Each song on In Motion’s recently released Allegories album tells a story, one layered with deeper meaning. The 12-track project is the second recorded body of work by the outfit led by South African guitarist, composer and academic, Vuma Levin, alongside his Swiss collaborators Théo Duboule and Martin Perret. Regularly performing between South Africa and Western Europe, In Motion brings in various instrumentalists for recordings, performances and tours.
What might surprise the attentive listener is how its singular thematic focus can yield so many different perspectives. In a time when focus is measured in seconds, Allegories rewards patience — sustaining its concept for nearly an hour.
With Allegories, In Motion reimagines the renaissance period (a historical time period and not the Western scientific and cultural period) that is attributed as Europe’s transition to modernity. The band see the period as a precursor to the catastrophes of colonisation, the transatlantic slave trade and other atrocities beyond Europe.
The idea for the album was “more chance than anything else,” Levin says. In 2022, after performing his last show in Switzerland promoting his solo album, The Past is Unpredictable, Only the Future is Certain, he visited the apartment of Basel-based musicologist and promoter Weit Alt and Levin heard recordings of renaissance madrigals. “I consider myself a sound historiographer,” he explains “[Investigating] the renaissance sonically was intriguing to me.”
From that chance encounter, Levin and his collaborators began embedding reimagined madrigals within the cultural vernaculars of traditional Nguni music, contemporary jazz, and the Black Atlantic’s popular soundscape.
Anomie, the album’s opener encapsulates the creative journey. It’s drum beat laboured and warm, as though emanating from thick hide while distinctly renaissance guitar melodies and synths create a listless mood. Tides and Madrigal offer the most overt references to the project’s sonic and philosophical roots, while Seven and 14-6 are imbued with the clear phrasing and jazz-rock influences of Levin’s early career.
By composing Allegories, the artists forced an encounter between musical styles shaped by the renaissance zeitgeist, suggesting that, without one, the other may not exist in its current form. The link between West African traditional musics, and genres such as jazz and blues is well documented, but southern African music from the period was yet to be recorded and Western art music notation was still nascent. The musicians, therefore, worked less from scores than from imagination and cultural intuition.
“You have to rely on a principle called ‘textual continuity’,” Levin says.
“[The] belief that although cultures change, we can reconstitute how things may have sounded. Both are acts of imagination and reconstruction. To me, that is what history is — historiography, an act of storytelling [relying] on one dominant voice reconstructing a narrative, accentuating certain things and obscuring others. Invoking the past is always an imaginative act in the present. I wanted to compare that imagination from the vantage point of pre-colonial SA and early colonial renaissance times.”
At the album’s conception, Levin had been immersed in Hegel’s Lord and Bondsman allegory as part of his reading for his PhD at the University of Amsterdam. “In essence, the allegory is a dialectic of mutual recognition,” he explains. “But it’s a mutual recognition that has to go through this stage of struggle and conflict. As we know from ubuntu, self-consciousness is grounded in mutual recognition. So there is no I, there is only we. That is based on the notion that we delegate our sense of being recognised as a self-conscious thinking ‘I’ to someone else because we, in turn, recognise them as a self-conscious thinking ‘I’.”
Historically, Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” were used to justify slavery, colonisation and other atrocities and subjugations of peoples performed by Western European countries, in territories outside of the European subcontinent. In Allegories, Hegel’s idea is brought to an enlightened African conclusion which, because today it is touted as “ubuntu”, makes an argument for this principle being centuries ahead of his thinking. However the struggle for mutual recognition plays out in abstraction, Levin acknowledges that, “The act of mutual recognition has always been arrived at only out of a position of struggle. We see in SA a very similar history.”
The subject matter of Allegories is neither light nor easily digestible for most of the SA and Swiss listening audiences. The SA contemporary jazz community and circuit, however, provided Levin and his In Motion collaborators the opportunity to dissect important historical and philosophical topics, the product of these processes necessarily complex but fulfilling and enriching.
Speaking about the tour promoting the album in SA, which featured renowned percussionist Gontse Makhene, Levin says “In terms of the turnout, certain places we had sold out audiences, certain places we had less people. But it was always very receptive audiences, to the types of things we are trying to do. I think with this type of music that we make, co-creation is very important. Without audience participation, that was present, so all good.”
