Filmstill: «Silêncio: Voices of Lisbon», Judit Kalmár, Céline Coste Carlisle, 2020.

Lisbon Before and After

Short Essay

Silêncio – Vozes de Lisboa captures a transformational moment in Lisbon via the traditional music of fado and the effects of gentrification. André Santos, who was born and bred in the city, finds the nuance – sadness, loss, nostalgia, hope, and renewed energy – in it all.

→ Check all articles of this special
→ Download PDF with introduction and table of contents

I envy the courage of Marta Miranda facing her audience – the patrons of her bar, TascaBeat do Rosário – to tell them she is about to close its doors for the final time. The disappearance of social places, old and new, has become an all-too-familiar story to citizens of Lisbon over the last ten years. The story of Marta and TascaBeat is a heartbreaking one for those of us who call Lisbon home.

What is admirable about her gesture is the way she addresses her audience – mostly tourists – without any prejudice. She understands how important they are for her – for Lisbon – and she understands that in the 21^stcentury we are all tourists. We all use Ryanair and EasyJet. Tourism is the reason her business thrived and it is the reason why it is closing.

Fado Is Life

This ambivalence towards tourism in Lisbon is well portrayed in Silêncio – Vozes de Lisboa (Silence – Voices Of Lisbon), by Judit Kalmár and Céline Coste Carlisle. Co-director Carlisle, who has been living in Portugal for more than two decades, doubles up as an informal guide to Lisbon and the people that live here. The pair use fado, a style of music that is not just traditional but also embedded in the DNA of the most emblematic neighborhoods of the city, to tell a tale about how Lisbon is changing. It’s a change brought about by gentrification, aggressive tourism, and a lack of long-term planning, in terms of both urbanism and economics.

There lies the ambivalence. Fado is the centerpiece of the film, which offers a comprehensive explanation of its roots, its meanings, and how it has developed over the years. But Kalmár and Carlisle also do a great job of showing how it is an attraction for tourists and a focal point for the export of Lisbon and Portuguese culture. It is something genuine, learned by the lived experience of a city, its citizens and relationships.

More to the Story

Ten years ago you could count on your fingers the number of people walking downtown or on the most popular avenues after 9pm. Tourism created a different dynamic in the city: It diversified the places people could go – even locals – and gentrification brought new vision and ways of doing business. It brought new people to old and renovated places, and created new places to go and be. Places that were empty ten years ago were suddenly full, thriving.

But mass tourism and Airbnb also forced neighborhoods to change, to offer «the real experience» of living in Lisbon. I don’t know what that is, because I have been living here my whole life and the experience isn’t «real», it is just «experience». But I do know that the pursuit of that «real experience» forced a transformation in the city that no one saw coming. Yes, it’s sad to no longer see some familiar faces, places, and sounds, but it’s also exciting to live and breathe in a multicultural city that adapts so easily to this transformation.

Better and Worse

Fado is a glimpse of light from another time, another way of living, that most of the big cities have lost. It attracts people to Lisbon, which invariably changes the whole dynamic of the place, its DNA. Fado is a portal for a myriad of genuine and pure characteristics one can find in Lisbon. It is an experience, a new reality, that has been transforming the city.

If Marta Miranda perfectly personifies the ambivalence of tourism – the good and bad – the other star of Silêncio, Ivone Días, embodies the essence of fado and how it is struggling. Días, who is over 80 years old, has lived with the music her whole life. Born and raised in Alfama, she became a local legend, singing fado from a young age. Tourism forced her out of her house and she now lives in the suburbs with her daughter.

She represents how fado is a form of living struggle and how it is at risk of disappearance. She still sings in Alfama, for the joy of locals and, yes, tourists too. There are many Ivones in Lisbon. And a lot of Martas too, who study the fado tradition and give it new purpose for modern times. But the rapid changes in the city leave no room for them. Kalmár and Carlisle have captured a transforming moment in Lisbon. For better or worse, things will never be the same.

The film «Silêncio – Vozes de Lisboa» by Judit Kalmár and Céline Coste Carlisle was officially selected at the Norient Film Festival NFF 2021. See full program here.

This text is part of Norient’s essay publication «Nothing Sounds the Way It Looks», published in 2021 as part of the Norient Film Festival 2021.

Bibliographic Record: Rhensius, Philipp. 2021. «Editorial: NFF 2021 Essay Collection.» In Nothing Sounds the Way It Looks, edited by Philipp Rhensius and Lisa Blanning (NFF Essay Collection 2021). Bern: Norient. (Link).

Trailer

Biography

André Santos is a freelance writer specializing in cinema, television, music, books, and videogames. He was an editor at Time Out Lisbon and currently collaborates with Observador and Sábado. He also co-manages the record store Flur and the record label Holuzam, both based in Lisbon. Follow him on his Website.

Links

André Santos, Clive Bell: «Q&A Silencio: Voices of Lisbon» (Norient)

Published on January 05, 2021

Last updated on April 09, 2024

Topics

Capitalism

Place

Tradition

City

Tourism

All Topics

Specials

Nothing Sounds the Way It Looks

Norient Festival

Snap

print as pdf

Filmstill: «Other Music», Puloma Basu, Rob Hatch-Miller, 2019.

Underdog Music

Short Essay

by Emilie Friedlander

Other Music was a seminal NYC record store for 20 years. Emilie Friedlander, a frequent shopper there, reflects on the film of the same name and a legacy lost to the algorithm.

→ Check all articles of this special
→ Download PDF with introduction and table of contents

In the early 2000s, walking into an independent record store in New York City was frightening – especially if you were young and the kind of person whose sense of self was bound up in music. Years before the internet made rarefied musical expertise something one could access at the click of a button, knowing about outsider psych and tropicalia records that nobody else did was the ultimate currency of cool – and walking up to the counter with your selection felt less like a commercial transaction than a test. Clerks at East Village institution Kim’s Video, a dry cleaning shop turned film and music emporium, were so prickly with customers they deemed to have sub-par taste that one former patron compared his love for the place to an «S & M» relationship. (I worked there for a few summers in high school, and he wasn’t off the mark.)

The first time I wandered into Other Music, a cramped hole-in-the-wall on West Fourth Street founded in 1995 by three former Kim’s employees, I felt like I had walked into the most intimidating record store of all. In what felt like a punk move at the time, owners Josh Madell and Chris Vanderloo had set up shop catty-corner to a giant Tower Records; like a David to that corporate retail Goliath, the shop seemed perfectly situated to attract foot traffic from lost customers who hadn’t been able to find something they wanted to hear across the street. And instead of the usual headers, like «rock» and «world music», its inventory was divided into sections that seemed designed to disorient one’s mental schema of the lines of genre and taste.

Counter Culture

There was «THEN», for musicians who were no longer around and kicking; «IN», for the sort of vaguely fashionable indie releases one might read about on Pitchfork; and «OUT», for more abstract sounds of the Stockhausen variety. There was a shelf dedicated to up-and-coming hip hop artists in the city (rapper Beans was a former employee, and was rumored to routinely recommend albums by the Antipop Consortium, his own group); an unusually extensive psychedelia and krautrock section; and even a card dedicated to a genre the store had invented called «Decadanse», for vintage easy listening music in the lineage of Serge Gainsbourg. In what felt like a mission statement for the entire operation, «Out» was the first thing you saw when you walked in the door.

And yet, as Rob Hatch-Miller and Puloma Basu’s quietly poignant retrospective of the store suggests, there was always something strangely utopian about the place. Contrary to the overwhelming whiteness and maleness of record store culture in the aughts – a facet of the hipster legacy we can be thankful no longer holds much primacy, even as we lament the demise of record stores – its staff genuinely reflected the diversity of the city. And as much as it was the kind of music-geek mecca that Depeche Mode’s Martin Gore, one of many high-profile musicians interviewed in the film, would make a point of visiting whenever he passed through the city – its clerks always seemed more interested in sharing their knowledge than hoarding it. In one scene, we see a staffer search the store up and down to help a young woman and her mother track down an actual Depeche Mode album, frantically pantomiming the album cover as another searches for the out-of-print record online.

Team Humanity

After hearing stories from Animal Collective and Interpol about how Other Music was the only shop that was willing to stock their scrappy early recordings, and learning how gushing word-of-mouth recommendations and online reviews from its employees sparked international cult interest in records like Gary Wilson’s You Think You Really Know Me and William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, it’s hard not to feel heartbroken when we see people emptying out the room and breaking down the shelves in 2016, when the shop became yet another casualty of the internet. Duane Harriott, the clerk who rediscovered Gary Wilson and who everybody else seems to regard as the most prolific tastemaker of the bunch, tells us he thinks he’ll remember the store as a place where «the underdog always won». Which brings us to the film’s most painful insight, however conflicted about record snob culture we may be: what other underdogs will we never find out about when algorithms, instead of humans, are doing the curating?

The film «Other Music» by Puloma Basu and Rob Hatch-Miller was officially selected at the Norient Film Festival NFF 2021. See full program here.

This text is part of Norient’s essay publication «Nothing Sounds the Way It Looks», published in 2021 as part of the Norient Film Festival 2021.

Bibliographic Record: Rhensius, Philipp. 2021. «Editorial: NFF 2021 Essay Collection.» In Nothing Sounds the Way It Looks, edited by Philipp Rhensius and Lisa Blanning (NFF Essay Collection 2021). Bern: Norient. (Link).

Trailer

Biography

Emilie Friedlander is an independent culture reporter and essayist from New York City. She co-hosts the podcast «The Culture Journalist». Follow her on Instagram, X, LinkedIn, or on her Website.

Published on January 05, 2021

Last updated on March 11, 2024

Topics

Music Business

Curation

All Topics

Specials

Nothing Sounds the Way It Looks

Norient Festival

print as pdf

Filmstill: «Her Bijî Granî», George Mürer, 2020.

A Yearning for Coherence

Short Essay

by Martin Stokes

Love songs tend to be seen as unpolitical. Granî however, the energetic Kurdish wedding music merging folk with electronic music, contains significant political meanings. An essay by Martin Stokes on the power of hidden dissent cultures, inspired by George Mürer’s film Her Bijî Granî.

→ Check all articles of this special
→ Download PDF with introduction and table of contents

The bus hurtles over a mountain pass, scruffy town outskirts flash by, flat rooftops, rocks, grass. A frenetic, electric pulse, and a young man’s urgent singing. «I went on Facebook, I saw my beloved’s face, I go to her page, I can’t see her picture, I send her a friend request… she won’t accept, some kid from Derik will steal her away, some kid from Germany will steal her away», sings a protagonist in the film Her Bijî Granî by George Mürer. Social media promises connection and desire’s end, but only multiplies the anguish – we all know that.

Here though, the beloved – seen but not seen, all powerful but passive, the threat to the social order but also the key to its reproduction – has significant historical, literary, and political meanings. Love is a persistent undercurrent in the Kurdish wedding music in Southeast Anatolia (today’s Türkiye) whose key figures are portrayed in the film. Love takes shape as a yearning for coherence – and change.

If We Loved One Another

No easy matter, given the states of emergency, the grinding poverty, the migration, and the cultural marginalization that have been the norm in these Anatolian borderlands. «If we just loved one another we would be the richest people in the world» observes Mohammed Ali Tejo, an old and tired voice in the film. «If only we didn’t just stand around abject, accepting those rotten thieving bastards.»

The 17^th century Ottoman love lyric, fed from many sources, took shape in the emerging tensions of absolutism and empire. Filtering through an Anatolia torn by famine, migration, and millenarianism, it became a mystical as well as political cry for justice. Such cries demand response, of course. This is a fundamental ethical principle of vocalization. But they can attract the wrong kind of attention. In Anatolia they would seem, as a basic condition of their survival, to have dispersed over time in complex fields of translation and what I would label «trans-sonicization»: The movement of repertoires from voice to instrument and from instrument to instrument.

A Message of Endurance

In the distorted and layered «elektro» soundscapes of granî at Kurdish weddings, Mürer’s interlocutors tell him they hear the kilam (poetic narrations) of the dengbêj – dramatic accounts of the allure and threat of the beloved to the tribal order. They also tell him they can hear more contemporary lyrics, like Armenian Kurdish singer Aram Dikran’s «Ez Kal Kirin li Ciwani». Dikran’s parents fled the Armenian genocide to Qamishlo, in what became Syria. Dikran (1934–2009) himself lived for a while in Soviet Armenia, and then Athens. He performed in Diyarbakır/Amed, his parents’ home, in 2008, to huge crowds. He wanted to be buried there, but, in the event, the Turkish authorities refused permission.

Dikran’s song speaks overtly of love’s loss of hope and vitality. It underlines a message of endurance, passed from generation to generation, and exchanged between the many communities here that have reason to feel harshly treated by history. «You made me old with your beautiful youth/But I was young, as you know well/You’ve scattered the leaves of my tree/And brought autumn, even though it was spring.» A vibrant culture of dissent hides in plain sight at these borderland weddings.

The film «Her Bijî Granî» by George Mürer was officially selected at the Norient Film Festival NFF 2021. See full program here.

This text is part of Norient’s essay publication «Nothing Sounds the Way It Looks», published in 2021 as part of the Norient Film Festival 2021.

Bibliographic Record: Rhensius, Philipp. 2021. «Editorial: NFF 2021 Essay Collection.» In Nothing Sounds the Way It Looks, edited by Philipp Rhensius and Lisa Blanning (NFF Essay Collection 2021). Bern: Norient. (Link).

Trailer

Biography

Martin Stokes has been traveling around this part of the world and listening to its music since the early 1980s. He teaches at King’s College London. He is the author of «The Republic of Love: Cultural Intimacy in Turkish Popular Music» (Chicago 2010). Follow him on LinkedIn.