December 3, 2025, 6pm
Brooklyn NY 11238
USA
Join us at Bar Laika on Wednesday, December 3 from 6pm for the twenty-third edition of Playback with Satch Hoyt. The artist will play his new album Un-Muting released on traza, and sounds from his back catalogue.
The album Un-Muting documents Satch Hoyt’s ongoing project of un-muting as a form of ‘sonic restitution’, a performative challenge to the silent confinement of instruments and sounds within Western conservation standards, awakening and celebrating the hybridity, resilience and creativity of the Black diaspora. The starting point for the album was a recording session that took place at the British Museum in October 2023, where Hoyt responded to the instruments' physical and sonic presence, playing them without written scores. Recordings from that session were then developed further in Hoyt’s studio, layered with African and Western instruments from his own collection.
Satch Hoyt is a spiritualist, a believer in ritual and retention. A visual artist and a musician, his diverse and multifaceted body of work—whether sculpture, sound installation, painting, musical performance, or musical recording—is united in its investigation of the “Eternal Afro-Sonic Signifier” and its movement across and amid the cultures, peoples, places, and times of the African Diaspora. Those four evocative words (a term coined by Hoyt) refer to the “mnemonic network of sound” that was enslaved Africans’ “sole companion during the forced migration of the Middle Passage.” It was, and is, a hard-won somatic toolkit for remembering where you come from and who you are—and maybe, where you’re going—against all the many odds.
Of Jamaican-British descent, Hoyt was born in London and currently lives in Berlin. Having also spent time in New York, Paris, Mombasa, and Australia’s Northern Territory—all points on the many-sided and ever-expanding star that is the African Diaspora—he is an intimate observer of the sites of convergence where the Diaspora comes together to sing, shout, and be, reflecting itself to itself. Employing the shared toolkit to connect, express, and commiserate across centuries and oceans, Hoyt taps into aural and oral echoes as well as those retained in the historical and material record. Recent selected exhibitions include: Your Ears Later Will Know to Listen (Nottingham Contemporary, 2025); Un-Muting Sonic Restitutions (MARKK Museum Hamburg, 2024); Ten Thousand Suns (24th Biennale of Sydney, 2024) and Afro-Sonic Mapping (House of World Cultures, Berlin, 2019
Playback is a series of informal listening events curated by Kamran Sadeghi where record labels, musicians, composers, and producers feature recordings from their catalog, and premiere album pre-releases, archives, and other rarities.
For more information, contact laika [at] e-flux.com.
