OneBeat Mixtape 2019 is Released

The 2019 OneBeat U.S. Mixtape represents some of the musical works that crystallized over the course of this month-long residency and tour. The theme for this year’s program was Human Ecologies — which led us to use a musical lens to examine the ways groups of humans can interact in the spirit of collaboration and compassion. The OneBeat ecosystem is perhaps one-of-a-kind on the planet, in that it’s made up of an incredibly diverse collection of individuals with radically different musical approaches. And yet we are able to find a common spirit of unity, a respect and mutual admirations that binds the group together into a collective of artists who are truly accountable to one another.

2019 Colombian Fellow Andrea Hoyos described this unexpectedly cohesive OneBeat ecosystem in “An Unlikely Thing We’ve Found” a song she co-wrote with U.S. Fellow Dylan McKinstry: “For the past four weeks, a group of 35 people have been sharing sound, ideas, thoughts, laughter, dance steps, workshops, music, videos, movements, meals, sunrises, sunsets, walks to the beach, and thousands of other beautiful things. From the beginning of the residency, there was an energy in the air that got thicker as time passed by. The energy of love. Love as a decision. We did not know each other, yet from the beginning we were willing to become a family and a community. And that’s what we have become.”

OneBeat is an initiative of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, & produced by Bang on a Can’s Found Sound Nation.