NO GPS After Sunset

Soker

Soker presents NO GPS After Sunset. A scripted audio musical podcast.

Episodes

  1. After Sunset | The Mariner Hospitality of the Coffee Ceremony | EP 7

    FEB 22

    After Sunset | The Mariner Hospitality of the Coffee Ceremony | EP 7

    The Mariner Hospitality of the Coffee Ceremony is a cinematic scripted audio musical that moves across oceans, memory, and myth. At its heart is a long lost ancient Eritrean folk tale (recovered by the poet Ribka Sibhatu) about Emperor Merso and (with his two sons Miren & Gemel) the moment power split the visible world into the purely visible and the purely invisible. From that rupture, the first African spirits were born. Blending narration, immersive soundscape, and an original score woven from Eritrean, Yemeni, West African, African-American and European musical textures, the work travels from the Red Sea to the Great Lakes, from maritime empires to modern migration patterns borne from war and climate crisis. It asks: What did we carry when everything else was taken? What survived the crossing? The answer arrives through the coffee (boon) ceremony. Here, fire meets water. Bean becomes liquid. Strangers sit. The act of pouring becomes an act of remembering and forged kinship. Coffee becomes more than drink—it becomes a bridge between worlds, a method of listening & rebuilding community in a time of planetary loneliness. This is not simply a story about migration. It is about what migration reveals—about power, about memory, about the illusion that anyone survives alone. It is about how a people once shaped by empire and sea learned, through loss, that dominion fractures but relation endures. How exile becomes encounter. How the crossing becomes classroom. How the coffee ceremony becomes a quiet rebellion against a world that trains us to remain strangers. Here, hospitality is not etiquette. It is an ethic learned from water—an understanding that we move as currents, not islands. That what is poured is also what binds. That what rises as smoke carries counsel from the invisible. This is an epic carried by smoke, sound, and sea—where the mariner remembers that survival is collective, and every cup is a crossing. Produced by Aaron Joseph, Matthew Joseph, and Andrew Kozyn for TrethWest & Soker.

    15 min
  2. After Sunset | The Alternative Sonic Black History of The Territory Formerly Known as Weston-Mount Dennis | EP 5

    01/24/2025

    After Sunset | The Alternative Sonic Black History of The Territory Formerly Known as Weston-Mount Dennis | EP 5

    In this NO GPS After Sunset episode, we reimagine Weston-Mount Dennis not as a neglected periphery, but as "The City of Our Dreaming"—a title borrowed from the radical insights of Christina Sharpe's 2024 Alchemy Lecture Series. This is no ordinary retelling; it is a sonic and spatial Black history, reassembled and resurrected to defy the dictates of Empire. We dismantle the colonial narratives that reduce this territory to urban blight, flipping the script to unveil an emancipatory geography rooted in care, community, and the audacious brilliance of radical imagination. Each act of the episode layers scholarship, music, and storytelling to craft an interconnected vision of the future—one where education, architecture, and economies of reciprocity form the bedrock of liberation. Guided by Saidiya Hartman's critical fabulations and the transformative power of utopian dreaming, this episode doesn’t just tell history; it remakes it. Absence becomes presence, melancholia transforms into resilience, and Black life transcends the constraints of Euro-modernity to flourish as it was always meant to—unbound, unapologetic, and alive with possibility. This is NO GPS After Sunset at its most daring: an offering of liberation and renewal for a territory that refuses to be forgotten. Tune in, and let us build a world where dreaming itself becomes a radical act of creation.

    30 min
  3. After Sunset | Home Alone For The Holidays | EP 4

    12/14/2024

    After Sunset | Home Alone For The Holidays | EP 4

    What if Home Alone is more than just a holiday staple, more than the merry slapstick marathon we’ve come to cherish each Christmas season? What if Kevin McCallister’s battle for survival—armed only with his wits, an arsenal of improvised 1930s innovations, and a rebellious spirit—mirrors the existential loneliness of our age of hyperconnectivity?   In this updated version of my Christmas scripted audio musical podcast, I revisit Home Alone as an unlikely metaphor for self-tutelage and self-mastery in the face of abandonment—by parents, by the state, by society. From the haunted yet hopeful nostalgia of my childhood in Apartment 710 on the Southside of Jane Street to the barren streets of a Mike Harris-era Toronto, I connect Kevin’s lonely yet inventive struggle to our shared navigation of a neoliberal world where we’ve been left to fend for ourselves.   This is not a tale of mere survival. It’s a story of transformation. Of Hip-Hop’s birth in the ashes of abandonment. Of finding harmony in cultural difference. Of using metaphor as the royal road to the collective unconscious. It’s a story of the mind’s ability to grasp itself, and the promise of a future where our minds can grasp each other’s.   Join us as we uncover the hidden genius of Home Alone—a Christmas classic that resonates far beyond the snow-globe fantasy of the McCallister mansion. And remember: the connection is already made. My mind to your mind. Merry Christmas, ya filthy animals.   Produced by: Matt & Aharon Written by: Aharon Music provided by: TrethWest

    17 min

About

Soker presents NO GPS After Sunset. A scripted audio musical podcast.