Global Sonic Culture

P 4th March 2022

Introduce to a contemporary world of distinct music, sounds and music videos. Niche Music from Johannesburg to Helsinki, China to Chile that speaks of a changing geography of multi-layered modernities, far beyond old ideas of North versus South, West versus East.

Norient is an audio-visual gallery and a community (of practice) for the sound of the world: For contemporary music, quality journalism, cutting-edge research, projects and events like the Norient Film Festival (NFF). Norient conceives music, sound, and noise as seismographs of our time, facilitates space and place for thinkers and artists from currently fifty countries to tell new and different stories of the now and tomorrow.

The Politics of Folk Dances by Johanna Hilari

by Johanna Hilari

«Somos Sur» by Ana Tijoux, featuring Shadia Mansour, is an anti-colonialist statement of autonomy. To underline this, the video clip re-contextualizes two significant folk dances, which historically are linked to both socio-political identification and struggle.

«Somos Sur» represents Arabic and South American communities identifying themselves through cultural practices of pre-colonial origin. The two folk dances tinku and dabkeh aim to highlight the insubordinate character of a heterogeneous but nonetheless coherent community of the global South. Social cohesiveness is staged through a joyful and combative manner. While Ana Tijoux and Shadia Mansour appeal to autonomy in their lyrics, a cheerful tinku and dabkeh dancing crowd visualizes the fighting spirit of their words.

The music shows a strong cultural tension in its rhythm and rapid, within its passion and emotion. People dressed in high saturated colours dancing happily and foxy, with national flags.

New Music Decolonization in Eight Difficult Steps By George E. Lewis.

1) Move beyond kinship. Invest in new populations.

2) Give up on meritocracy.

3) Diversify school music programs.

4) Encourage ensembles to commission

5) Make decolonization an explicitly foregrounded part of cultural policy.

6) Internationalize music curation decisions.

7) Encourage media discussions of new music decolonization.

8) Change of consciousness.

“I have suggested that a mental envelope of creolization would allow contemporary music to move beyond its Eurocentric conception of musical identity.”

His memorable collaboration with the sound art collective Ultra-red at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2012 considered this question: “What is the sound of freedom?”

What is the Sound of Freedom?

IN BRIEF

For day five of Ultra-red’s project, the investigation will review the previous work undertaken together, and perhaps draw up a summary of reflections and pose some future questions.

IN MORE DETAIL

Who

Founded in 1994 in Los Angeles, Ultra-red is a sound art and popular education collective committed to the practice of listening as a form of organizing.

What

Ultra-red have been working with many different communities in New York for many years. For their project with us, they have invited these groups to join them for 3 hours each day, and to enact, reflect upon and codify their experiences of 4 different protocols for listening, which will each address the question: what is the sound of freedom? Each protocol will has been devised and will be led by a different invited guest: George Lewis, members of the House|Ballroom scene, Nancy Nevárez and Fred Moten. The final session will review the previous four days and develop summary questions and propositions.

Each 3-hour session can be viewed as a performative action to be observed, or a collective learning process to be joined.

Why

While the image serves as the foundation for much of our understanding of activist art, Ultra-red turn the focus to the ear: the sound of communities organising themselves, the acoustics of spaces of dissent, the demands and desires in our voices and in our silences, and the echoes of historical memories of struggle.

Ultra-red propose a very simply but effective switch: instead of understanding music as a process of organising sound, they take seriously the political aspect of the term ‘organising’, and they work to find ways that combine political, popular educational methods of organising with the tools of experimental music (ways of listening). They have developed what you might call a pedagogy of the ear.

Kinds of listening involved

Freedom – to ask: what is the sound of freedom?

Organised – to replace the idea of music as organised sound, with a notion of political organising, and to use listening as a tool to aid this.

Our topic is based on “What is the sound of political disengagement based on the Ukraine crisis?” We went to casino and recorded some voices of people ‘playing with money’ and we also recorded the sound of footsteps, drunk smashing the bottles, students in ual gossiping. The reflections of those sounds which were recorded by Zoom h5 shew a strong tension that people were careless of the war, paying no attention to the economy and still maintained doing the same things daily.