Listening to D’Angelo — recordings of parts 1 & 2

Amongst many other things, artist, DJ, composer and writer Edward George is known for his ongoing series of events and broadcasts – The Strangeness of Dub and The Strangeness of Jazz – and as one of the founders of the legendary Black Audio Film Collective.

His three-part investigation of D’Angelo’s landmark album Voodoo, which began at the Hyde Park Picture House in 2024, was commissioned by performance, possession + automation (pp+a), a three- year collaborative research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The second iteration took place at Fierce Festival in Birmingham in October 2024, and now the project concludes back at the cinema – an occasion that takes on greater poignancy following the sad demise of Michael Eugene “D’Angelo” Archer in October, at the age of 51.

While there’s no need to have experienced the first two parts of the project, recordings of each event can be heard below for your listening pleasure. Here, George unfolds the myriad meanings and messages locked within D’Angelo’s music, playing tracks from the album alongside music that traces the broader sonic landscape it conjures – including Marvin Gaye, Sly & The Family Stone, Fela Kuti, Public Enemy, Albert Ayler, Duke Ellington, Erykah Badu, Donny Hathaway, Prince, Roberta Flack, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Roots, and more.

performance, possession + automation (pp+a) is a collaborative research project led by Nicholas Ridout, Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), Dhanveer Singh Brar, University of Leeds and Orlagh Woods (creative producer), in partnership with Fierce Festival (Birmingham) and Transform Festival (Leeds) and with the collaboration of performingborders (London).

Concluding this month, the project brought together academics and artists to investigate, through the practice and study of performance: the resistant power of ‘spirit possession’, the contemporary rise of automation, and their entanglement with histories of colonial slavery. pp+a’s aim was to produce an understanding of contemporary performance that is properly attentive to the colonial and racialising dimensions of the history from which it has emerged.

Listening to D’Angelo, Hearing Voodoo – Part 3 takes place HPPH on Thu 11 Sep at 18:00. More details and tickets are available here.