Norient (Thomas Burkhalter, Simon Grab, Michael Spahr): “Sonic Traces: From the Arab World”
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Norient (Thomas Burkhalter, Simon Grab, Michael Spahr): Sonic Traces: From the Arab World
Sonic Traces: From the Arab World
Audio-visual performance, 70 min, September 3, 2011
live produced by Thomas Burkhalter, Simon Grab and Michael Spahr
We people in the west probably tend to underestimate the fact that it is, above all, the people on the fringes of the western hemisphere who profit from the global interconnectedness, from the open exchange of information, from Freeware and Open Source. Thomas Burkhalter, music-ethnologist and founder of the Internet-music-network Norient is all geared up and convinced that digital media will change the cultural focus.The music journalist, thus Thomas Burkhalter, is interested in good music, music from all over the world, music that cannot, necessarily, be purchased at iTunes. For years, he has been travelling all around the globe in order to get to know music from ‘culture-industrial provinces’, from Africa, Latin America, or Asia, meeting musicians and producers everywhere. What he found can be described the following way: With regard to technical equipment and know-how, or to knowledge in old and new sounds, or the dissemination of their tracks in the Internet, sound artists from the above mentioned areas are just as up to date as sound artists in the western world. The Internet certainly has levelled geopo- litical differences in this respect. Burkhalter calls the music that’s being made in Cairo, Dakar, or Mogadishu ‘World music 2.0’. This music has little to do with so called ‘world music’ that’s being reduced to its formula of authenticity or ethno-Romanticism, it is a mix of Pop and tradition, kitsch and protest, everyday reality and the experience of war, a mix of local and global. The new, urban sound of the 21st century avoids cultural clichés and mirrors the chaos it draws upon: “These musicians construct self-conscious post-colonial positions, yet find themselves, once and again, caught in the old post-colonial structures, as we can see in their use of exotica, of violence, and war. The obscure, the ironic, and the exotic disproportionally profit from the avalanche effect of virtual mouth-to-mouth propaganda on platforms like Facebook” (Thomas Burkhalter).
In the 70-minute live music-video collage Sonic Traces: From the Arab World Thomas Burkhalter, together with musician Simon Grab and VJ Michael Spahr, presents a medial tour through the history of as well as present-day Arab music, with hip-hop and Oud sounds, with Death Metal and Musique Concrète. This mix of documentary, recital, presentation, and concert introduces us to or familiarizes us with new Arab music which plays an important role in the current uprising of the Arab peoples against dictatorship and autocracy – just to mention one more topic of their performance that’s continually brought up to date.