The Cedar Presents
Sunken Cages — Ancient to the Digital
with Dameun Strange and Davu Seru
Saturday, March 20, 2027
Doors 7PM | Show 8PM
Seated | All Ages
This show is part of The Cedar's New and Experimental Music Series, made possible in part by funding from New Music USA's Organization Fund and the hundreds of donors whose generosity helps sustain our programs each year.
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about this show
Ravish Momin started working under the moniker Sunken Cages in 2019 to showcase his unique production style, layering live loops and manipulating them in real time to blur the lines between composition and improvisation. While rooted in Indian folk and Black Music traditions, Momin is also influenced by the street sounds of South African G’com, Angolan Kuduro and Egyptian Mahraganat. Twin Cities experimentalists Dameun Strange and Davu Seru open.
Sunken Cages
From adapting South-Indian rhythms to the acoustic drumkit to constructing electronic drum-racks from South Indian percussion, Momin’s practice is the result of a twenty-year evolution. Drawing inspiration from the “Great Black Music” of the AACM (via his work with saxophonist Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre) as well as Indian percussive tradtions, Sunken Cages is a sonic ritual: a system of live-looped layers and improvised decisions where real-time research meets raw percussive trance.
Signed to Mahorka and Akuphone, he has recently been featured in Wire, The Fader, Resident Advisor and programmed at Big Ears Festival (US), LeGuessWho? (NL), Positive Futures Festival (AT.) Depeche Mode’s commission for a remix led to occupying a rare position: equally recognized across electronic, global and avant-garde circuits without belonging fully to any of them. That refusal to be contained is not a liability, it is the point.
Dameun Strange
Dameun Maurice Strange is a Saint Paul–based sound artist, composer, Resonance Technologist, and Chrono-Navigator exploring the African diaspora through an Afrofuturist lens. His work develops the Siderochroni (Star-Iron Clock) philosophy of temporal mechanics, examining micro-timing variations and participatory discrepancies across the Black Atlantic to collapse linear time into multidimensional continuum loops. Drawing on West African polyrhythms, synthesizers, jazz harmonies, and live sampling, he creates genre-defying sonic architectures that bridge ancestral memory with speculative futures.
A native of Washington, D.C., Strange began his musical journey at age five with the DC Youth Orchestra and later studied African drumming, composition, and poetry at Macalester College. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Music Composition at the University of Minnesota, centering his musicological research on the phenomenology of funk and Black Atlantic traditions.
His work has been commissioned by The Cedar Cultural Center, Seitu Jones, and Ananya Dance Theatre, featuring premieres such as Mother King and O.S.A.G.D. Honors include the 2015 Minnesota Emerging Composers Award, 2018 ACF | Create Award, and 2019 Jerome Hill Hill Fellowship.
Strange is also a dedicated arts advocate, creative consultant, and former Director of Community and Belonging for the American Composers Forum.
Davu Seru
Minneapolis-Saint Paul resident Davu Seru is an improvising musician and composer known primarily for his work on drums. His playing has afforded him an international reputation and awards from McKnight Foundation (2020 Composer Fellowship), Jerome Foundation (2017-18 Composer/Sound Artist Fellow) and commissions from Walker Art Center and Zeitgeist ensemble. For the past two decades-plus his collaborators have included Anthony Cox, Milo Fine, George Cartwright, Nirmala Rajasekar, Douglas R. Ewart, Jack Wright, Michelle Kinney, Dean Magraw, Jamal Moore, Paul Metzger, Evan Parker, J. Otis Powell ‽, Didier Petit, Babatunde Lea, Nathan Hanson, deVon Russell Gray, Mankwe Ndosi, Rafael Toral, David Boykin, Donald Washington, Guillame Seguron, Louis Alemayehu, Taylor Ho Bynum, Tony Hymas, Catherine Delaunay, Ta-coumba Aiken and Nicole Mitchell Gantt. Davu is a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM).