Indigenous Resistance is a revolutionary musical collective built on collaboration — bringing together indigenous cultures from jungles, favelas and barrios with producers and musicians working in studios and on laptops across the industrialised world. Their releases are entirely self-funded and autonomous, achieved through barter, commitment and co-operation rather than conventional music industry infrastructure.
IR35, their latest release, traces its origins to the making of IR33 — a dub documentary and graffiti experience filmed in Korogocho, one of Nairobi’s largest slums. Inspired by what they found there, the IR collective created a mural whose making was documented by a local video crew. In the editing room of African Aftermath Media, overlaying dub sounds to footage of Kenyan graffiti artists at work, the crew began splicing together edits of previously released tracks featuring Jamaican artists Sawandi and Jah9, with dub mixing by Delroy ‘Fatta’ Pottinger. The results formed the basis of a new soundtrack — and then something more.
Revisiting those tracks, the collective found new ways to foreground Sawandi’s ethereal keyboards and the soaring vocals of Jah9. The material’s subject matter — the brutal murder of Galdino, a Brazilian Pataxo Indian, and the subsequent silence that fell over the Brazilian media — demanded a fresh retelling. IR35 is the result: a work that refuses to let that silence stand.
The name IR also stands for Indigenous Reality — a reminder that what this collective makes is not manufactured imagery but an honest account of indigenous life as it is actually lived.
Further images and video related to the release are available on the IR Dub Reality blog at dubreality.wordpress.com.
