Satch Hoyt

Artist and composer Satch Hoyt, featured in the exhibition Your Ears Later Will Know to Listen at Nottingham Contemporary, makes a special contribution with a curated selection of his original music compositions, spanning both past works and current projects. Within Hoyt’s contribution are excerpts from Un-Muting Beyond Misspelt Borders, a newly commissioned sound work for Your Ears Later Will Know to Listen. Composed, produced and performed by Satch Hoyt as part of his long-term Un-Muting project as well as his Afro-Sonic Mapping (ASM) Tracing Aural Histories Via Sonic Transmigrations. Its starting point is a recording session that took place at the British Museum in October 2023, where collection-care staff listened to Hoyt playing antique African instruments usually preserved in silence in the museum collections. The recordings were then reworked by Hoyt in a studio and layered with further recordings of African and Western instruments from the artist's own collection. For Hoyt, unmuting is a form of ‘sonic restitution’, a performative challenge to the silent confinement of instruments and sounds within Western conservation standards, awakening and celebrating the hybridity, resilience and creativity of the Black diaspora. Satch Hoyt, born in London of British and African-Jamaican ancestry, currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He makes sculptures and installations accompanied with sound, as well as paintings and drawings.