Histories. A Lecture with Matana Roberts

This chapter delves into themes and practices that have structured Matana Roberts’ album and mix–media series Coin Coin (2011–today) over the years, especially in relation to the topics of history and memory, archiving, composing, and texturing. Starting from exploring Coin Coin Chapter Three: River Run Thee (2015) as a key case study, it focusses on: how the project has developed since the beginning and how the artist has approached each chapter; the compositional processes connected to collecting and working with archival materials, as well as to what they define as “panoramic sound quilting”; the practices of writing the visual sheet music conceived as specific medium; the conceptions and use of visual contents for the multimedia performances.