Rasheedah Phillips writes:

Dismantling The Master’s Clock: On Race, Space, And Time is a collection of essays that operate as a multimodal entity, with sound being one dimension. Embedded within the collection’s dimension of sound are sonograms that interact with the text’s concept of Black SpaceTimeMatters, where Black temporalities emerge as distinct modalities and relational spacetimes. In these spacetimes, Black communities and Black people intra-act with time, space and matter in ways that diverge from hegemonic Western scripts that segment time into distinctive past, present and future and segregate space. In fact, Black SpaceTimeMatters often defy conventional temporal and spatial categorisation altogether.

In quantum physics, superposition describes particles existing in multiple states simultaneously until observed. Similarly, Black temporal-spatial experiences position past, present and future as overlapping, interconnected dimensions, rather than discrete, linear points. This valuing of Black SpaceTimeMatters can guide us toward principles that confront systemic inequalities across historical, present and future timescapes.

In Chapter 6 of the book, I draw on a number of influences, including sound theory, quantum theory, and Black cultural theory, to discuss the ways that sound itself operates as a paradigm of unique and discrete events entangled in time, disrupting conventional notions of unilinear transmission. This approach to sound moves beyond the classical metaphysical views of what sound is and does, which relies on linearity and mechanical causality – frameworks rooted in Newtonian physics. Reconceptualising sound as interconnected events challenges Western tendencies to fragment reality into isolated categories (like past, present, and future), embracing instead a worldview that honours interconnectedness across all phenomena.

This understanding of sound as a carrier of complex information holds particular resonance in Black oral and sonic traditions. In contrast to the dominance of visual culture in modern Western European frameworks – where written words often become static symbols stripped of their dynamic nature – Black oral and sonic traditions preserve the fluidity, vitality, and relational nature of sound and its temporal multiplicity. This playlist operates within that tradition, offering a textured encounter with Black temporalities and the entangled spacetimes they inhabit.

The songs and sounds here are a mix of this and that – references to Black modes of time, space, memory, love, pain, longing, joy, things unknowable, unspeakable, unwordable, and mysterious. The creators of these songs, words and sounds – musicians, writers, singers, rappers – are all storytellers, and many, if not all, modern griots – those who practice an art of storytelling and timebinding passed back and forth through generations. When we experience the music (with our many sensory organs) we can connect with them in a multitude of nowness – the now of the music and the now of when the song was made and the spacetime the song is creating or reaching back or forward to. These are snatches of sounds and temporalities from our youths, from our futures, from our dreams, from our mindscapes, landscapes, timescapes, and communal-scapes.

Tracklist

Sun Ra “Door Of The Cosmos”
Moor Mother “Nighthawk Of Time (featuring BQF)”
Moor Mother “Umanzi”
Norman Connors “Twilight Zone”
Nicole Mitchell “Voudon Spacetime Kettle”
Georgia Ann Muldrow “Vital Transformation”
Parliament “Prologue”
Pharoah Sanders “Harvest Time”
Betty Carter “Some Other Time”
Burning Sphere “Jah See Know”
Bob Marley “Time Will Tell”
Carron Wheeler & Soul II Soul “Keep On Movin’”
J Dilla “Time: The Donut Of The Heart”
Irreversible Entanglements “Open The Gate”
Lonnie Holley “Part Of The Wonder”
Saul Williams “Horn Of The Clock-Bike”
Dwight Tribble “Peace”
Meshell Ndegeocello “Modern Time”
Moor Mother “Passing Of Time”
Nina Simone “22nd Century”
Irma Thompson “Time Is On My Side”

Dismantling The Master’s Clock: On Race, Space And Time by Rasheedah Phillips is published by AK Press on 28 January.

Black Quantum Futurism is an interdisciplinary creative practice between Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips that weaves quantum physics, Black temporalities, ritual, text and sound, creating counter-histories and Black quantum futures that challenge exclusionary, mainstream versions of history and future.

Rasheedah Phillips and Moor Mother’s Invisible Jukebox was featured in The Wire 437. That issue of the magazine is sold out, but Wire subscribers can read the article here in our online magazine library.