Homing: Tremble Borders | Archive Of Belonging & Alphabet Shadow

Tremble Borders is a mixtape by Alphabet Shadow. It takes a deep dive into the musical effect of tremolo, tracing this through types of music that share Indigenous and slave ancestry. Cumbia, for example, borrows its rhythm both from the riding of horses but also from the kind of shuffle dance that shackled legs would only permit. Tremolo is the musical equivalent of trembling, of an excess of emotion, of a body or even a land losing its hard edges - such allows us to connect across vast differences and distances. Leaving the question, if borders were to tremble, would they disappear?

Tremble border is part of Homing, a four part audio exhibition, presented online on archive of belonging (https://archiveofbelonging.org/). Each month the exhibition is reformated and a new mixtape introduced, as something to be carried easily, lightly.

For Homing, the artists and musicians were invited to make a mixtape (in the broadest sense of the term) in response to the complex question, what are the sounds of belonging? Especially considering that sound is the first sense we develop in the womb. And hearing our mother’s voice, discerning it from background noises, is our primal step of becoming an individual while still very much being more-than-an-individual, belonging in that moment to the womb, to our first home. We know this sense of home with all of our body, by just the first sounds we hear in this world.