The Black Mediterranean is a transnational site of globalization. Black is the color–or rather, non-color–in which all shades merge, that which the sea assumes during the crossings pursued by the million migrants who have ‘burnt’ it in the past three decades. The metaphor of ‘burning’, indicating crossing, is used in colloquial speech by North Africans, who, since the early 1980s, have traversed the Mediterranean with the hope of finding upon its European shores the potential to work, to participate in democracy, and establish better life conditions for themselves and their families. Besides its literal meaning, the Arabic verb haraqa (‘to burn’) is used in Mediterranean Africa, from Morocco to Egypt, in a number of colloquial locutions, always indicating some experience of transgression. In Arabic, to ‘burn’ a norm, a law, or even a red light (one says ‘hargt l-feu rouge’), one is in fact breaking rules, trespassing norms, infringing laws. Similarly, harraga (literally, ‘those who burn’) are aware of the harg−namely the burning, or crossing, of the Mediterranean−as an act of transgression.

Against the colonising spirit of the algorithm seeking ‘to tear speech out of history’, music from below, from the despised depths of the Occidental archive, holds out another promise, sustains another space. Bodies, cultures and histories are here altogether less recognised but also less fixed. On the move, in process, such sounds return us to our senses, reach into memories, sustain desires, futures. The sham of rational neutrality is subverted. For music sustains, while simultaneously sabotaging, the bridge between the algorithm and the mystery of language. In the cut, in the beat, in the interval sustained in sound, an abstract universalism is breached, and another more complicated and inconclusive world can be heard and felt.