COURTESY PIONEER WORKS
Clocktower Radio is launching its first residency program with She Resonates, a self-described gender-justice-driven music education initiative, and YATTA, a New York-based musical performer. Over the course of three months, the residents will produce work for Clocktower’s online airwaves with access to the station’s production, publishing, and promotional resources at Pioneer Works art center in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
YATTA, former resident of Flux Factory in Long Island City, is the performative guise of Sierra Leonean-American musician Yatta Zoker. Her debut EP Spirit Said Yes! mixes sounds inspired by shamanism with jazz-like vocals for an effect that is both meditative and unsettling. Her work at Clocktower will explore “psychosis in relation to society, generational trauma, healing, and magic” as a means “to explore mental illness as an ongoing response to oppressive environments.”
She Resonates is a collaboration between Las Marías, a bilingual grassroots feminism education project, and sound-artist Merche Blasco. Blasco’s practice revolves around building new instruments for electronic music and orchestrating participatory performances in public spaces. Las Marías holds feminist workshops and discussion groups for participants from kindergarten through high-school age. A podcast series for Clocktower will confront issues of sound, politics, and gender, with each episode to feature the work of female or queer artists committed to social change via both sound and political action.