Ekpe, Sounds of a Second Coming

Ekpe, Sounds of a Second Coming is a live set built from a living sound archive: field recordings from Malabo, oral testimonies, and the percussion and chants of the Bonkó funerary rite, a legacy of the Leopard Society, whose ritual practices span cultures across much of the Gulf of Guinea and the Caribbean. Having survived the transatlantic slave trade, colonial displacement and the widespread plundering of countries such as Cuba, Haiti and Equatorial Guinea in encrypted form (as collective memory and esoteric knowledge), the traces of these practices now form the historical foundations of genres such as highlife, rumba, salsa and blues, themselves direct precursors of pop, rock and global EDM within a much broader musical continuum.

On stage, the piece combines field recordings with electronic production: layers of synthesis, controlled distortion and electronic rhythms enter into dialogue with the rhythmic patterns of this legacy, celebrated in Equatorial Guinea today as the cultural heritage of the Creole ethnic group, descendants of the ñáñigos and other cultures from the Gulf of Guinea deported to the island of Bioko during the Spanish-British occupation. The result neither documents the ritual nor recreates it: instead, it opens up a state of quantum superposition in which Calabar, Havana, Malabo and Barcelona coexist simultaneously through sound.

This piece is presented as an introduction to the experimental phase of Jordi Mani’s research project Bonko: Sound Anthropology, coinciding with the conclusion of its second phase, Bonko in Transit: Rituals, Bodies and Sound, supported by La Capella and the 2026 BCN Producció grant.

Activity curated by Salmon Festival d'arts vives
With the participation of Jordi Mani
In collaboration with Margot E. Cuevas

Jordi Mani is a multidisciplinary artist and sound researcher born in Equatorial Guinea and based in Barcelona. His ethnofuturist practice explores sound as an ancestral language, a spiritual technology and a tool of collective resistance, through an intersectional lens encompassing race, gender, diaspora and bodily dissidence. He is a member of the collective Don’t Hit a la Negrx. In 2024, he launched Bonko, a transdisciplinary study of the legacy of the Ekpe Society in Equatorial Guinea and Cuba, and its impact on popular culture and contemporary electronic music.
 

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