Brothers
Jess Rowley
On an unknown day in 1890 brothers, James and George Bohee, recorded a banjo duet into the flute of an Edison phonograph, marking the earliest commercial documentation of Black musicians known to record. This wax cylinder, like many others, is lost to time.
Brothers engages with this absence of material and the fragile nature of oral histories, in particular those from historically marginalised people and cultures. Data fragments are uploaded to the only virtual archive dedicated to the duo (brothers.archive). The ephemera is then sent to collectives and individual musicians to interpret the archive into a musical arrangement. Encouraging them to engage with oral traditions that adapt to a non- linear call and response. At the end of their residency period the artists compositions add to multiplicities of interpretation animating the Bohee’s missing performance for the first time.