“It is a work of Proto Persephone

Of the sea beneath the sea

The earth, the belly of the beastess

It is a shadowland

Find yourself reflected in the heart of light

Feel the power of transformational fire” 

- Nwando Ebizie

Following the release of her highly-anticipated debut album ‘The Swan’ (via Matthew Herbert’s label Accidental Records) multidisciplinary Afrofuturist artist Nwando Ebizie presents a new live performance - a work of speculative fiction and ritual exploration.

Carving out a bold new Afrofuturist imaginary, The Swan opens the gates to ritual cultures of the Black Atlantic. This genre-breaking album is a work of sonic fiction into the imagined world of a matriarchal community, unfolding like a time-bending ethnographic account of found sound and footage that is at once both ancient and futuristic. The project brings together Nwando’s left-field electronic experiments, cross-border musical influences, radical live art practices, and interests in Black Atlantic ritual cultures and speculative fiction. 

Delving through sonic visions of mythologies past and future, this immersive live experience takes the form of a performance lecture given by Kpakpando, a fictional anthropologist from another timeline. Through sacred dances and reenactment of sacred songs, Kpakpando revisits fragments of video, designs, songs, and writings of an earlier matrilineal culture. In exploring these artefacts The Swan is brought back to life. 

‘Suspended somewhere between reclaimed pop exotica and Afrofuturism, it’s perhaps with Ebizie, in the intimacy of a confined theatre, that the elusive claim to a new sort of live music-theatre hybrid gains ground.’  - The Wire