“Forget the rest ...”: Notes on Magnetic Tape and Other Antiquated Media as Archives of Afro-Atlantic Liturgy

The virtuosic complexity of Afro-Cuban orisha music has led scholars and artists to enshrine it as a “classical” tradition, and it has become one of most iconic and closely-studied sacred music traditions of the historical Afro-Atlantic. This essay traces the legacies of several analog-era multimedia technologies in orisha music traditions: reel-to-reel and cassette tapes; limited edition and out-of-print books and phonograph discs; ephemeral texts such as album liner notes; and photographic negatives, prints, and slides. The tapes and photos — along with a vast body of informal, unpublished, and out-of-print documents of Afro-Cuban orisha liturgy — are seldom archived by cultural insti­tutions, effectively floating in time and space on archaic media. Despite representing some of the most robust historical documents of a liturgical tradition, they hover at the edge of obscurity, antiquated in both their content and media. Drawn from a larger study of orisha music, the essay’s handful of case studies juxtapose diverse sources, including unpublished archival materials. The case studies offer unprecedented context for tape recordings of orisha music and, by extension, novel ways to study a marginal, mediated body of liturgy. The case studies include: historical and cultural context for the recordings; composite multimedia portraits of several individual priest-artists; analyses of musical, linguistic, and technical details; a primer on Afro-Cuban liturgical forms (moyuba, oro, and tratado); and reflections on novel, dynamic historical relationships between media technologies and liturgical traditions. Emphasizing the primary importance of the sound recordings and some of the ways “speak for themselves” (or not), snapshots of the fluid, blurry margins between art, folklore, and ritual.