D'Angelo: A Sonic Remembrance with Dr Natalie Hyacinth | Haze Sessions 001

Our monthly Sunday sessions are back, this time with a series of musical deep dives.

Each month, a guest host will guide us through a topic, musical movement, scene or genre through storytelling and shared listening. We’ll listen to records together, exploring the histories, people and ideas behind the music, in a relaxed and cosy environment.

Around our first session, My Midnight Heart will perform a live DJ/looping set responding to D’Angelo’s music, alongside a DJ set from Namata. Expect the usual Haze Sunday setup: soft furnishings, visuals, hot food and massage.

About the session:

“Ain’t no justice , just us ashes to ashes, dust to dust” - Devil's Pie, D’Angelo

Step into the spiritual sound world of D’Angelo. This deep listening session will act as a sonic ritual; a sèance of meditations on Black thought, soul and music; a sonic prayer for the vibrations collectively felt through the presence of D’Angelo’s globally powerful Soul music.

D’Angelo’s music touched so many of us, that it is only fitting to dedicate deep time and space to his legacy in Bristol. Join us as we play his music, listen deeply and talk through the social, political and global dynamics his oeuvre has resonated.

About Natalie

Dr Natalie Hyacinth is a composer and academic creating and thinking about music at the intersections of technology, climate justice, feminism and Black life.

Natalie’s artworks are intersectional and interdisciplinary, inspired by diverse sonic fields such as free jazz, hip hop, dub and electronic music, while drawing upon conceptual themes from Afrofuturism, Philosophy and Cultural Geography, to Black Studies, Ethnomusicology and Aesthetics.

Experimenting with sounds and sonic technologies as a form of defiance and resistance, Natalie seeks to create new sound worlds as part of her activism, a creative practice she explores under the name The Black Astral.

Music

My Midnight Heart
My Midnight Heart is the project of Bristol-based vocalist, producer and interdisciplinary artist Angélica Allen. Her work moves between experimental pop, live electronics and immersive sound, using the voice as both instrument and raw material. Her music has been supported by Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, NPR and SPIN, and she has performed alongside artists including Solange, Blood Orange and Tegan and Sara.

She will perform a live DJ/looping set responding to D’Angelo’s music, deconstructing fragments of his recordings and rebuilding them through beats, loops, live vocals and processing. Rather than a conventional DJ set, the performance treats D’Angelo’s catalogue as material for improvisation, moving through memory, repetition and reinterpretation while remaining rooted in the feel and musical language of the original recordings.