My many encounters with Latasha Nevada Diggs, hanging in my Berlin studio to contemplate her Ebonic morphs into Edo-period Japanese and multi-patois linguistics.
It all leads to Africa. We’re in this triangle space, right, and each point has its individual vocab, she said.
Yeah, twenty years on, me and my good friend Latasha are still discussing and experimenting with the binary interweave of the word and sonics. We started our friendship back in 2001 as band mates in Burnt Sugar, the Arkestra Chamber. That was in NYC on the eve of 9/11. She was one of the first vocalists I experienced all looped out in a loop station, plus the other pedals she was tweaking as she sung, screamed, cried and sermonized in the whirl of Butch Morris-esque conduction (real-time composition) loosely sketched from the baton of Greg “Ironman” Tate.
Yeah, those were the early days of Burnt Sugar’s unabashed forays into terrains of improvised non-predictability, and those are the days I count as my most erudite and mind-bending, sans drugs. Sonic moments where we fifteen musicians were lifting each other as a melded mass into trodden and untrod spaces – quite often a Miles-meets-Maggot Brain space with a tinge of Barok and Karnatic raga to aptly glide into a dark groid urban bashment beat.
That encapsulates the situation in which I met my good friend Latasha Nevada Diggs, so please enjoy Part 1 of our interview.
Afro-Sonic Mapping 