topics

Why New Yorks’ underground doesn’t give a fuck about Trump or why satirical rap in Pakistan can be life threatening.

About the micropolitical qualities of sound as a non-conscious experience of intensity.

How do musicians fill or widen the gap of feeling at home in a world that is radically unhomely?

About the ups and downs of cross-cultural creativity: Korean reggae, vaporwave, and the worldwide Hindu Holi festival.

How can sound & music be preserved and at the same time evolve in line with the present?

A form of attachement beyond categories like home or nation but to people, feelings, or sounds across the globe.

From hypersexualised dance culture in baile funk to the empowering body culture in queer lifestyles.

How does this ideology, but also its sheer physical expressions such as labor affect cultural production? From hip hop’s «bling» culture to critical evaluations of cultural funding.

From political music in the GDR, the trouble of punk musicians in China and the dangerous life of kurdish folk singers in Turkey.

Why do people in Karachi yell rather than talk and how does the sound of Dakar or Luanda affect music production?

From classism in techno clubs to clashing ideals of masculinity in Brazilian «bate bola».

From Beyoncés colonial stagings in mainstream pop to the ethical problems of Western people «documenting» non-Western cultures.

On new cultural implications of Meme Music, and how commnunication is more and more a result of power relations disguised in social networks.

From Bangladeshi electronica to global «black midi» micro scenes.

From Muslim taqwacore to how the rave scene in Athens counters the financial crisis.

From machine-assisted musicking to the struggle of creating under precarious circumstances and in a world in which work rules everything.

Can a small chinese radio show about Uyghur music stand against the censorshop of the Communist Party of China? Are art residencies useful?

From art exhibitions to djing to personal Instagram feeds, we look at curation from multiple perspectives.

From breakdance in Baghdad, the rebel dance pantsula in South Africa to the role of intoxications in club music: Dance can be a form a self-expression or self-loosing.

Desires are produced personally and impersonally: About music as desiring machine and the elasticity of bodies.

Does the global appropriation of kuduro exploit or reshape the identity of Angolans? How are «local» music genres like guayla sustained outside of Eritrea?

Digitization means empowerment: for niche musicians, queer artists and native aliens that connect online to create safe spaces.

Can a bedroom producer change the world? How do artists operate in undersupplied conditions?

Ecology describes the relationships among living organisms. At Norient, we add sounds and music, asking, for instance: what does a field recording tell about the environment it was recorded?

What happens when a Muscovite electronic producer meets Circassian folk musicians? What rules are needed for intercultural cooperation between individuals?

What happens when U.S.-blogger collects african music and offers it for free? What is the difference between «textually signaled» and «textually unsignaled»?

About Indian musicians in German pedestrian zones and the relationshis of music and place in academic research.

From Self-Orientalism in Arab music to the sheer exploitation of Brazilian funk music by acclaimed artists: how exotica examine aesthetics playing with the other and cultural misunderstandings.

Music and art that dealing with the unfinished and undefined.

Why is a female Black Brazilian MC from a favela frightening the middle class? Is the reggaeton dance «perreo» misogynist or a symbol of female empowerment?

What is conveyed or represented by a particular arrangement or sequence of things.

A generative practice that promotes different knowledge. One that listens is never at a distance but always in the middle of the sound heard.

Loneliness can feel like isolation, but can also be a positive solitude by keeping distance from the worlds’ chaos.

Artistic endeavours aimed to certain tastes and norms of majorities.

What happens, when artists move from one to another country? For example, when an Arab artist replaces the big tractors in her the village with big jeeps of the West.

Musicians need to pay rent and taxes. But their relationship to money is highly ambigious.

About fees, selling records, and public funding: How musicians strive for a living in the digital era.

Why does a Kenyan producer of the instrumental style EDM add vocals to his tracks? This topic is about HOW things are done, not WHAT.

Watch how cutting-edge music from Brazil to Singapore is represented in moving images.

From instruments made of plastic waste of the ocean to questions about a futurist naturalism which embraces technology for aesthetic emancipation.

Why Asia is not a continent and how the aesthetics of the NON Worldwide collective create new utopian notions of multi-centred origins.

From the music format «78 rpm», the melancholic echoes of a dubbed out rave night in London, and parodic mockings of «perfect house wifes» by female Nigerian pop musicians.

Does one really need the other in order to understand oneself?

When the world gets too small, some escape to the cosmos as a free space for imagination.

From post-digital pop mocking the music history to Romanian folk music turning into a meme culture.

What is «Treble Culture»? How does what one hears affect what one sees?

What’s the idea behind a traditional brass band from Vienna playing at 5 am in the morning? How does physical presence of artists affect the music they play?

Place remains important. Either for traditional minorities such as the Chinese Lisu or hyper-connected techno producers.

How did the internet change the power dynamic in global music? How does Egyptian hip hop attempt to articulate truth to power?

About Tunisian rappers risking their life to criticize politics and musicians affirming 21^st century misery in order to push it into its dissolution.

Queer is a verb, not a noun. Thinking & acting queerly is to think across boundaries, beyond what is deemed to be normal.

How artistis deal with this non-natural but political category as a result of its ideological dominance.

From priests claiming to be able to shapeshift into an animal to Irish folk musicians attempting to unify Protestants and Catholics.

How artists deal with the practice that some call «time-travel» and others «audiotopia».

From Pakistani wrestling practice «kushti» to muezzin singing contests in Turkey.

Sampling is political: about the use of chicken clucks or bomb sounds in current music.

Does a crematorium really have worst sounds in the world? Is there a sound free of any symbolic meaning?

How do acoustic environments affect human life? In which way can a city entail sounds of repression?

From world known reggae musicians fighting against the devil to the black metal scene in Indonesia.

How does the artits’ relationship to the gear affect music? How to make the climate change audible?

From the electronic music duo Gabber Modus Operandi discussing toxic tourism in Bali to the growing displacement of fado culture in Lisbon as an effect of gentrification.

From westernized hip hop in Bhutan to the instrumentalization of «lusofonia» by Portuguese cultural politics.

From afrofuturist parallel worlds to decoding strategies of emancipatory sounds: Examinations of music striving for a life worth living.

From linguistic violence in grime, physical violence against artists at the Turkish Gezi protests, and violence propagation in South African gangster rap.

From the political implications of human voice to its potential of un-making sense.

What is it to be a voyeur in a world where everybody sees each other? What’s the difference between obsessed observation and the mundane swiping through Instagram?

How does Syrian death metal sound in the midst of the civil war? Where is the border between political aesthetization and inappropriate exploitation of death?

From Korean visual kei to Brazilian rasterinha, or the dangers of suddenly rising to fame at a young age.