Matana Roberts - Coin Coin Chapter Five: In The Garden…

The Quietus

Matana Roberts’ Coin Coin series, now in its fifth chapter, illuminates the long tail of African-American history. In the New York-based multi-disciplinary artist, composer and musician’s works, sounds and stories collapse into each other, blurring lines between past and present, genres and disciplines. Age-old folk songs transform into abstract, expressionistic melodies and stories that hail from years past feel like they could have happened yesterday. The success of the Coin Coin series has been its ability to blend its elements, letting the fiery rise and fall of soundwaves tell a story as much as Roberts’ words. With Coin Coin Chapter Five: In The Garden, Roberts takes on the theme of reproductive rights, chronicling the anxiety, frustration and tragedy that reverberates from an ancestor’s story into the current moment.

The record draws on the ensemble sound of previous Coin Coin entries like 2019’s Chapter Four, letting the sound of frenetic violin meld with blown-out saxophone, urgent drums and meditative piano, played by a ten-person ensemble including Kyp Malone, Stuart Bogie, Gitanjali Jain, Darius Jones, Matt Lavelle, Mike Pride, Ryan Sawyer, Corey Smythe and Mazz Swift. But with this chapter, Roberts’ music takes a more brooding and anxious mood, conveying a sense of the unknown and unknowability, rocking back and forth between certainty and uncertainty and between being heard and being drowned out.

Where other Coin Coin chapters have felt like seamless blends, Chapter Five is more jagged, seesawing between explosive and introverted moments. ‘we said’ opens the album with hollow, jangling pulses and eerie drones, while ‘different rings’ follows up with blaring, dissonant fragments that burst and bleed out. Elsewhere, ‘a caged dance’ follows the sound of a forlorn saxophone, building a lamentation, and ‘shake my bones’, one of the album’s standout tracks, jumps from dissonant fragments to wispy shimmers to a defiant melodic repetition. Each of these tracks effortlessly conjures the swirling feeling of needing to make a decision – and questioning your own being – never quite settling, always moving. 

But one repeating refrain sticks through all the ups and downs: "my name is your name / our name is their name / we are named / we remember / they forget.” The line first comes out matter-of-fact and off-the-cuff, it shrinks to a whisper, and then it grows into an explosion, layering into itself over and over again. Though history has passed, the stories remain, and the one thing you’ll always keep is your name – and your voice.

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A Closer Listen

Matana Roberts is now twelve years into the Coin Coin project, one of the century’s most culturally important musical works.  With Chapter Five: In the Garden…, the artist continues to stun.  Chapter Five is audacious, confrontational, harrowing, mesmerizing, enrapturing and potentially transformational.  One may read it as a horror story, a cautionary tale, a challenge to patriarchal views or all three.

As bold as Roberts’ previous installments were, the latest entry is even bolder.  While one would never suggest that it is easy to talk about racism, sexism, or prejudice against the LGBTQIA+ community, it is even harder to broach the subject of abortion.  In the four short years since Chapter Four was released, the U.S. has passed a shocking number of anti-abortion laws, restoring the sociopolitical climate experienced by Roberts’ ancestor Gail: few options, all of them risky, and even fewer advocates.  The religious and political right has been extremely invested in ensuring that babies are born, but much less interested in birth control, financial support for mothers in poverty, strengthened anti-abuse laws, or even adoption.

How to address all of these topics without being preachy?  Roberts reframes Gail’s story as a series of journal entries, slowly revealing the drama, the horror, the awful quandary.  An incongruence seems to lie in Matana’s voice, often upbeat, even laughing, perhaps the only rational response to such absurdities.  Field recordings, spirituals and a half-score of collaborators color the scenery and further the plot.  The brass section becomes a quartet.  The drums suggest a marching band.  Tin whistles abound.

As in previous chapters, a pair of choruses is introduced, resurfacing throughout the set.  The first appears in French, bubbling below the surface before breaking through in English.  My name is your name, our name is their name; we remember, they forget.  Some of Gail’s descendants were given a fake narrative, carrying it to their graves; the true narrative was kept by the women in whispers.  The secondary chorus, used less frequently, is even more important, as the protagonist holds fast to the revelation that she is “electric, alive, spirited, fire and free.”  Despite the abuse, the rejection, the judgment, her spirit remains unbowed.  The saxophone’s adventures, especially in “predestined confessions,” reflect this spirit, untamed, exuberant and wild.  “Does he see me … a minor character in a backstory that didn’t really belong to me?”  The phrase refers to sex, but can be extended to an entire life.  “Stay on the borderline on dumb, undramatic and devoted.”  Later in the narrative, the same question is asked of a previously sympathetic doctor:  “Does he see me?”

We cheer for the protagonist when she leaves her husband, children in tow, dreaming of a career, of transcending her conditions.  We despair when she discovers she is pregnant again, when she returns, when she attempts to take matters into her own hands.  The judgment grows exponential: Black on Black prejudice, twisted Scriptures, different rules for cuckolding men, tossed phrases and glances like cudgels.  In this context, even the lullaby “All the Pretty Horses” seems foreboding.

Who controls the story of a life?  Is it the person who is “closest” to the deceased, the pillars of a community, the antiseptic revisionists?  Roberts wrests control of those who would do – and have done – her ancestor harm.  The narrator speaks from beyond the grave with wistful grace.  It was a different time.  People were blinder then.  They did not know that she was “electric, alive, spirited, fire and free.”  Roberts is revealed as her great-granddaughter, and Gail relaxes in the knowledge that she is finally seen and heard.  The chorus is doubled, tripled, shouted, proclaimed.  My name is your name, your name is their name; we remember, they forget.  Now handclaps, bells, jubilation: the funeral she was denied.  The dirge becomes a celebration.

This is not, nor should it be mistaken for, a happy ending.  This is a restoration of dignity.  This is a righting of reputation.  The closing track is is a procession, a parade, a gift to an ancestor.  But the full album is a warning.  These times are returning.  Women are being stripped of their humanity, context removed, reduced to talking points, caricatures and placards.  Even Genesis contains two creation stories, dueling views of what happened in the garden.  The Coin Coin project challenges assumptions, saying, don’t always believe the narrative you’ve been taught.  (Richard Allen)