How does music affect the image of a city? In his recent book «Deindustrialisation and Popular Music», Giacomo Bottà elaborates the relationship between de-industrialization and genres like house, industrial or post-punk.
«Timezones» – Episode 2. An electro-acoustic composition based on the interviews with the three artists Mara Miccichè, Branko Džinović, and Vukašin Đelić, the close friends and collaborators of the podcast producer, who have never met each other.
The pandemic-driven changes have produced new sensory dissonances: While some urban spaces became eerily quiet, ubiquitous video calls turn the domestic into a public space flooded by multiple voices and sounds. What do these sonic worlds tell us about the social?
Nairobi’s next generation music producers and performing artists speak out – Episode 1 of the new Timezones Podcast Series, co-initiated and co-produced by Norient and the Goethe Institute.
Norient met with Firas Abou Fakher of the indie rock band Mashrou’ Leila who is among the progressive voices of the young Lebanese generation, to talk about Lebanon’s complicated history, clichés about the Arab world, and the role of music in times of change.
In this Norient Special, we examine how political contexts of our time are transformed into musical production. With case studies from all around the world, this Norient Special approaches sampling as a tool for critical thought and a way of alternative storytelling.
Music producer Eomac describes how his sampling strategy has changed over time. Starting out, he used any sound available. Now, as an experienced musician, he is confronted by complex ethical questions. Today, he emphasizes the intent behind sampling as key.
Music scholar and producer Francesco Fusaro discusses one of his sample-based tracks. It is through the voice that dance music has proven a fertile territory for the expression of the political and social concerns that underpinned its history from the beginning.
Recently, dance music producers have attempted to sample Islamic sonic materials and courted controversy with the establishment in North Africa and the Middle East. Is sampling a tool that can be used indiscriminately across cultures? Or are there limits to its reach?
The song «Apesar de Você» by Chico Buarque is one of the most iconic protest songs published in the context of the Brazilian military dictatorship. A sound collage made from clippings of the word «despite» in various instances of Brazilian pop music.
The cut-up technique by William Burroughs is one of sampling’s predecessors. Burroughs’ logic of the perverse agent stealthily using the medium for manipulation seems foreboding of 21st century phenomena like the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal our author argues.
