MAKESHIFT NOISE-MAKING: BLACK PERIPHERAL MUSICAL TECHNOLOGIES AS POLITICAL RESISTANCE

Abstract

This paper aims to discuss how musical technologies in Black and peripheral contexts operate as producers of resistance and knowledge. This dynamic is consolidated through the appropriation of musical instruments, sound devices, and various equipment that can become vehicles for music production. Such materiality enables experimentation and the reinvention of other musical horizons, creating new aesthetics that can be understood through the notion of gambiarras as a critical category (Tragtenberg et al., 2021). Based on this, we analyze examples of how music-making in the peripheries of Belo Horizonte, within the musical genres and cultures of funk and hip-hop, subverts the logic of restricted access caused by social inequalities. By reordering the logic of absences into means of production and facilitation of music-making, these practices create new ways of producing music and expand understandings of artistic creation. Thus, we aim to approach musical production as a mode of resistance through the technological appropriation that these genres, in particular, have been enacting for at least the past decade in the capital of Minas Gerais.