While techno and house have become widely commodified by white Europeans, Tedra Wilson’s documentary Dark City Beneath the Beat shows how Baltimore Club kept its highly localized aesthetics, and proves the richness of Black club music in the 21st century.
A body is not just perceiving sounds, it is also their medium. Here is an essay about the materiality of sound and how the body shapes the listening process.
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.
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 «Beating Heart Project» repurposes ethnomusicological recordings from the International Library of African Music to raise money for charitable projects. A discussion of the project’s sampling ethics and the supposed unequal power relations inherent in EDM.
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.
