Triangular Trade by Seth Cooke

“Diasporic lives are characterised by an absence of ruins. There are no monuments that even as ruins attest to your existence, of your passing through a space. This then means that the intangibles, be they sound or words, become necessary building blocks. Lives that are not legitimised in the official monument can then be given a certain kind of legitimacy.”
John Akomfrah, Sound and Music interview

“How do people migrate from being human beings to cockroaches? What do you have to forget? Amnesia is a constant sea.”
John Akomfrah, TateShots interview

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«TRIANGULAR TRADE» takes its name from the system of trading between three ports or regions, the most notorious example of which was the transatlantic slave trade. Commissioned by the Arnolfini to thematically accompany John Akomfrah’s 2015 film, ‘Vertigo Sea’ – a film that explores oceanic migration, slavery and exploitation – Cooke conceived the composition to address the significance of situating the film’s UK premiere in Bristol, a city that has yet to reconcile its current consciousness with its participation in the slave-based Atlantic economy. Since that initial installation, Cooke has continued to rework, refine, and add to the material. The piece triangulates themes of slavery, migration, and climate change—from West Africa, the Americas, and England; to Liverpool, London, and Bristol; to local ambivalence toward Edward Colston, Bristol’s historic benefactor, whose wealth was built, in large part, upon the transatlantic slave trade.

Each copy of «TRIANGULAR TRADE» included an archival CDr containing a single 45-minute sound recording; eight text-based collages created by Cooke that provide context, raise further questions, and connect the broader thematic implications of the work; and a sheet providing information on the source material, instrumentation, and recording process. The text collages are attached as a pdf to anyone purchasing this release from Bandcamp. An hour-long hip hop mixtape also accompanies the work, available here on Bandcamp as a separate stream.

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Reviews...

"Seth Cooke’s ‘Triangular Trade’ is a compelling examination of colonialism, slavery, migration, place and climate change, in which sound, image and text are intertwined to engrossing and sometimes confounding effect. Initially commissioned as a sonic accompaniment to John Akomfrah’s video work ‘Vertigo Sea’ in 2016, Cooke expanded ‘Triangular Trade’ for its physical release on the excellent Suppedaneum label, augmenting his original composition with a set of text collages and a specially-created mixtape available online. The title is a reference to the economic infrastructure enabling the transatlantic slave trade between the 15th and 19th centuries, and Cooke’s work is a steady unpicking of the post-colonial delusions around this tragedy that still blinker the British psyche. The UK was a key hub for a network that reached from West Africa to the Americas and across the Atlantic, one which provided essential economic fuel for British colonial power even as it displaced and killed millions of African people, an upheaval whose results are still felt today. ‘Triangular Trade’ gains additional power by homing in on Bristol – Cooke’s base and the home of the Arnolfini gallery, who first commissioned this piece – as a city that benefited from slavery while repressing the grim reality of its complicity in that activity. Cooke’s full-spectrum approach results in an artwork that is rich and detailed, but one which yields its secrets only gradually. The methodology is considered and non-literal: his composition, utilizing shells sourced from Ghanaian beaches, reconstituted samples and Cooke’s trademark no-input field recording, is abstract and open. The textual interventions add layers of meaning without resorting to mere explication, and the mixtape reinserts black diasporic voices into the story. But that’s just the start. Within this trio of formats, there are further layers of significance – the triangle, in particular, is an organizing principle throughout, enabling Cooke to create a hermetic web of allusion in which even the smallest component has a specific role to play. Seen this way, ‘Triangular Trade’ is at once a self-enclosed system and an edgeless meditation whose many strands merge seamlessly into the complex weave of history. Yet there are plenty of moments of delight, too. Cooke’s eight collages have a fanzine obsessive’s zing in their pile-on of Bristolian local history, news articles and snippets of ruffneck chat. The mixtape is great, cutting bumpy golden-age flow against Manc chancers and splifftastic West Country rumbles. At the risk of privileging one element in an intricate net, it is Cooke’s sound-art composition that casts the most profound spell. The opening chorale of bowed shells is a cascade of plaintive and fragile whines, part-prayer, part-lament. Its still, stark power transports us from our everyday bustle into an alternative temporality, one that’s intent on creating an ahistorical sound world while foregrounding the political implications of sound-making. The piece’s final stretch, in contrast, pulls us back into the world, slowly reverting a sample of Mahavishnu Orchestra’s ‘Planetary Citizen’ from a gleaming drone into the distinctive shriek that provides the engine for Massive Attack’s ‘Unfinished Sympathy’. While Cooke’s method for reanimating the fragment is technically intricate and thematically precise, the slow-motion epiphany it delivers is pure rave joy. My experience of circling around ‘Triangular Trade’ these past few months is, in some ways, similar to that of encountering ‘Vertigo Sea’ or other of Akomfrah’s multi-channel video works for the first time. Cooke and Akomfrah’s pieces share common preoccupations – migration, colonial history, climate change – but, more importantly, both require an acceptance of the impossibility of processing them in a single instance. Just as you can’t watch the multiple screens of ‘Vertigo Sea’ at the same time without missing something, the onion-like layers of ‘Triangular Trade’ resist easy assimilation. And, although you could spend a considerable amount of time listing out the different interacting elements of ‘Triangular Trade’, the synergistic pulse that arises from these components working in concert would still evade articulation. (In any case, Cooke does a pretty amazing job of laying it all out in this interview. ) Like all superior works of art, ‘Triangular Trade’ revels in its plenitude even at its most spare and tragic moments. It’s not so much haunted by migratory ghosts – both historic and contemporary – as marking out a space within which these voices can be acknowledged and remembered. As such, it is both subtle and revelatory." We Need No Swords

"Bristol sound-artist Seth Cooke is no stranger to us, having been well represented on releases from LF Records and his own label Every Contact Leaves A Trace. Most of these have been process-based noise experiments, but often involved subtle manipulations of field recordings and percussion instruments, and what characterises his work for me is a sense of tough-mindedness, each sonic statement insisting on its own very challenging presence in the world. I’m encountering all of this, and further aspects of Cooke’s personality and ideas, on Triangular Trade (SUPPEDANEUM No. 15), a quite exceptional art statement released in America by Joseph Clayton Mills on his Suppedaneum Label. In the package is a CDR of puzzling and hard-to-process sound art, and several black-and-white photo prints covered with collages, texts, hints, clues, and jottings. The whole thing is intended as an attack on institutionalised racism, and from the press release which arrived with the package, I’m slowly putting together the detailed back-story putting it all in context. I think it starts out with a film called Vertigo Sea, made in 2015 by the film-maker John Akomfrah. Akomfrah is an important UK film-maker who has been active since the early 1980s when he was a founder member of the Black Audio Film Collective, whose aim was to examine and articulate Black British identify using film, sound, and media; Handsworth Songs, which I have never seen, was a documentary about racial tensions in the UK and one of the first fruits of the Collective. Vertigo Sea, which I have also never seen, is a documentary about migration and a history of the transatlantic slave trade, directly attacking the exploitation of slave labour. (Anti-colonialism is deep in Akomfrah’s DNA.) Akomfrah had his film shown at the Venice Biennale in 2015, and later that year the Arnolfini gallery elected to exhibit the work. It’s a three-screen presentation and may shade into an art installation in some way; the Arnolfini does at least have some history as a repository of avant-garde films (I visited there myself in 1982 to avail myself of their library of structural-materialist cinema, for my Fine Art BA). For reasons that aren’t clear to me, the Arnolfini wanted a new soundtrack / score to the film, and asked Seth Cooke to provide one. Cooke soon made clear his objections to this “fundamentally bad idea”. Quite apart from the fact that Akomfrah is already a respected film-maker who certainly has no need of interference in his work nor the mechanics of its presentation, Cooke felt strongly that he would be “yet another white guy erasing a black guy’s work”, and was being pushed into this impossible position. But then he opened up the question even wider, to include the city of Bristol itself, and its own implication as an important historic port in the slave trade. Cooke’s view is that Bristol has never faced up to this inconvenient truth about its own history, and source of its wealth. Evidently incensed by the whole thing, he made the record Triangular Trade, an oblique yet penetrating critique of all the above issues, laced with anti-colonial sentiment; for good measure, he took on the Colston Hall, another Bristol institution whose hands are dirty with “imperialist culpability”. These strong themes are expressed in the most roundabout way imaginable. Cooke starts out with a triangular structure for his compositional approach, to reference the triangular system of the slave trade; he created three site-specific recordings in Pero’s Bridge, positioned from three different locations, and these are combined with other elements, all arriving in threes – “three resonance recordings, three borrowed recordings, three instrumental parts, three no-input field recordings…” Even the diagram by which this “compositional shorthand” is given form is arranged in a triangular shape, like a piece of concrete poetry; there it is printed on one of the handouts. The words by themselves seems innocent enough on this graphical score, yet already there’s a sense of accusation lurking behind every stark word, a sense of factual truth which can’t be ignored. I’ve heard this quality in Cooke’s work before; my opinion on 2012’s Pneuma, for instance, is that it “just hangs in the air like an unyielding, brutal, fact”. Play the CD to hear the 45-minute suite of sounds created by the above method, including much minimal droning and scraping sometimes interrupted by harsh process noise. The tension is palpable; if nothing else Cooke has found a way to sublimate his evident anger at what he perceives as institutionalised racism. But the work also has a terrifying beauty; whether by default or design, it ends up sounding like crashing waves, in places, a stormy sea effect. And there is – I think – a short spoken-word sample from the Vertigo Sea film, which not only refers to the whole affair that started this project, but also gives the listener a contextual clue by which to navigate as they listen. Come to that we don’t lack for contextual clues, since as indicated Cooke has packaged this release with numerous A4-sized handouts printed in black and white, each a dense textual-image collage laden with fragmented references to Bristol and its role in the slave trade. This is where he gives both barrels to Colston Hall and its history, undermining any sense of civic pride Bristol may have in its history. Even the triangle motif resurfaces on one of these handouts, given Cooke’s free-spirited approach to cutting up lines of text and pasting them on the page. I feel like I’m back in the glory days of 1970s conceptual art, when artists like Richard Long issued compacted hard-to-decipher statements in the form of stark, black and white photos, maps, diagrams, and annotations. I should think that 30 mins spent in the company of Cooke’s enveloped inclusions – like an avant-garde Jackdaw, if anyone is old enough to remember those educational aids packaged in card wallets – would be sufficient to activate the enquiring mind in the direction of decoding the meaning of this work. I might also want to note Cooke’s fleeting references to two instance of studio technique which I don’t fully understand, but they sound fascinating – one of them is the “erased structure” that he applied to the John Akomfrah sample, and the other is his treatment of a sample from a Mahavishnu Orchestra record, which has been “convolved 184 times”. I have no idea what either one means, but they both seem like they ought to be brilliant. This is another fine work from Seth Cooke, one which succeeds in conveying a lot of ideas and information through simple minimalist means and much compression of thought." The Sound Projector

"If it hasn’t been done already, someone should write an article on Joseph Clayton Mills’ label, Suppedaneum. There are seventeen releases now, all of them at the least very interesting, a number of them–like the current item–pretty great. The focus of the label has been on scores and other accompanying material, often given at least equal weight to the audio portion of the release and Cooke’s ‘Triangular Trade’ is no exception. It arrives with a “title page”, more or less, and eight 8 1/2″ x 11″ laminated pages containing words and images referring to the trade of its title, a system which transported slaves and goods between Europe, the Caribbean and West Africa from the 16th through 19th centuries with repercussions (not to mention extensions) felt and experienced to this day. Bristol, where Cooke resides, was the focal port of the English slave trade and the first page of the release centers the image of a plaque recording the fact, surrounded by related statuary and inscriptions, excerpts of text from London Posse’s ‘Gangster Chronicle’ and apparent news items concerning lack of public funds for Hartcliffe, a very poor section of Bristol. Subsequent pages–they’re not numbered and presumably the order doesn’t matter–include historical documents revolving around the slave trade, news clippings concerning the legacy of slave trader Edward Colston who seems to still be regarded as an honored father of the city (Colston Hall being, I take it, the main music hall in Bristol), a portion of an article on the effects of climate change in the Fertile Crescent and much more. These are presented in an often fragmentary manner, roughly scissored from printed documents, rarely entire, offering a kind of dizzying picture, perhaps reflecting the confusion and lack of clarity in the thinking of the local citizens about their city’s role in their history and, more importantly, the benefits the white citizens have reaped and continue to reap as a result of the slaving practices of their ancestors. Cooke’s sound sources on the disc include field recordings from three points near Pero’s Bridge in Bristol (as well as from London and Liverpool docks), Ghanaian shells, djembe-feedback and more including (not that I could pick it up) a bit of Mahavishnu Orchestra’s ‘Planetary Citizen’ “convoluted 184 times”. It’s one long piece, about 46 minutes, but very wide-ranging. It begins with overlaid harsh, scraping/ringing tones, sometimes buttressed by (apparent) dockside recordings and distorted speech–desolate, sorrowful and keening. This section continues until about 15 minutes in, when the heavens open up in storm and we hear the words of John Newton from his ‘Thoughts Upon the African Slave Trade’, published in 1788 (not sure of the source here, possibly a television program titled, ‘The Fight Against Slavery’). The sounds subside, once again nautical in nature: clanking, echoey metals, churned water. These soon cohere into a relatively pure tone, those echoes still in the background, that subtly pulsates, until an explosion knocks everything apart, a wave overturning a boat, perhaps. The feeling of depth, of largeness is quite strong, Cooke, developing a convincing, if abstract, panorama of not merely a scene, but an expanse of time and history. That complex, sine-like tone returns, more insistent and darker, spiraling and drilling holes in one’s eardrums. Very gradually and in harrowing fashion, this tone mutates into a human-sounding cry, a kind of ghostly wail from the bowels of some cavernous depths, a piercing, accusatory call from Bristol’s past to the unlistening, willfully ignorant present. A powerful, grippingly realized work that should be widely considered." Just Outside

filling noise with space

artefacts and artifice

live performances involving feedback & resonance

occasional drums & electronics

other projects:
Dominic Lash & Seth Cooke (duo)
Every Contact Leaves a Trace (label)

past projects:
Hunting Lodge
Defibrillators
Bang the Bore

full details via google drive link below

Seth Cooke
Every Contact Leaves a Trace
Twitter
discogs.com
drive.google.com