ORIGIN Anthem: Global 15-country synchronised playback set for October 17

ORIGIN Anthem enlists Rocky Dawuni and Artists from more than 15 countries for a single synchronised playback on 17 October.

Every so often a record arrives with an instruction attached. This one asks you to play it on a specific date, at a specific second, wherever in the world you happen to be.

The Origin Anthem is the closing movement of ORIGIN, a worldwide event taking place on 17 October, and it has been built for a release pattern the charts were never designed to measure. The track goes out ahead of the date so audiences already know it, then plays simultaneously across more than 2,200 registered locations in over 70 countries at the same absolute instant. Not the same local hour rolling westward the way New Year's Eve does, but one shared moment.

Who is on it
The record was produced by multi-platinum producer Michael Gazzo and pulls contributors from more than 15 countries.

The headline name is Rocky Dawuni, the four-time Grammy-nominated Ghanaian musician whose Afro Roots sound has taken him onto stages with Stevie Wonder, Peter Gabriel, Bono, Janelle Monáe and John Legend. CNN once named him among Africa's top 10 global stars, and in 2018 the United Nations appointed him a Goodwill Ambassador for the Environment for Africa.

He is joined by South African vocalists Nomvula and Buhlebendalo, sarangi player Kamal Sabri, and King Moore, the California-based child rapper who earned a standing ovation and four judges' votes on America's Got Talent. Edward and April Ellington, of the Duke Ellington family, also appear. Aaron Ableman and Tete Bero share songwriting credits.

Ableman describes what the roster was assembled to do. "The Anthem is the sound of what happens when people stop competing for whose story matters most and start singing the one story we all come from," he says. "Every voice on this record, from a UN Goodwill Ambassador to a kid who went viral rapping the truth, is proof that the return to origin isn't one culture's idea."

The blend of ancestral instrumentation with contemporary production is the point rather than a novelty. Each contributor brought something rooted in where they are from, which is why a bowed North Indian string instrument sits alongside West African highlife and Xhosa vocal lines rather than being decorated with them.

The man behind it came out of British club culture
Anyone who spent time in UK clubs in the nineties may recognise the producer's name. Chris Deckker founded Return to the Source, the club night and record label that pushed ritual and meditation into dance music and toured across Europe, the United States, South America, South Africa and Asia. In 1992 he co-founded Medicine Drum, an act layering tribal rhythms and live instrumentation over progressive electronic production well before that combination became fashionable.

In 1997 he launched Earthdance, a synchronised global dance event that opened across 22 locations in 18 countries and eventually staged more than 700 events in 75 countries, every floor pausing at the same instant to play the same track. The office of the Dalai Lama recognised it as the most successful global event of its kind supporting the Tibetan people.
ORIGIN is that structure again, considerably scaled, and Deckker now serves as its managing director from Byron Bay.

What comes before the drop
The anthem is the third of three movements. It follows a multilingual recording made with Indigenous Elders representing 15 nations, each contributing in their own language alongside an English translation, and then a shared moment in which participants are asked to touch the ground and speak aloud the world they want to see.

Rather than bringing contributors to a studio, the production travelled to them. Each Elder was filmed on their own land by Deborah Anderson, the filmmaker and Leica ambassador who directed Women of the White Buffalo, a documentary about Oglala Lakota women at Pine Ridge that took Best Feature Documentary at the Red Nation International Film Festival.

Paul Jrumpinjinbah, an Aboriginal elder of the Yuin Nation in Australia, puts his reason for taking part plainly. "We all breathe the same oxygen. We still look at the same trees. You come from the land and you shall return, no matter who you are, where you're from, or what nationality you are."

The flagship weekend
Origin South Africa runs from 16 to 18 October at the Kromdraai Impact Hub inside the Cradle of Humankind outside Johannesburg, and anchors a live broadcast moving between continents for several hours. The bill leans on South African talent including TRESOR, the Congolese-born SAMA winner who co-wrote and produced Fountains for Drake and Tems, alongside Bongeziwe Mabandla, Sibusile Xaba, Tubatsi Malo and Buhlebendalo.

Everywhere else, the day is whatever the person hosting it makes of it. No ticket, no venue, no travel required.

How to take part
More than 2,200 groups have registered gatherings so far, with confirmed public events across Australia, New Zealand, Italy, France, Argentina, Zimbabwe, South Africa and the United States. A Global Yoga Wave runs alongside for anyone who prefers their synchronised moment horizontal.

The organisers ask three things: be somewhere with other people when the moment arrives, listen, and plant something. That last piece runs through Seed the Dream, which logs plantings to a global map, and sits under a ten million dollar target directed at soil restoration, food systems, ecological restoration and Indigenous leadership.

The phrase the organisers use for the shift they are attempting is from doom to bloom. For a project whose producer has spent three decades learning what a room full of people does when the right record plays, that tracks. The bet has always been that a good track played by enough people at the same time can do something a speech cannot.