Music & Sociality
Nakul Krishnamurthy in conversation with Daniel Spicer
14:30
Yewande Adeniran (Ifeoluwa)
16:00
Leila Adu-Gilmore
17:30
Shzr Ee Tan & Anjeline De Dios
19:00
Kunstquartier Bethanien5 € per panel / 10 € day pass at the door
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The Wire magazine contributor Daniel Spicer will speak to Nakul Krishnamurthy on his work, which is shaped by contact with and between Indian classical, Western classical, experimental, and electronic musics. Yewande Adeniran, also known as Ifeoluwa, is a scholar and DJ; her participatory seminar »What the hell is the Black Avant-Garde?« asks audience members to join her in thinking through how liberation and Blackness can be felt and understood in dance music. Composer, performer, and researcher Leila Adu-Gilmore considers Ghanaian hiplife and afrobeats as crystallisations of moments of social and convivial improvisation. Shzr Ee Tan and Anjeline De Dios, who spoke online in our winter Discourse programme, will come together in Berlin to explore the sonic lives of migrant workers in Southeast Asia, sourcing both historic and current experiences.
Nakul Krishnamurthy in Conversation with Daniel Spicer
Conversation hosted by The Wire magazine.
What the hell is the Black Avant-Garde? Talk by Ifeoluwa
The contemporary Black Avant Garde follows the critical artistic and academic tradition that looks at centering and presenting alternative conceptions of Blackness. The real, what we experience in the phenomena world vs noumena, the metaphysical world, is central to these discussions. Examples will be taken from contemporary forms of expression within both the written and sonic realm.
The seminar aims to provide a contemporary exploration into the rhythmic analysis and sonic portrayal of Black dissent against the prevailing mis-horiticising of the Black experience – from an anglophone Western perspective: How non-linear time and multiple temporalities are imperative to Black Liberation from the »end« of slavery till now and how negrophillia and neoliberalism has been able to thrive post Black square.
Critical Sonic Practice. Talk by Leila Adu-Gilmore
The author’s article »Critical Sonic Practice: Decolonizing Boundaries in Music Research« in the Continental Thought and Theory Journal explains their term, »critical sonic practice,« and outlines guidelines for decolonising music research, such as »radical reclassification,« thus broadening ranges of diverse electronic musics for analysis. European colonisers and settlers used music, culture, and other art forms in tandem with religion as tools of colonisation. These softer politics stripped away local practices, neatly packaging cultural production away in galleries and in the case of music, transcriptions and recordings. Cultural factors preempt and affect the music of non-black peoples and cultures, omitting a full picture of creativity and negatively affecting marginalised and majoritarian music creators alike.
Critical sonic practice brings its ideas into the classroom through founding NYU’s undergraduate Global Electronic Music (GEM I) course, which has run for the past three years. The Critical Sonic Practice Lab dissolves splits in music research, practicing and publishing and investigating electronic musics that have typically been left out of the music theory, composition, and music technology.
Transnational Ears: The Acoustic Lives of Migrant Workers in Asia. Talk by Anjeline De Dios and Shzr Ee Tan
Can music and sound shape migrant life? What does migration sound like? From 1970s nightclubs in Hong Kong and Japan to 2020 lockdowns in Singaporean homes, Southeast Asian migrant workers—such as Filipinx musicians and Indonesian domestic workers—have always confronted the transnational realities of race, class, culture, and identity through practices of listening and sounding. In this panel, Shzr Ee Tan and Anjeline De Dios will come together in Berlin to reflect on how historic and current experiences of migrants' acoustic lives, expressed as leisure, livelihood, performance, religion, and community, offer a provocative register from which to attune to the embodied possibilities of decolonisation.
The artist talk with Nakul Krishnamurthy is presented by The Wire.