Image Credit: ORIGIN
Every so often a record arrives with an unusual instruction attached. Play it on this date, at this exact moment, wherever in the world you happen to be.
That is the plan behind the Origin Anthem, the centrepiece of ORIGIN, a worldwide music event taking place on 17 October. The track is scheduled for release ahead of the date so audiences already know it, and on the day itself it plays simultaneously across every time zone rather than rolling forward hour by hour the way New Year’s Eve does.
The anthem
Produced by multi-platinum producer Michael Gazzo, the record pulls contributors from more than 15 countries.
The biggest name on it is Rocky Dawuni, the four-time Grammy-nominated Ghanaian musician whose Afro Roots sound has taken him onto stages with Stevie Wonder, Peter Gabriel, Bono, Janelle Monáe and John Legend. CNN once named him one of Africa’s top 10 global stars, and in 2018 the United Nations designated him a Goodwill Ambassador for the Environment for Africa.
Kamal Sabri brings the sarangi, the bowed North Indian string instrument. South African vocalists Nomvula and Buhlebendalo appear alongside him, as does King Moore, the California-based child rapper who earned a standing ovation and four judges’ votes on America’s Got Talent.
The blend of ancestral instrumentation with contemporary production is the point rather than a novelty. Every artist involved was asked to contribute something rooted in where they are from.
TRESOR headlines South Africa
The flagship gathering, Origin South Africa, runs from 16 to 18 October at the Cradle of Humankind outside Johannesburg, and the bill leans heavily on South African talent.
Topping it is TRESOR, whose story is one of the more remarkable in contemporary African pop. Born in Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo and orphaned at 17, he arrived in Durban at 20 speaking no English and worked as a car guard by day and a security guard by night while writing songs. His debut album VII, seven years in the making, won Best Pop Album at the South African Music Awards in 2016, and he has since collected further SAMAs for The Beautiful Madness and Nostalgia.
Pop fans may know his work without knowing his name. He co-wrote and produced Fountains, the Tems collaboration on Drake’s Certified Lover Boy, after the OVO Sound team approached him off the back of Rumble in the Jungle, his album with Kabza De Small and DJ Maphorisa. He also contributed a cover of Nothing Else Matters to Metallica’s Blacklist compilation, and has toured with Seal.
Joining him are Bongeziwe Mabandla, the Xhosa-language singer-songwriter whose folk-electronic records have found audiences well beyond South Africa, along with Sibusile Xaba and Tubatsi Malo. The weekend combines live performance with talks and camping, and feeds a broadcast that will move between continents for several hours.
Image Credit: ORIGIN
The man behind it has dance floor history
Anyone who spent time in British club culture in the nineties may recognise the producer’s name. Chris Deckker founded Return to the Source, the club night and record label that brought sacred symbolism and meditation into dance music and toured across Europe, the United States, South America, South Africa and Asia. In 1992 he co-founded Medicine Drum, an act that layered tribal rhythms and live instrumentation over progressive electronic production well before that combination became fashionable.
In 1997 he launched Earthdance, a synchronised global dance event for peace that opened across 22 locations in 18 countries and eventually staged more than 700 events in 75 countries, every dance floor pausing at the same instant to play the same track. The office of the Dalai Lama recognised it as the most successful global event of its kind supporting the Tibetan people.
ORIGIN is that same idea, considerably scaled up.
What happens on the day
Before the anthem plays there is a multilingual recording made with Indigenous Elders representing 15 nations, each contributing in their own language. It was filmed on the Elders’ own lands by Deborah Anderson, the Leica ambassador who directed the award-winning documentary Women of the White Buffalo. The sequence begins in Aotearoa New Zealand and follows the sun west.
After that comes a moment where participants are invited to touch the ground and speak aloud the world they want to see. Then the anthem drops and, in theory, several million people move at once.
2,200 groups have registered gatherings so far, with public events confirmed across Australia, New Zealand, Italy, France, Argentina, Zimbabwe, South Africa and the United States. A Global Yoga Wave runs alongside for anyone who prefers their synchronised moment horizontal.
Image Credit: ORIGIN
How to take part
There is no ticket required unless you want to attend a specific event, and no travel involved unless you fancy it. The organisers are asking people to gather friends, press play at the appointed moment, and plant something through Seed the Dream, a campaign that logs plantings on a global map.
The phrase the organisers use for the shift they are going for is from doom to bloom. For a project built on a dance floor lineage stretching back three decades, that tracks. The people behind ORIGIN have always believed a good track played by enough people at the same time can do something a speech cannot.