VOICES OF DETROIT | PEACE LIKE A RIVER

Detroit, 2015: Citizens who are residential water customers became delinquent bill payers due to years of unmanageable water rate hikes. These locals are getting shut-off notices and their water cut-off. This threatens to displace 25,000 people, many of who are committed Detroiters. Music is a powerful force in Detroit. For many generations, choirs were the platform where voices came together. Today, this is still the case. The Metabolic Studio, based in Los Angeles, has been present in Detroit since 2014. During this time, we came to bare witness to the community articulate their struggle to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation as well as the Special Rapporteur on adequate housing. Being there, we understood the power of a collective human voice as a devotional practice. We invited choirs from Detroit to come together at the iconic United Sound Systems—the oldest recording studio in the country—to cut an album about water. The choir’s songs were broadcasted live, via the Internet, into empty industrial silos on the edge of the Owens Dry Lake Bed in California. This record contains two of these hymns. From the shores of the Great Lakes to the shores of the dry lakes of the inter-mountain West there is a shared experience—both are threatened by the removal of water.