When the Sound Listens Back from Mexico

Playlist

Listen to this playlist from Mabe Fratti, who compiles music from Mexico she currently likes.

This playlist is a part of the Norient Special When the Sound Listens Back, a publication in collaboration with Rewire Festival 2024. It assembles essays and audio pieces reflecting ideas about the importance of listening beyond one’s ear, its ethics, and critical potential. Curated and edited by Philipp Rhensius and Katía Truijen.

Biography

Mabe Fratti, Guatemalan avant-garde cellist, is known for her etherial voice and music. She dwells between the noise, classical, the electronic, and the indie realms of contemporary music. Follow her on Instagram, Bandcamp, Spotify, Facebook, X, or SoundCloud.

Published on March 11, 2024

Last updated on March 11, 2024

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When the Sound Listens Back

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Peek – AI! Brought to its Knees

Radio

by Urs Rihs,

Radio Bollwerk

Artificial Intelligence turns emotive on a Swiss underground radio dataset and gives up in peace – collective curatorial practices winning over. This radio feature is a collaboration between Norient and Radio Bollwerk. Based in Bern, we share the same city of origin with this Swiss internet radio.

The feature is to be seen as a local add-on to the Norient book Politics of Curatorship: Collective and Affective Interventions, released in Spring 2023, and a creative by-product of the curation of a Swiss underground spotlight in the program of the 13^th edition of our Festival in January 2024 by the radio crew. Radio Bollwerk maintains a network of primarily DJs, but appears to house a concert collective in its studio and to have collaborated with numerous contemporary artists and festivals all over Switzerland.

In this very feature, various artists, curators, and scientists are involved, prominently and in order of appearance: Duex Fontana, art director and programmer of the club and festival Bad Bonn in Düdingen, Sara Palin aka Palinstar, singer and musician from Zurich, Dany Digler, art director and programmer of the club Le Singe in Biel-Bienne, Dr. Marzia Varutti from the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences in Geneva, Laurence Wagner, art director of the Belluard Bollwerk festival in Fribourg, and last but not least Miro Caltagirone, singer of the bands Puts Marie and Mister Milano, musician, and actor.

tracklist

Palinstar: «Smooth Operator» (unpublished)
Trash Mantra (Dany Digler): «Don’t do Business with the Devils» (unpublished)
Swarm Composing (PLOUK & splatz.space): «Free Swarm». (PLOUK 14.05.2023)

trailer video

This feature was produced by Urs Rihs, any rights to the material used in the broadcast stay with Radio Bollwerk or the authors.

Biography

Urs Rihs (1987, he/him) is co-founder of the internet Radio Bollwerk in Bern, Switzerland, hosting a morning show on the resident FM station Radio RaBe, programming concerts in the underground and beyond since 2010. Hosting club nights, and rushing on sound 24/7 anyways, he views the profane in music as paramount, like pasta e fagioli on a table with friends. Urs is deeply dedicated to the local scene, yet, it doesn’t matter to him where you are from, as long as you come from somewhere with attitude and a frank spirit. He is also a freelance journalist and writer for the collectively attended KSB Kulturmagazin, which works on forms in the twilight of reportage, critical theory, and art. «To experiment is to be hunting chance. It takes time and faith», he is reported to say – «but it’s most rewarding when you catch that spark». He has realized various radio features for festivals such as Face-Z in Geneva and the Lausanne Underground Film and Music Festival (LUFF). Follow him on Instagram.

Biography

Radio Bollwerkist ein Gemeinschaftsradio mit Avantgarde-Clubmusik in der DNA. Mit Satelliten, auf verschiedensten Bühnen und in möglichst allen Sparten. Qualität hörbar machen, das Spektrum des Untergrunds auffächern, Musik im Netz – 24/7.

Radio Bollwerk is a community radio with avant-garde club music in its DNA. With its satellites, on various stages and in as many sections as possible. Making quality audible, overflowing on different scenes to capture the depth of underground music, music online – 24/7. Follow them on Facebook, Instagram, SoundCloud, and on their Website.

Published on March 19, 2024

Last updated on March 19, 2024

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Sonic Traces: From Switzerland

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Raging Affirmations

Sound Piece

by Shanti Suki Osman

In her sound piece, artist and educator Shanti Suki Osman explores the sonority of rage. Listen to a new episode of the Sonic Worlding column, which asks how one’s positionality is created by the people who listen.

In 2023, I was invited by friend and dancer Birte Opitz to feature in her dance and voice performance, Raging Affirmations, which was performed at the end of August and beginning of September 2023. The performance was a beautiful opportunity to sing and sound and explore the notion of rage and rage. It became apparent that narratives of rage do not always correspond with or complement each other. Alongside rehearsing and workshopping ideas for this performance, I was also developing methodologies for my current academic research which involved listening and positionalities and, more specifically, how my positionality is created by the people who listen to me. Whilst writing about these methodologies, I felt connections and repetitions from and in the performance and vocal work I had also been doing. This piece, Listening to Positionalised Rage, is an attempt to concretize some of those connections and considerations in sound.

«Sonic Worlding» is a monthly Norient column. It invites writers and artists from all over the world to to think and speculate with and not only about music. Where most music writing treats music as something that can be categorised and placed in pre-determined boxes (personality cults, end-of-year lists, genres, origins, styles), «Sonic Worlding» is interested in the vast potential of rhythms, ideas, and worlds that are still to be unlocked, attempting to spin new webs of thought spanning the globe. Edited & curated by Norient editor Philipp Rhensius.

Biography

Shanti Suki Osman is a Berlin-based artist, educator, and researcher working with song, sound, and radio, exploring the topics of identities, privilege and power, anti-racism, and feminism. She is a research associate and doctoral candidate for Music Pedagogy at Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg in Germany. Her PhD research investigates the experiences of women* of color and Black women* studying popular music in German Musikhochschulen.

Published on February 13, 2024

Last updated on August 21, 2024

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Sonic Worlding

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When the Sound Listens Back from Mexico

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