“Singing Medicine” for Tina Coupé, Supergau magazine

A hatchback car is converted into a karaoke box with streamers and decal flames for Lola Göller and Flavio Dengen’s artwork “Tina Coupé”

Karaoke Theory/Karaoke Therapy reprised as “Singing Medicine” for Lola Göller and Flavio Degen’s participatory artwork Tina Coupé for Supergau Festival’s magazine.

Tina Coupé is a mobile party machine, pop-up karaoke booth and participatory art intervention devised by Berlin-based artists Lola Göller and Flavio Degen. Where ever it pulls up, bystanders, interlopers and art goers are invited to sing along with karaoke videos that they have likely never seen before. These music videos, made in collaboration with artists and communities, have evolved since the Covid pandemic when friends would get together to sing online. Tina Coupé adopts the phenomenon of karaoke as a globalized, cross-cultural and popular social practice, to address issues of space, accessibility and economic precariousness and it chimes with my interests in the social function and health benefits of singing.

“‘DJ Report/DJ Backlash’: Unsound 2024 Noise…”, Cyclic Defrost.

My DJ-focused report about Unsound Festival, 2024 themed Noise has been published, somewhat sentimentally, in Cyclic Defrost. A publication that began as zine affiliated with the Frigid chill club nights in Sydney, circa the late 1990s and early 2000s. It was via Frigid that a first heard, sometimes met and occasionally befriended artists involved in abstract and experimental club music. Very happy to have completed this circle somehow and be warned: it’s a long read!

So while Unsound presented numerous notable concerts, club nights, installations and a discourse program, my focus here is on the festival’s DJ sets. Once in Kraków, I sensed a backlash against DJ culture, as people voiced to me their disdain for the popular Boiler Room platform, complained about the exorbitant fees headlining DJs charge and generally begrudged those who, to paraphrase British producer aya, “make a career out of playing other people’s music”— albeit admitting to having done so herself. Are such criticisms warranted? Let’s cut to the chase.

critical radio

The founders of coletivo digital, São Paulo are gathered around a life-size cut-out of Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, in the run up to the Brazilian presidential elections 2022.

foto: Coletivo Digital, São Paulo October 2022.

First published in German in Springerin “ArtGPT,” issue 1/2024.
Later printed in English as a zine for MISS READ Berlin Art Book Fair & Festival 2024 as a supplement to my contribution to WAVES: Radio as Collective Imagination (2024).

Download: A4 print-at-home PDF.
Instructions:
1. Print on A4 paper
2. Check in printer preferences that it is printing at 100% not “print to fit” that many printers default to.
3. Print one side then flip along the long side of the paper to print the second side. If your printer can handle 2-sided printing select “flip on long side”.
4. Once both sides have been printed, fold the page into 4.
5. Cut off bottom edge and staple along the spine or bind with a rubber band.

–

When I initiated fugitive radio in 2020, during the first year of the global COVID19 pandemic, it seemed like everyone was making a podcast, but I wondered who was listening. As “if a radio broadcasts in a forest…,” quipped Sophea Lerner, co-founder of the independent radio platform {openradio}. Curious about the sociabilities arising around (experimental) radio technologies, fugitive radio made a series of live “performance–radio” broadcasts for Pixelache Helsinki Festival #BURN____2021. Since 2021, it has a produced a monthly podcast, “fugitive frequency,” for the radio communities Colaboradio on Freie Radios Berlin-Brandenburg and Helsinki Open Waves. It is also active with lumbung radio/Station of Commons, a platform founded for documenta fifteen (2022), and πNode, a community formed around an ad hoc network of radio infrastructures in France. I have further developed fugitive radio’s collaborative live broadcast events across residencies at Helsinki International Artist Programme (2022), Lanchonete.org (São Paulo, 2022) and Jan van Eyck Academie (JvE) (2022–23).

At an assembly held during documenta fifteen, it was suggested that net radio is a kind of low bandwidth activism taking up digital space in a largely privatized and commercialized World Wide Web. While this may be so, fugitive radio claims that the critical front is not at public facing websites, rather “critical radio” [1] emerges in the kinds of organizing, skill sharing and community building that occurs alongside the production of content. Hack-labs and live broadcast happenings facilitate sharing, co-learning and generate enthusiasm for alternative networked-sociabilities. While such gatherings are often premised on pursuing free and open (source) culture and promoting digital commons, it is arguably conviviality that shapes the micro-politics of experimental radio activity.

counterculture
During my time at JvE, Charles Esche, director of the Van Abbemuseum, suggested that a turn towards audio in exhibitions was in response to “the focus on visuality in visual art.” He proposed that sound in what is traditionally the domain of visual arts, transgresses the separation of senses that occurred during modernity and the distinct disciplines defined by art academies and conservatoires. If exhibitions are making radios appear, how might they critique conventional aesthetic, intellectual and institutional practices?

“Instagram is my portfolio,” a visual artist once told me. In the 1990s the World Wide Web became the graphical interface for the internet. With the advent of social media in the early 2000s, notably Facebook, Instagram and now Tik-Tok, it seems that much of net culture has become by default visual culture. In 2022, I met with Coletivo Digital, a rare group still active in Brazil who recall the optimism of the early World Wide Web. They suggested that the emancipatory and experimental drives of open culture movements had coalesced in net radio. Indeed, I propose that current (net-)radio practices are a counterculture to prevailing pics-or-it-didn’t-happen social media engineered relations.

“Make friends not art” was a phrase that memed during the Jakarta-based collective ruangrupa’s takeover of documenta fifteen (2022), also known as “lumbung one,” valorizing of the social aspects of art-making over its commodified objects. Friendship was thus politicized as it determined the communities, practices and issues leveraged through infrastructural art power. This was notable as evidence of antisemitism alongside racist and transphobic attacks rocked the event, leading to censorship, withdrawals and the resignation of Documenta’s Director General Sabine Schormann. Nevertheless, solidarities resolved among those remaining and initiatives, such as lumbung radio, are ongoing. Organizations have since proposed to “learn from lumbung,” a reference to an Indonesian community rice barn, emphasizing the pooling and redistribution resources among inter-local networks and collective planning. [2] I think it would also be wise to learn from the Humboldt Forum.

normalization
I first encountered plans to re-house collections from Berlin’s Ethnological Museum and Museum of Asian Art in an architectural monument recalling Prussian imperialism at the conference “Postcolonial Justice”, University of Potsdam, 2014. [3] At panels about the restitution of sensitive objects, I learned of Tanzania-born Mnyaka Sururu Mboro’s campaign to return human remains held in these collections. In July 2017, Bénédicte Savoy, an art historian specializing in restitution and provenance, resigned from the Humboldt Forum’s advisory board stating:

The architecture signals that history can be undone. But people who ask for the return of stolen objects are told that history cannot be undone. [4]

Her sensationalized departure sparked debate about Germany’s colonial legacy. Groups protesting the Forum included: No Humboldt 21, Decolonize Berlin Alliance, Africa Avenir and Barazani. The Coalition of Cultural Workers Against the Humboldt Forum (CCWAH) formed in 2020, objecting to the crowning of this public-funded building erected on the site of East Germany’s former parliament, with a privately funded golden orb and cross. Bearing an inscription that demands “the living and the dead kneel unconditionally before Jesus”, they opposed the Forum’s assertion of Christian domination. [5]

After a series of staggered openings, the Humboldt Forum was inaugurated on 20 July 2021 as a space for criticism and debate, discursively reframing its problematic collections. While the CCWAH announced that they would “refuse to participate” others resigned to work with it—I suspect because precarious artists cannot afford to refuse a paying gig, especially migrants whose visas are dependent on such contracts. Indeed, the Forum welcomes critical readings of its collection by so-called “People-Of-Colour” whose participation validates its means of knowledge production, neutralizing the potency of their critique. Activists I’ve met complain that the Forum has appropriated their language, community-building methods and commissioned work from thinkers whom they reference. After much pressure, the Forum announced a restitution deal with Nigeria in 2022 to return over 1000 objects, including two prized “Benin Bronzes.” Recently a friend disclosed attending a free hip-hop dance class at the Forum, confirming that despite lingering disquiet some dissenting artists had normalized their relations with it.

solidarity
Even in the progressive capital of Berlin, solidarities among its creative scenes are uneasy. At the time of writing, the war in Israel–Palestine has divided the city which is home to significant communities linked to this conflict. The artist and broadcaster Nathan Gray calls it “the new Berlin Wall.”

In January 2024, the Berlin Senate adopted an anti-discrimination clause as a condition of cultural funding. With an emphasis on antisemitism over other forms of racism, such as islamophobia and anti-blackness, the Senate controversially chose a working definition promoted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) adding an extension that conflates persecution of Jewish people with criticisms of Israel. Many are anxious about this curbing of free speech and artistic expression as wars escalate worldwide, and noticeably it is Palestinians who have been silenced. As Jewish critics of Zionism question if they are being subject to antisemitism by German police when arrested for protesting the war, those from countries where support for Palestine is the norm, call out the hypocrisy of German institutions’ decolonial interests. In response, a campaign to “Strike Germany” has gained traction. Recalling the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction campaigns against Israel declared antisemitic by the Bundestag in 2019, it demands that the state “protect artistic freedom,” “focus the fight against antisemitism” and “combat structural racism.”

When I moved to Berlin in 2017, curators I met sought to politicize their practices. Now some admit to being strategically silent, contributing to a climate of self-censorship and antagonism that recalls East Germany’s Stasi era or McCarthyism in the United States. As spaces holding multiple perspectives are dramatically reduced, what are the alternative platforms for critical debate?

While German mainstream media echoes the state’s unequivocal support for Israel, a group of artists and intellectuals are providing counter-narrative resources. Learning Palestine have so far compiled two twelve-hour radio programs, “Until Liberation I & II”, collaborating with Bethlehem-based Radio Alhara. Birthed in 2020 among friends isolating during the pandemic, Radio Alhara takes its name from the Arabic word for neighborhood. Interpersonal organizing and low operating costs afforded it to function beyond the “constrains of social media and corporate controlled networks” and it was welcomed among a globalized cultural community as a forum where otherwise silenced Palestinian voices—and music—are made audible. Since first airing in October 2023, “Until Liberation” has been rebroadcast on several sympathetic platforms including lumbung radio, suggestive of participating radios’ (infra)structural solidarity.

(an)optics
At JvE I learned that optics is a primary concern of exhibition-making—exhibitions must look “professional” regardless of intent. I suspect fugitive radio’s critique is indulged in such contexts precisely because of its low visibility—indeed there is nothing to see! But who listens? My friends and peers assure me that they follow online, however, I predict fugitive radio’s legacy will be publishing; it produces podcasts and publishes zines that leave a trace of critical radio practice in contemporary art.

I’ve found some affinity between experimental radio makers and independent art book publishers and fugitive radio has participated in several related fairs including: Under The Leaf, Helsinki (2022), The Fabulous Books Are Bridges, Rotterdam (2023) and MISS READ, Berlin (2023). Not long ago I ran into a curator of book events clutching a copy of Rebecca Ruth Gould’s Erasing Palestine (2023) concerning the IHRA. When I asked if he should be seen with this book in Berlin, he laughed and replied that it was not a problem on a book display, “but if it were an exhibition…”. His remark indicates tiers of visibility that are subject to differing scrutiny and censorship. After all, who reads books these days?

As an “anoptic” practice, might radio modulate the functions of art institutions as instruments for the commodification of creativity and the enforcing of state interests? Collaborating with community-developed platforms fugitive radio promotes alternative sociable medias. It approaches radio not as a mass media, but rather as a catalyst for coming together to discuss, experiment and play. Co-opting the discursive impulses of institutional art to co-produce responsive micro-media—promoted by word-of-mouth and distributed hand-to-hand—could critical radio circumvent authoritarian oversight and the performative pressures of corporate social medias under which professionalized art is subsumed?

January 2024

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[1] A term proposed to me by Amanda Sarroff, writing advisor to Jan van Eyck
Academie.

[2] For example: “Learning from lumbung Public Forum on documenta fifteen” 23–24
January 2023, Jubilee, Brussels; “Lumbung Practice” temporary masters programme,
Sandberg Instituut, De Appel and Gudskul.

[3] Gesellschaft für Anglophone Postkoloniale Studien, “Postcolonial Justice”, 29 May–1
June 2014, Potsdam and Berlin.

[4] Cited in dpa, “Expertin: Humboldt-Forum verschweigt Ursprung seiner Sammlungen”, Monopol, 21 July 2017.

[5] Noëlle BuAbbud, “Nightmare at the Museum: An Interview with Coalition of Cultural Workers Against the Humboldt Forum,” Berlin Art Link, 5 February 2021.

fugitive frequency, season 3, episode 12: The Image of Gaza

A protest placard sitting on a bench stating: “PROTECT ALL CIVILIANS-CEASEFIRE NOW”

My friend, the artist and broadcaster Nathan Gray [Instagram], describes the current war in Gaza as the “New Berlin Wall”, as it has polarised a city that is home to significant migrant communities from both Palestine and Israel. In a country held accountable for the Jewish Holocaust and which considers Israel’s security and right to exist its “Staaträson”, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiment have surfaced since Hamas’ 7 October attack in southern Israel. From a distance in Finland, I began to approach these developments via anti-racism frameworks; being attentive to (historical) forms of biological race and ethno-nationalism, alongside more recent concepts of ethnocracy—a term coined by Oren Yiftachel, a Professor of Political Geography, to describe circumstances in which democratic processes are unequally distributed among citizens, biased towards ethnic groups in power.

Cultural theorist Paul Gilroy opens his book, Against Race (2000)—re-published as Between Camps (2004)—with a citation from Frantz Fanon:

At first thought it may seem strange that the anti-Semite’s outlook should be related to that of the Negrophobe. It was my philosophy professor, a native of the Antilles, who recalled the fact to me one day: “Whenever you hear someone abuse the Jews, pay attention, because he is talking about you.” And I found that he was universally right—by which I meant that I was answerable in my body and my heart for what was done to my brother. Later I realized that he meant, quite simply, that an anti-Semite is inevitably anti-Negro.
Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks) cited in Gilroy 2000, p. 1.

Writing at the turn of the last century, Gilroy argues that the ambition of anti-racism work should be to dismantle race as a category of difference, and he urges his readers to be wary of emergent forms of racism arising from technological developments, such as genetics.

Like many others, doomscrolling through a feed of “atrocity images” and trauma over the past two months, my interest was piqued last week with the publication of an investigation “‘A mass assassination factory‘: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza” by +972 Magazine and Local Call , an independent, bipartisan and non-profit platform established by Israeli and Palestinian journalists. Authored by Yuval Abraham [Instagram], the article outlines Israel Defense Forces (IDF) use of machine learning and AI in determining military targets, in particular a system named Hasbora (The Gospel). There has already been much discussion about the inherent bias in such systems and criticism about their use in policing, so Hasbora’s deployment in a situation where vengeance is a motive is alarming. It should be noted, as Abraham states at the beginning of this interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, that this report was vetted by the Israeli military censor. That is, the IDF has some interest in publicising this information. A recent article in the New York Times reveals how Israel’s security intelligence failed to act on early indicators of Hamas planning an attack on 7 October, thus Abraham proposes that the Netanyahu government is under pressure to produce a “victory image” for its citizens, and arguably one that foregrounds its technological prowess.

Investigative journalist Antony Loewenstein, whose recent book The Palestine Laboratory (2023) is concerned with how Israel develops and tests its sophisticated military and surveillance technologies in Gaza, is often called upon to comment on these issues. Contained within a security wall, Egypt’s national border and the Mediterranean Sea, Gaza is often described as an “open-air prison”. With over 2 million people in area that is approximately 365 square km, it is one the most densely populated regions in the world. As noted by scholars Eyal Weizman (2007) and Jasbir K. Puar (2017), Gaza is tightly controlled; dependent on aid, supplies and (communication) infrastructures that are ultimately managed by Israel, calculated according to what is necessary for survival. Thus, it can be easily analysed as a bio/necro-political regime. Following the end of the cease-fire on 30 November and as the staggering civilian death toll continues to climb, the US and other allied states, including the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and Australia, are qualifying their statements of unequivocal support for the war Israel names “Operation Iron Swords”, cautioning the Zionist state to minimise civilian casualties while continuing to sanction its efforts to completely destroy Hamas. In an interview with Amy Goodman and Juan González on Democracy Now!, Loewenstein points out that these states are continuing to export arms to Israel, and that some of them have significantly expanded these exports since 7 October. Alongside arms proliferation and shared intelligence, these states are also implicated in global supply chains that produce these weapons technologies. As such, the images (and information) currently flowing out of Gaza are effectively, as Al Jazeera presenter Jonah Hull puts it, a “live-fire, real-time experiment” demonstrating these technologies and their concomitant political strategies.

This podcast, “The Image of Gaza”, returns to the theme of “optics”. It is a montage/mixtape of news media, music, infomercials and street recordings that serve as a prompt to think about the images flowing out of the war and how they are being received and interpreted by different interests. These include:

– affective “atrocity images” of an exceptional humanitarian crisis at scale and evidence of possible war crimes
– a “victory image” that Israel’s Netanyahu government is under pressure produce following security intelligence failures to act on early indications of Hamas’ 7 October attack
– a “live-fire, real-time experiment” demonstrating Israel’s military technologies and that attest to a global weapons market and production supply chains that implicate the US, UK, Germany, the Netherlands and Australia in the war.

Media used (in order)

Music: “Drone Command”, Marc Torch

A song that was briefly removed from Spotify in May 2023, provoking a backlash against the popular music-streaming platform.

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Yasmeen Daher from Palästina Spricht/Palestine Speaks addresses a demonstration in Berlin, 4 November 2023.

“Karaoke Theory/Karaoke Therapy”, Acta Academiae Artium Vilnensis 109, 2023

A cartoon by Olav Westphalen (2021). A professor, with black hair and glasses and a student with light hair, sit at a desk. The professor is holding a copy of the student’s thesis and in the speech bubble she says: "As your supervisor, I recommend a much smaller font," Student thought bubble: "Brilliant" Professor continues: "You don’t want people to actually read this."

Cartoon by Olav Westphalen (2021),lifted from the X-disciplinary Congress on Artistic Research and Related Matters, Vilnius Academy of Arts, October 14-17th, 2021.

Acta Academiae Artium Vilnensis: The Uses and Abuses of Artistic Research in Post-Disciplinary Academia, No. 109, 2023.

Editors of this issue: Aldis Gedutis, Vytautas Michelkevičius

https://aaav.vda.lt/journal/issue/view/aaav109

This Acta Academiae Artium Vilnensis (AAAV) issue brings together selected papers presented during the congress. Some of the articles are written by scholars and some by artist-researchers from all around the world. Aldis Gedutis and Vytautas Michelkevičius lay the ground for artistic research and discuss the labyrinth of inter-, trans- and other prefixes in arts and sciences as well as justify the trans-epistemic community as the caretaker of artistic research. John Hillman claims the practice is a symptom of research, while David Maroto presents “fictocritical” writing as a lifesaving boat for artists who want to seamlessly merge their fiction writing skills with (critical) theories. Magda Stanová guides us to artistic thinking in scientific research, while Greg Bruce flies us over the Atlantic Ocean and presents outlines of the local (Canadian and French-speaking world) concept of artistic research – research-creation. Bettina Minder and Pablo Müller return us back to earth in order to see how artistic research works in doctoral programs and courses in Switzerland. Andrew J. Hauner helps us witness an experimentally written research paper and question the existing formats of research outcomes. Raivo Kelomees proposes and defends a challenging hypothesis about the animistic relationship between a viewer and an artwork, whereas Sumugan Sivanesan allows us to swing and linger between karaoke theory and therapy. Finally, Christiane Keus proclaims the present condition as Postresearch!

KARA-O-KLINIK

Live broadcast personal consultations with Sumugan Sivanesan introducing the benefits of Karaoke Therapy. Register here to secure your slot in the KARA-O-KLINIK or just walk-in!

Duration of each session: 30min
Language: Consultations are in English, although you can karaoke in the language of your choice.
Location: HIAP Studios

Following the ‘silent disco’ season finale of fugitive radio’s online club, RUB, in April, I’ve been thinking about ‘awkward’ as an aesthetic category; a subclass of ‘zany’ that cultural theorist Sianne Ngai describes as: “evok[ing] the performance of affective labor—the production of affects and social relationships—as it comes to increasingly trouble the distinction between work and play.” (Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, 2012, p.7)

Ngai notes that the zany mode is “lighthearted but strikingly vehement”, in which injury is always imminent. Literature and media scholar Pansy Duncan associates awkward with ungainly actions that impede progress combined with feelings of embarrassment. In her article on ‘cringe comedy’, “Joke work: comic labor and the aesthetics of the awkward” (2017) she traces the emergence of cringe comedy with the reorganisation of labour during late capitalism—from mechanical conditions to flexible, ‘creative’ and affective practices. Noting its arhythmic timing and the labour and endurance required of audiences, she emphasises awkward’s “negative phenomenological effects” (p.2).

Arguably play, sociability and managing relationships are simply how we work in ‘creative industries’. So what aesthetic and affective modes do we habitually use as we negotiate expectations to perform our ‘authentic selves’—indeed the best version of ourselves—in these sectors overly concerned with representation? When we sing and dance for our supper what do our voices and bodies betray? What tricks do we turn to when we feel we are failing?

KARA–O–KLINIK sets up a broadcast situation, combining endurance performance-research with reality ‘comedy vérité’. It will broadcast live from HIAP Open Studios, Friday 6 May, 16.00–20.00 and Saturday 7 May, 14.00–18.00.

Weird Fun: Awkward Glitch Dance Party (reflections on RUB8)

Six people sit, legs crossed, on the floor of a studio. They are wearing headphones and face masks. Cushions are scattered around the floor. Two windows with the blinds pulled down are in the background.

I’ve been describing RUB8 ‘silent disco’ season finale as a happening. ‘It’s like a real dance party’ Aliisa Talja AKA DJ folk flore quipped during the night. Indeed, it was the people who made it ‘happen’, and upon reflection my role was to make the space and also make it worthwhile for people to ‘come to the party’ and to take up a kind of responsibility for it. This includes the time and effort taken to build trust — friendship. I doubt RUB8 would have been successful among strangers.

A headphone party seemed consistent with the idea of RUB, an online club with no physical room and that one could only enter via audio; a club I promoted as having a ‘no body policy’ because no bodies were in the room. A headphone party still meant participants would have to ‘bring the sound to their bodies’ and put it in them, but they would also have the experience of other bodies. Indeed it is curious that headphone parties have acquired a vernacular phrase,‘silent disco’, so it does not require much explanation. Although, I did expect it to be awkward, which might warrant further thought as an aesthetic category, such as those put forth by Sianne Ngai who wrote this about the ‘zany’ (2012, p.7):

the zany more specifically evokes the performance of affective labor—the production of affects and social relationships—as it comes to increasingly trouble the distinction between work and play. The formal dynamics of this seemingly lighthearted but strikingly vehement aesthetic, in which the potential for injury always seems right around the corner, are thus most sharply visible in arts of live a recorded performance—dance, Happenings, walkabouts, reenactments, game shows, video games—and in the arts of rhythm and movement in particular.

RUB8 took place as usual online on SonoBus, but we also gathered in person in my studio at the Helsinki International Artists Programme (HIAP). As soon as one enters my apartment they are in my studio, which was the dance floor. By the entrance is a flight of stairs that leads to the living area at the rear of the building; the VIP. Inbetween is a mezzanine, which overlooks the front half of the studio, which was the ‘DJ cockpit’.

Irina Mutt described her experience as ‘dancing in my bedroom in the dark, but with others.’ Fan Chon Hoo made note of the ‘technical glitches’ which returned him to the room and the current context — (another) reality — alluding to the way the sound ‘transports’ or ‘augments’ where one is physically present.

To explain: We began a little late and the set-up required physically switching inputs between performers, so I copied a back-up file to my hard drive to play during changeovers. It was the March podcast of fugitive frequency ‘Double Troubles’, a montage of recordings made at the demonstration against the Russian invasion of Ukraine in Helsinki (26.2), mixed into a recording of a RUB live mix a few days before on 2.02.2022. Notably the protest interventions into the RUB8 broadcast were not designed or pre-determined, it was simply the first file I found. Furthermore ‘Double Troubles’ was made quite hastily as a document/reflection of that moment.

The programming of RUB can be thought of compositionally. It occurred on the night of the new moon; the black dot of the lunar cycle that lands on the grid of the Gregorian calendar. RUB didn’t occur on a consistent day of a week, arguably a more conventional way of running a regular event. I describe it like a ‘moving one’ in music composition, the ‘one’ being the beat that is stressed when counting a time signature. So, in terms of timing or composition, I want to stress that the inclusion of ‘Double Troubles’ was not planned, yet it became a critical juxtaposition to the other sounds being broadcast. I am interested in this kind of ‘synchronicity’ and how to keep developing events or happenings that remain open to this.

A blurry image of around 12 people dancing in a studio. The foto is taken from a slightly higher angle, on a staircase that can also be partially seen in the right of the image. — Fotos: Kamila Sladowski 2022

Karaoke Theory / Karaoke Therapy

Below are edited excerpts from a performative panel-presentation I delivered at X-disciplinary Congress on Artistic Research and Related Matters, Vilnius Academy of Arts & SODAS 2123, 14-17 October 2021. In preparing this presentation, I realised that the key issue I sought to address was a perceived inhibition about singing in public. Noting that many ‘non-literate’ cultures use song as a vehicle for knowledge and as a ‘memory code’, according to researcher and author Lynne Kelly, I wonder what we ‘Westernized Moderns’ are missing out on, especially with reference to the academic formatting of knowledge as it is occurring in the arts. The discussion at the conference honed in on notions of perfection, but the issue of a kind of ‘performance anxiety’ around singing in public remains compelling.

‘Singing has been somehow colonised out of us!’
I approach song as a learning tool, as a means to convey knowledge and structure feeling. In particular, I would like to address a perceived inhibition about singing in public, which I propose is a kind of trauma. This was prompted by the Helsinki-based filmmaker and stand-up comedian, Roxana Sadvo, who recently told me that she suspects that ‘singing has been somehow colonised out of us’.

In his 2006 book This Is Your Brain on Music, Daniel J Levitin, a North American cognitive neuroscientist, author, musician and sound engineer, notes that it is only recently that a distinction was made between classes of music performers and music listeners in Western societies.

Only relatively recently in our own culture, five hundred years or so ago, did a distinction arise that cut society in two, forming separate classes of music performers and music listeners. Through out most of the world and for most of human history, music making was as natural an activity as breathing and walking, and everyone participated. (Levitin, 2006)

As a neuroscientist, Levitin has researched how music alters our moods and brain chemistry and cites studies that demonstrate how music stimulates all areas of the brain. Indeed, in his 2008 book The World in Six Songs, he argues that the human brain evolved with song:

Before there was language, our brains did not have the full capacity to learn language, to speak or to represent it. As our brains developed both the physiological and cognitive flexibility to manipulate symbols, language emerged gradually, and the use of rudimentary verbalizations—grunts, calls, shrieks, and groans—further stimulated the growth potential for the types of neural structures that would support language in the broadest sense. (Levitin, 2008)

Singing as ‘Soma Technique’
Recently I came across the work of the Finnish ethnomusicologist, musician and therapist Anne Tarvainen, who also claims that in the West, singing is split between those can sing — that is, those who are gifted, trained and professionalised — and those who cannot, who are cast as audiences, admirers and connoisseurs.

Tarvainen works with singers, both amateur and professional, who due to illness or injury, now experience difficulty vocalising. She expands on the work of the North American (pragmatist) philosopher Richard Shusterman who has been developing a concept of ‘Somaesthetics’ since the 1990s. As Tarvainen explains in a recent article for the Journal of Somaesthetics:

One of the main ideas of somaesthetics is that bodily experience can be cultivated. By practicing body consciousness, one can free oneself from harmful bodily manners and improve one’s overall quality of life. Shusterman suggests that a researcher working in the field of somaesthetics should not only approach things analytically but also critically examine the physical practices of our culture, suggest new forms of somatic conventions, and put them into practice. (Tarvainen 2019, p.8)

Tarvainen is developing a branch of this field that she names ‘vocal somaesthetics’ alongside a form of vocal therapy, ‘Voicefulness’, in which Tarvainen encourages her clients to approach singing according to what feels good in their body, rather than adhering to established music conventions. Such ‘unorthodox’ singing is a means of transforming the body — it is a way of doing the body. Singing as ‘soma technique’. So if singing makes us feel good and make us smarter, why aren’t we karaoking everyday?

RUB

Free Shoutcast Hosting Radio Stream Hosting

The cyclical originates in the cosmic, in nature: days, nights, seasons, the waves and tides of the sea, monthly cycles, etc. The linear would come rather from social practice, therefore from human activity: the monotony of actions and of movements, imposed structures. (Lefebvre 2004, p.8)

Having re-purposing EDM as ‘experimental dance music’, I’m wondering how practices of rhythm abstraction modulate what Lefebvre describes as ‘linear rhythms’. These are structured institutionalised rhythms that one associates with work, transport schedules, school; how one organises time to meet deadlines, juggle commitments and other time-sensitive institutional pressures, with the social also being an institution. These rhythms run concurrently with ‘cyclical rhythms’ such as the setting and rising of the sun and the phases of the moon. Cyclical rhythms can expand out to cosmological proportions, can they also be perceived at the level of particles?

During this time of pandemic and while bracing for a Northern winter, I’ve been thinking to open a room in an online multiuser audio streaming platform; an EDM ‘club’ on SonoBus that is also open to sound clash and other kinds of interventions.

Naming the room ‘RUB’ is a joke of sorts, because it’s not physically possible to do so in such a space. RUB is a club with a no body policy — literally no bodies in the room — but you can take the club to your room and to your body. While this absent-presence might spark braindance-induced sonic fictions, it also emphasises sonic friction, given that physically gathering may be difficult during these times. As a room for deep bass explorations, beat psyence and riddim methodologies, RUB emphasises sound as a haptic sensation, as changes in air pressure vibrate the sensitive organs of our inner ear; sound pressure that scales up with volume.

Scheduling RUB on the night of the new moon, a ‘cyclical rhythm’ according to Lefebvre and the darkest night of the lunar phase cycle, situates a practice of abstracting rhythms within interacting rhythmic categories. Rather than selecting a regular day of the Gregorian calendar (eg the first Tuesday of each month as is fugitive frequency), RUB proposes to modulate the governance of patterns and habits that arise from them. It’s seemingly irregular placement (Wed 6 October, Thur 4 November, Sat 4 December in 2021) is akin to a ‘shifting one’ in music composition, where the stress or the accent of the beat moves (with repetition) over time. Will RUB synergise with or clash against other scheduled events? Will anyone listen? Would anyone intervene? Given that RUB will begin on the first new moon following the Autumn Equinox (22 Sept 2021), it seems fitting that it’s first season should run until the Spring Equinox (20 March 2022). I’m told timing is everything…

Theory On The Radio / Theory in the Mixxx

Last night I was listening to music, the way I used to when I was a child: lights off, sitting in front of the speakers and emotionally available to go with the sound… but now with high quality headphones that detect the fine production details. It made a significant difference to the music I usually only hear when I mix and I found myself listening to certain tracks by the Two Lone Swordsman, Jlin and Kode 9 several times over, fascinated by their subtle productions techniques; arguably listening with respect for the time and experience that went into their making.

This is very different to when I mix, which is intuitive. I often playing with tracks I haven’t listened to all the way through, teasing out their possibilities as they unfold. I suppose this is why ‘tracks’ are called ‘DJ tools’. I tend towards eclectic mixes. I don’t stick to genres, nor the latest releases. I’m not part of any scene, so I lack insider knowledge and don’t get sent anything exclusive. Also, I don’t mix regularly. I tell people I stopped more than a decade ago and the entry level Vestax controller I bought around that time is proof of it. (The company went bankrupt in 2014, which I only learned when I recovered my barely used Spin last year from storage).

I digress. After last night’s listening session I decided I would push these tracks to front of my ‘crate’ in Mixxx (free and open source) and shape my collection around them. I’ve noticed there is a lot of footwork in this folder, old and new. Today, I read some interviews with Jlin. Living in Gary, Indiana her early points of reference were footwork from Chicago, and she describes her sound as ‘EDM: Electronic Dance Music.’

I’ve been thinking about a notion of ‘riddim discursivity’. With reference to ‘urban dance music’ (UDM?), there is an established discourse about how certain looped samples laid the foundation for specific genres. Think of the ‘Funky Drummer’ in hip hop, the ‘Sleng Teng’ riddim in ragga, the ‘Amen Break’ in jungle, the ‘Volt Beat’ for funk carioca, reggaeton’s ‘Dem Bows’. I could happily spend hours (days, months, years) traveling down these wormholes, exploring the genealogies of such genres, but that’s not what I want to do right now. Notably, all of these genres emerged out of specific locals, often lower socio-economic enclaves of big cities — hip hop from the Bronx, New York; ragga from downtown Kingston, Jamaica; jungle, garage and grime from the estates of London; funk from Rio’s comunidades. With their unique histories and handful of pioneers these genres have since globalised and mutated. They have been opened up by a range of artists and production techniques and new/sub genres have emerged as music travels across peer-to-peer networks, blogs and file-sharing platforms; cross-infecting genres of bass.

So, I wonder what exactly is EDM? Most recorded music these days goes through some form of electronic, or more precisely, digital production. How does EDM differ from say, Electronica? It reminds me of IDM — ‘Intelligent Dance Music’. I don’t know where this term popped up. I vaguely recall reading an interview with Richard Devine in Cyclic Defrost, a zine associated with the weekly ‘Frigid’ nights organised by Sub Bass Snarl (Luke Dearnley and Seb Chan) in Sydney in the 1990s and early 2000s, that discussed IDM as a genre emerging as access to software, equipment and time became easier. It inferred some class dimension to this music. It probably encompassed producers such as Squarepusher and Autechre, to which I would add DJ Spooky, Matmos, Amon Tobin — I don’t know, who isn’t intelligent? Jace Clayton AKA DJ/Rupture used to describe himself as ‘the world’s smartest DJ’, or words to that effect. Richard D. James AKA Aphex Twin and Grant Wilson-Claridge, perhaps mischievously, named their label ‘Braindance’, to describe an electronic music movement and ‘way of life’ that: ‘encompasses the best elements of all genres’. Perhaps IDM simply announced a shift away from ‘four-on-the-floor’ rhythms into more ‘abstract’ styles of production that were not perceived to be so dance-floor friendly and better suited for headphone listening? IDM might also have signalled a delinking of production from geographically-locatable scenes, as music dispersed via networks rather than, say, record stores?

Anyhow, back to EDM. In a 2017 interview, Jlin discusses connecting online with the late DJ Rashad, regarded as one of the founders of footwork (a genre of urban dance music), when she started out as a producer. In a 2016 interview Jlin divulges that she hates clubbing and I began to wonder about her scene; who does she make music for? Jlin says her main sounding boards are her mother and best friend. Next I read an ‘up-to-the-time’ guide to footwork by Chicago-based producers RP Boo, Jana Rush, and DJ Manny and was surprised by their inclusion of tracks from producers based in Poland and Berlin.

While I’ve been collecting footwork and juke since before I withdrew as a DJ, the genre currently comprises much of a folder on my desktop labelled ‘Next Level’. Not all of the music gathered here is new, indeed tracks by the Two Lone Swordsmen date back to 1998. I’m enjoying the process of working out what stays in the mix, what gets culled and then figuring out what is missing — ‘curating my crate’, you might say.

I find that the music that remains is not necessarily music I like or that I feel ‘represents’ me or that I would listen to in another way — say, if I was going about some chores. Rather, what stays is music that I am curious to mix. Furthermore, with DJ software, the speed of a track — BPMs — need not necessarily govern what is most readily beat-matched. Pushing tracks well beyond their speeds (+/-24 is enough for me, but this range can easily be widened), opens up what is possible and introduces some novelty. While I know producers who have long designed their tracks to switch between tempos (80/160 BPM seems to be the footwork standard), lately I‘ve developed new respect for tracks that ‘connect’ between different genres.

Although I’ve a life-long fascination with rhythm, I’ve noticed that I habitually drop my interest in dance music (or any other genre), returning to it some years later, enthused to find ‘something new’. This pattern of behaviour is arguably a rhythm in itself. Another habit is to reach out to theory and then stumble into ways of doing theory that are not strictly academic. Hence, ‘Theory on the Radio / Theory in the Mixxx’ as the headline for this post and a description/prediction of how this ‘urban artistic-research’ project might evolve over the coming year/cycle.

I often find music by reading rather than listening; reading about producers, scenes and genres. Recently chatting to a friend and philosopher Bruno Besana, who sometimes collaborates with experimental musicians, he observed that music — and all art — is accompanied by a context or discourse that frames it, and that indicates what to be attentive to. But I’m also interested in what Kodwo Eshun termed ‘sonic fiction’, the interplay between close listening (or dancing or reading or looking or in other ways sensing), thought and the construction of narratives and concepts. Indeed, Eshun described himself as a ‘concept-engineer’ in his bio for More Brilliant than the Sun (1998) and this book alone is proof of how discourse can fold back to influence the music or whatever material that was initially being addressed, or diverge altogether into different fields. So, while I take pleasure in listening to finely detailed productions, I wouldn’t describe myself as an audiophile. Rather, I enjoy thinking with music, as a embodied process, recalling Kodwo Eshun observing his body reacting to jungle ‘faster than the speed of thought’. Another digression.

I write this in an attempt to articulate what I mean by pursuing an ‘eclectic sound’; a sound that connects to a broader, lifelong project about how to be in an ever-evolving present, marked by crises and inequality. Currently, I’m thinking with Sylvia Wynters’ urgings for specifically Black, colonially-oppressed and gendered people, to break from historical scriptings, and embrace invention [PDF]. Simultaneously, I’m thinking about Eshun’s speculation that the kinetic rhythms and forward pressure of jungle were somehow re-training or upgrading our bodily organs for what was to come. This is something that Steve Goodman AKA Kode9 picks up on in his book Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect and the Ecology of Fear (2010) in which he discusses (amongst other things) the ‘(sub)politics of frequency’ — by which the affective manipulation of sound (notably bass) is used to modulate the tensions of urban life, ‘transforming deeply engrained ambiences of fear or dread into other collective dispositions’ (p. xx). In a 2013 interview he says:

… for me, if the sound is right, then the politics are secondary. That is one of the key powers of music, to overload and short circuit people’s value systems and produce an intense encounter in which all other issues temporarily subside. It’s great where the music resonates with what you might think politically, but it’s not necessary, because the burden of political correctness can also be the ultimate vibe killer.

How can an eclectic sound might contribute to an effort to inhabit the world differently? Can alternative rhythms alter brain patterns and behaviours? What about communities who gather around these practices; might pursuing an ‘eclectic sound’ become ‘a way of life.’ A decade ago, my first point-of-reference as an eclectic selector was DJ/Rupture, these days it is Zíur who springs to mind.

It seems, mixing for me is a somewhat improvised, but no less habitual approach to elaborating on emancipatory impulses that are also ‘faster than the speed of thought’. Drives. So in this spirit of experimentation, this post concludes with some notes cribbed from last night’s listening session:

‘If Deejay was your trade’
and your job was to modulate bodies and time through sound — ‘vibes’;
emotions and energy,
push-and-pull people through rhythmic abstractions.
(You might)
manipulate the tick-tock passing of time and textures that trigger memory, nostalgia, fantasy and curiosity
dread
with speed and volume
(with or without chatter).
At best, a subjective experience transferred to others.
Find your niche and push it.