CULTURE
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Prairie Pop
Color Balance
Heavy Color’s work with Congolese musicians for 2018’s River Passage transformed their worldview. BY KEMBREW MCLEOD
H
eavy Color, a beat-driven psychedelic music duo founded by Ben Cohen and Sam Woldenberg, makes “world music” by way of Toledo, Ohio. These composer-producers are very careful to distance themselves from that problematic term—world music often treats music made by people outside of a European or American context as exotic culture ripe for plundering. There’s a long history of Western musicians mining ethnographic recordings and sampling them within popular music, the first prominent example being the self-titled 1992 multi-platinum album by Deep Forest. This French duo sourced material from field recordings of music from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and elsewhere, but all of the profits flowed to the white European musicians and their corporate record label, a classic example of cultural appropriation. “If you look at the way creative rights of traditional music have been assigned,” Cohen said via email, “the ownership of music deemed indigenous defaults to the person it was recorded by, in effect treating entire cultures’ music in the same way we treated the exploration and eventual occupation of this continent.” Cohen has always been inspired by sample-based music, and Heavy Color started out as an outlet to release futurist instrumental hip hop and electronic music. He met his longtime musical partner Woldenberg during first period on their first day of high school in Toledo, and these two white kids clicked immediately. “We used to skip study hall to talk about our future band,” he said. “We have been collaborating in different bands ever since— going on 20 years of making weird music together.” They’ve both lived in different places throughout the country since graduating, from Hawaii to New York City, but for them there is something special about the Midwest. Living in Toledo gives them the time and space to manifest their creative projects,
Witching Hour Festival Oct. 30-31 witchinghourfestival.com Courtesy of Heavy Color
Cohen observed, and the city’s cultural institutions are accessible to the local creative community in ways that would be more challenging in major metropolitan areas. “The music and cultural scenes that we identify with are uniquely tied to the Great Lakes,” he said. “There is a holistic intersec-
sampling music from various archival sources, though they had the benefit of starting from a more historically informed and socially conscious understanding of social power dynamics than, say, Deep Forest. “Still, I wouldn’t say that we totally did avoid those pitfalls,” Cohen noted. “I think that being conscious of appropriation requires a lifetime commitment to learning and “I THINK THAT BEING CONSCIOUS OF updating your understanding.” With this in mind, they APPROPRIATION REQUIRES A LIFETIME recorded their 2018 album COMMITMENT TO LEARNING AND River Passage in a deeply UPDATING YOUR UNDERSTANDING.” collaborative fashion with musicians from Eastern Congo. They were approached by Seth Bernard, founder of tion of environmental activism, social justice Earthwork Music and artistic director for the and organic community relationships at the Musical Ambassadorship program at On the foundation for many of the circles we run in.” Ground, a Michigan nonprofit that seeks to A record collector for years, Cohen’s sonic create sustainable relationships in farming explorations have helped him connect the communities around the world. dots between a wide range of music. Heavy Heavy Color worked with poet and educaColor’s first album, 2014’s Arise Ye Spiritual tor Akili Jackson as they spent time in variMachine, drew on the hip-hop tradition of ous villages along Lake Kivu and in Bukavu,
