Commissioned as a part of The Apollo’s New Works initiative, The Renaissance Mixtape is a concert experience crafted with music, story, and video by Soul Science Lab’s Asante Amin and Chen Lo and their eight-member band. The show is a musical journey through the live recording of a multi-media radio show called “Renaissance Radio,” where the musicians grapple with where Black art, culture, and innovation has been in the past and where it is going in the next 100 years.
Under the direction of Awoye Timpo, The Renaissance Mixtape orchestrates a concert of viewpoints from the past, present, and future of Black culture, including the voices of Marcus Garvey, W.E.B DuBois, and Zora Neale Hurston. With an original soundtrack featuring hip-hop, funk, and jazz influences and immersive visual elements such as digital projections and video montages, Soul Science Lab conducts a sonic and optic exploration of the philosophies that shaped our culture and the opinions that are sculpting our future.
For this project, the Apollo Stories Fellows crafted a collection of lessons focused on the themes: The Harlem Renaissance, migration, technology, and Black Futurism (Afrofuturism).
