Norman W. Long - Scenes of Contestation...And the Expanded
In an interview with SHOWstudio, the legendary video artist Arthur Jafa described dub structures as something that "makes you hyper aware of all the things that are no longer there. In other words, it makes the silence and the emptiness surrounding that single instrument really prominent. So on a psychoanalytical level, I think, in the context of Black people in the Americas, what the dub structure is about is about loss and missing," he posited. "There's a kind of rupture, a loss, everything piles out, and then there's a kind of wish fulfillment where it all gets piled back in, so in the music what you see getting played out is not just a rupture but a kind of repair of that emptiness and that absence."
Over the course of nearly 30 years, sound artist Norman W. Long has developed that structure of rupture and regeneration into one of the most singular sonic practices in experimental music. His work reflects an understanding of sound that is every bit as informed by King Tubby and Augustus Pablo as it is by Annea Lockwood and Pauline Oliveros. Though dub music emerged from the sound-systems and cheap audio equipment of Jamaica's Black working class, faraway from the lavish and cutting edge technology of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, the music embodied the wavelength of natural and electroacoustic sound and reoriented the ear of its listeners in a way that only the greatest, most forward-thinking experimental music can.
However, the closed-off world of experimental electronic academia has historically paid little mind to the ways in which dub music (and hip-hop, another Black working class artform) have contributed to this legacy, despite being every bit as centered around the radical manipulation of sound as Luc Ferrari and Pierre Schaeffer. Anyone who listens to Long's music should instantly be able to recognize how much his work stands head and shoulders above the legions of ambient musicians spinning the same old field recordings of water and birdsong into dippy treacle. In a world where so much sound art feels like it was conceptualized after the artist's statement was written, Long's approach to sound and texture, which is heavily informed by a deep historical sense of Black music and ecology, has always made him something of a loner within the greater experimental music sphere. Still, within his small corner of that world, Long has been able to assemble one of the most rich and rewarding discographies in contemporary music, entirely on his own terms.
His latest project, Scenes of Contestation...And the Expanded, was born out of the tribulations of Long's experiences in the Bay Area, where he studied art and sculpture for years before moving into sound. As the home of Mills College and its groundbreaking Center for Contemporary Music, Oakland has long been a bastion of creative, forward-thinking music. However, by the 2000s, the Bay Area had already started to become the unaffordable Silicon Valley-tainted shithole it is today, and even the historically Black working class city of Oakland felt the brunt of pencil-pushing transplants and skyrocketing rent.
Scene of Contestation begins in the year 2000, with work created in Long's apartment as the ground shifted around him in surrounding Oakland, and covers material up to 2023, expanding its horizons to recordings from a ranch in Woodside, CA and the Outdoor Desert Art Museum of the groundbreaking assemblage artist Noah Purifoy. Purifoy, an artist who achieved renown for sculptural works created out of the wreckage of the Watts Riots, in many ways embodies the dub structure of rupture and regeneration Jafa was referring to, as does Long's work. The Scenes of Contestation could encompass the mass uprooting of gentrification, the environmental destruction brought on by the sociopathic desire for wealth and extraction in the name of "innovation," and the fascistic ideology that emerges in its wake. But the Expanded reminds us that, as Sun Ra might have put it, the omnipresence of mass death and indifference to human suffering may be the reality, but it is not the only reality. Beneath the soil lies ever-evolving lifeforms and ever-shifting landscapes, one that presents infinite possibilities of change and liberation, a reality every bit as tangible as the stalemate we are currently living through. All we have to do is listen for it.
Written by Levi Dayan, 2025
This new album is a journey from the personal and contested space of my apartment in Oakland, California, during the dot-com boom, and the housing crisis brought on by the gentrification of the early 2000s. From San Francisco, we expand to the refuge of a ranch in Woodside, California, and the desert garden of Noah Purifoy, where we are expanding to the self and the alter-destiny. The recordings explore the different ways we encounter and experience various forms of contestation, one where our presence contests a space, another where our position in that space is challenged, and how climate change affects the space we inhabit. Additionally, we explore how we are creative in the spaces we occupy, record, and remember as an act of contestation.
Norman W. Long - electronics
Recorded in Oakland, San Francisco, Woodside, and Yucca Valley, California, 2000-2023.
Tracks 3 and 4 mixed at Dharma Sound, Landers, CA.
Mix recorded by Harout Gulesserian.
Mastered by Bill Harris.
Thanks to the Djerassi Artist Residency, Yucca Valley Material Lab, Dharma Sound Studio, and 3Arts
In an interview with SHOWstudio, the legendary video artist Arthur Jafa described dub structures as something that "makes you hyper aware of all the things that are no longer there. In other words, it makes the silence and the emptiness surrounding that single instrument really prominent. So on a psychoanalytical level, I think, in the context of Black people in the Americas, what the dub structure is about is about loss and missing," he posited. "There's a kind of rupture, a loss, everything piles out, and then there's a kind of wish fulfillment where it all gets piled back in, so in the music what you see getting played out is not just a rupture but a kind of repair of that emptiness and that absence."
Over the course of nearly 30 years, sound artist Norman W. Long has developed that structure of rupture and regeneration into one of the most singular sonic practices in experimental music. His work reflects an understanding of sound that is every bit as informed by King Tubby and Augustus Pablo as it is by Annea Lockwood and Pauline Oliveros. Though dub music emerged from the sound-systems and cheap audio equipment of Jamaica's Black working class, faraway from the lavish and cutting edge technology of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, the music embodied the wavelength of natural and electroacoustic sound and reoriented the ear of its listeners in a way that only the greatest, most forward-thinking experimental music can.
However, the closed-off world of experimental electronic academia has historically paid little mind to the ways in which dub music (and hip-hop, another Black working class artform) have contributed to this legacy, despite being every bit as centered around the radical manipulation of sound as Luc Ferrari and Pierre Schaeffer. Anyone who listens to Long's music should instantly be able to recognize how much his work stands head and shoulders above the legions of ambient musicians spinning the same old field recordings of water and birdsong into dippy treacle. In a world where so much sound art feels like it was conceptualized after the artist's statement was written, Long's approach to sound and texture, which is heavily informed by a deep historical sense of Black music and ecology, has always made him something of a loner within the greater experimental music sphere. Still, within his small corner of that world, Long has been able to assemble one of the most rich and rewarding discographies in contemporary music, entirely on his own terms.
His latest project, Scenes of Contestation...And the Expanded, was born out of the tribulations of Long's experiences in the Bay Area, where he studied art and sculpture for years before moving into sound. As the home of Mills College and its groundbreaking Center for Contemporary Music, Oakland has long been a bastion of creative, forward-thinking music. However, by the 2000s, the Bay Area had already started to become the unaffordable Silicon Valley-tainted shithole it is today, and even the historically Black working class city of Oakland felt the brunt of pencil-pushing transplants and skyrocketing rent.
Scene of Contestation begins in the year 2000, with work created in Long's apartment as the ground shifted around him in surrounding Oakland, and covers material up to 2023, expanding its horizons to recordings from a ranch in Woodside, CA and the Outdoor Desert Art Museum of the groundbreaking assemblage artist Noah Purifoy. Purifoy, an artist who achieved renown for sculptural works created out of the wreckage of the Watts Riots, in many ways embodies the dub structure of rupture and regeneration Jafa was referring to, as does Long's work. The Scenes of Contestation could encompass the mass uprooting of gentrification, the environmental destruction brought on by the sociopathic desire for wealth and extraction in the name of "innovation," and the fascistic ideology that emerges in its wake. But the Expanded reminds us that, as Sun Ra might have put it, the omnipresence of mass death and indifference to human suffering may be the reality, but it is not the only reality. Beneath the soil lies ever-evolving lifeforms and ever-shifting landscapes, one that presents infinite possibilities of change and liberation, a reality every bit as tangible as the stalemate we are currently living through. All we have to do is listen for it.
Written by Levi Dayan, 2025
This new album is a journey from the personal and contested space of my apartment in Oakland, California, during the dot-com boom, and the housing crisis brought on by the gentrification of the early 2000s. From San Francisco, we expand to the refuge of a ranch in Woodside, California, and the desert garden of Noah Purifoy, where we are expanding to the self and the alter-destiny. The recordings explore the different ways we encounter and experience various forms of contestation, one where our presence contests a space, another where our position in that space is challenged, and how climate change affects the space we inhabit. Additionally, we explore how we are creative in the spaces we occupy, record, and remember as an act of contestation.
Norman W. Long - electronics
Recorded in Oakland, San Francisco, Woodside, and Yucca Valley, California, 2000-2023.
Tracks 3 and 4 mixed at Dharma Sound, Landers, CA.
Mix recorded by Harout Gulesserian.
Mastered by Bill Harris.
Thanks to the Djerassi Artist Residency, Yucca Valley Material Lab, Dharma Sound Studio, and 3Arts