Now into season five, things are sure to shuffle around in 2025. To begin with, fugitive radio is on mastodon.social, a decentralised social media based on “federated” websites hosted on a number of independent servers. You can find out more here and consider following.
This first episode for 2025 is a split. The first part is an audio fanzine and sonic meditation on “anti-fascist noise.” It pulls together audio recorded at a rally in Berlin protesting the war in Gaza held on the last day of 2024, including a speech by representatives of Palestine Spricht alongside a recording of that speech Nan Goldin delivered [YouTube] at the opening of her retrospective, “This Will Not End Well” at Neue Nationalgallery, Berlin, 22 November 2024. It then harks back to the turn-of-the-century with a track by Berlin-based anti-fascist cyber-techno-punk band Atari Teenage Riot (ATR), Deutschland (Has Gotta Die!) (Remix) (1997/2013) [Bandcamp]. Below is an excerpt of its lyrics penned in the 1990s, and that might well speak to the present:
Wake up! Wake up! Get off your knees
Where will the west strike next?
The war is still between east and west
Money talks! Money! You’re so bored and sick!
Let’s burn Germany!
Building up economy of dead bodies! That’s what they want!
ATR were notoriously arrested for inciting a riot while performing on the back of a truck at a demonstration protesting NATO’s bombing of Kosovo, in Berlin 1999. While critical of “the west” and its economy of war, I was curious to note this incident on a Wikipedia entry:
In advance of a December 2016 concert in Tel Aviv, Israel, ATR used Facebook to declare their opposition to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, calling it “a support mechanism for Palestinian terrorist groups in their efforts to de-legitimize and ultimately destroy Israel”, accusing Seeds of Peace [a non-profit peacebuilding and leadership development organisation based in New York City, ed] of promoting “anti-Israel activities”, and proposing that “working together is the best way to create a better future.”
Which, I suppose, positions the band on a political spectrum alongside the leftist “anti-Deutsch”.
This first section is a montage of recorded media that I’m thinking about in relation to “critical race media theory”—to follow a prompt from media theorist Wendy Hui Kyong Chun—and that I will be referring to in a forthcoming text.
Segueing through a piece of music by (conceptual) techno-noise artist Russell Haswell, iDEAL tape trk (take 2) (2017) [Bandcamp], part two is a short DJ mix. Recorded live, it teases out a kind of fractured-funky-acid sound that I expect to be hearing more of this year. It is also prompt to think about noise in relation to “movement research.”
Over two sections this episode brings together different kinds of noise circulating in popular social media and in the public sphere. They prompt a reflection on how noise—as disruption, criticism and affect—is an indicator of the health of democracy and the political conditions from which dissensus arises (with reference to Jacques Ranciére). This episode conflates the anti-fascist noise of civil rights, anti-racist and anti-war movements with the aesthetics of music made for sound systems and dance floors, and I’m interested in how these different kinds of critical social soundings modulate each other.
Tracklist
01. “iDEAL tape trk (take 2)” – Russell Haswell
02. “Hack Jammer (WTCHCRFT Remix)” – Posthuman
03. “Grift” – Průvan
04. “Glances” – Amazondotcom
05. “Too Hard” – Mark One
06. “Push The Body” – Doctor Jeep
07. “Symmetry Finder” – Client_03
08. “A Pulmón” – EL PLVYBXY
09. “EROTIC RAPTURE” – rEmPiT g0dDe$$
10. “Shake A Lil’ Faster” – DJ Taye
11. “Run It Bak Attak” – WTCHCRFT
12. “VII (Jlin)” – Second Woman
