Specials of the year 2025
In a world where voices compete but rarely connect, deepening divides and ecological crises demand urgent attention, Where Sound Becomes Witness asks: how can listening and sounding become acts of collective witnessing and transformation?
2024
We listen to sound, but what if the sound listens back? Explore a publication in collaboration with the Rewire Festival 2024, which assembles essays, audio pieces, and a playlist reflecting on ideas about the importance of listening beyond one’s ear, its ethics, and its critical potential.
The TIMEZONES podcast series plunges into the world of artists and their practices, asking: what does living and working in culture and the arts involve in different countries, cities, and contexts today? TIMEZONES is co-initiated and co-produced by Norient and the Goethe-Institut.
Sonic Worlding is a regular Norient column. It invites writers and artists from all over the world to contemplate a music or sound-related phenomenon that has recently struck them, and put this into relation to the world in which they live. It encourages to think and speculate with and not only about music.
In this ongoing series, launched in 2012, we invite artists, writers, and researchers to curate a playlist of music videos from the country of their residence. We invite listeners to walk, accompanied by the curator’s comments, on the videos’ alternative geographies, and to create their own map of meanings and imaginations.
For norient members only
The fourth edition of Norient City Sounds dives into Bogotá’s diverse, creative struggles. NCS Bogotá explores the city’s margins, revealing contradictions through varied genres, backgrounds, and influences // La cuarta edición de Norient City Sounds se sumerge en la diversidad creativa y las luchas de Bogotá. NCS Bogotá explora los márgenes de la ciudad, revelando contradicciones a través de una mezcla de géneros, contextos e influencias.
Norient co-curates a regularly updated playlist on Spotify around music scenes in different cities, regions, and countries around the globe. Additionally, founder and director of Norient, Thomas Burkhalter, curates a mixtape for the Swiss national radio SRF3 on a regular basis.
The podcast Long Take: Life as an Artist dives into deep conversations with artists from across the globe, focusing on musicians and sound creators. Hosted by Norient founder, anthropologist, writer and audiovisual artist Thomas Burkhalter, it explores the personal journeys of these artists.
2023
The third edition of the Norient City Sounds series is moored in Delhi, India, as it tunes in to a polyphony of voices, songs, sounds, and narratives that reimagine and unconceal the various worlds and characters constituting the capital’s sonicities.
As a collaboration between Norient and the festival Klang Moor Schopfe, this Norient Online Special gathers artistic practices reflecting the complex sonic entanglements of human cultures, the environment, and non-human worlds.
This Special focuses on sound, aurality, and ecology in Morocco. In exchange with artists, musicians, and scientists, Gilles Aubry’s more-than-sonic approach covers a wide range of practices, including music archives, seismology, healing practices, industrial extractivism, and inter-species co-evolution.
How do artists relate to each other and their environments and how does it affect their music? In which way can new forms of listening lead to new perspectives? A publication in collaboration with the Rewire Festival 2023.
In this collaboration with the Berlin-based festival for music of the Iranian diaspora, Klangteppich, the festival’s artists and a guest author share their approaches to listening, to collaborative artistic creation, and to addressing complex historical backgrounds.
2022
The second Norient City Sounds Online Special travels to Beirut, Lebanon, a city that continues to witness an aggravating financial and economic crisis in the midst of prolonged political and social unrest.
In this first Norient City Sounds Online Special, we focus on Nairobi, Kenya, at a time when political and social pressures are rising in tandem with the cost of things and the noise of the approaching elections in Summer 2022.
For norient members only
This Special is based on the book Politics of Curatorship. It assembles essays, articles, poems, interviews, and a photo essay seeking to disentangle the ubiquitous term curation from any formalized definition, conceiving curating also as a queer, non-binary, or a mundane, individual activity that include one’s own experiences and perceptions.
2021
30 writers from 17 countries share their thoughts on today’s world through sound and music, unraveling narratives about worries, dreams, and hopes in the 21st century – from feminist activism in South American club music scenes to critiques of sound and space design as instruments of (colonial) power.
For norient members only
A multi-layered, multimedia approach to the open question of «Italian identity» in sound and music. Through a variety of approaches, from essay to memoir, interview, video playlist, and open letter, this Special hopes to foster a broader conversation on the past and present of Italian culture.
For norient members only
The podcast series You Are Here! is a musical position statement. Where are we right now? Where are we socially? Artistically? With our minds? How do we (re)connect musically? In five intense encounters, eight musicians and thirteen authors answer these questions, musically and verbally.
This Norient Special gathers three essays, a podcast, and a mixtape by South American writers and artists. They investigate how the pandemic and its shift from off- to online affects experimental music scenes in South America. The contributions are inspired by the In/Out Festival 2020.
2020
An examination of how political contexts of our time are transformed into musical production. Among many further accounts, we follow the sampling of car horns in Indonesia or we read about an Italian refugee project that uses smartphones as sampling resources. With case studies from all around the world.
Much is said about Orientalism in Western mainstream music videos. But how do musicians from the respective regions strike back? International curators and authors come together to research contemporary music videos from the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia, that re-imagine, parody, or deconstruct Orientalism.
When two friends collect money for the so-called «suffering in America» in the streets of Accra, is it for fun, political provocation, or a prophecy? Two Swiss filmmakers will answer these questions with the help of seven musicians from Ghana. A Norient Special with background articles to the documentary film Contradict.