political art & cultural policy
From the category archives:
One of Canada’s preeminent video and sound art festivals Signal & Noise is calling for submissions.
Signal & Noise will showcase a spectrum of single and multi-channel audio & video works, live performances and immersive installations. Signal & Noise is an intimate forum for creative exchange between local, national and international artists. The event will take place in Vancouver May 27-29, 2010.
Submission deadline January 15, 2010. For more info go to the Signal and Noise website.
La Sala Rossa in Montreal was packed last week for the eleventh Artists Against Apartheid concert, a cultural event series bringing diverse musicians to the stage in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom. Artists Against Apartheid is occurring within the growing international campaign to enforce boycott, divestment and sanctions on the Israeli government in response to Israeli apartheid policies against the Palestinian people living under military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. This global movement gained prominence and support after the internationally condemned Israeli bombardment on the Gaza Strip last winter.
At the eleventh Artists Against Apartheid hundreds gathered to listen to unique performances, including a trio featuring Sam Shalabi on oud, Omar Dewachi on oud and Pierre-Guy Blanchard on percussion who opened the evening. Sam Shalabi’s performance at the concert builds on a growing excitement in Montreal and globally towards Shalabi’s innovative sound that incorporates tones from the Middle East and experimental musical styles from North America. Shalabi recently released an album, Land of Kush, on the celebrated independent record label Constellation Records. In recent years Shalabi has visited and performed in Cairo, Egypt developing styles on the oud and linking with groundbreaking musicians in Cairo, a cultural center in the Middle East.
Just when you thought it was safe to visit your local drive-thru, political troubadour Geoff Berner sets the record straight. There are some really Angry Chickens in Europe, and he’s speculating it just might have something to do with the recent crackdown on refugees across the continent.
The following account is an except from Berner’s newsletter.
In parts of Europe, you may remember that I told you that Burger King, in its wisdom, was selling a product called the Angry Whopper. I am pleased, as your Cultural Correspondent, to report to you that they have added new items to their Angry line of food products. Not only can you get an Angry Whopper, you can also buy an Angry Chicken. Yes, it is frightening. And no, I can tell you definitively, the staff still don’t know why the food is angry, leaving us to continue with our speculation…
Perhaps this is to make people feel better about eating meat? I mean, perhaps all the Angry Chickens were killed in self-defense, when they were on the Angry attack? No jury would convict you.
From the audio labs of Ultra-Red comes the fourth and final volume in their Sounds of the War on the Poor series. Beginning in 2008, activists and artists were invited to create one-minute sound responses to the question: What is the sound of the war on the poor? The contributions include micro-documentaries, soundscapes, music interventions, interviews … all available for free download.
Ultra-red is an interesting crew. Positioning themselves as an artist collective who engage in the “fragile dynamic between audio art and political mobilizing”, ultra-red is pushing the boundaries between the aesthetic and the political in the realm of sound art.
Not content with making and distributing recordings with political implications, ultra-red also engages in political intervention in the course of their collaborative work. Some of their previous work includes: Soundtrax, their first public intervention created in collaboration with the Los Angeles clean needle exchange, Clean Needles Now; Secondnature: an investigation into queer public sex in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park; Survey the Future: reflections on the struggle of migrants in the context of, respectively, global capital and labor – to name just a few.
Sounds of the War on the Poor are part of their public record archives, which also includes series on AIDS, questions of global migration, and public housing. All recordings are available for free download.
It’s as much library as it is archive. But that’s the way things are these days – archives becoming interactive and living bodies of culture and memory. In this case, it is music we are remembering and sharing in a collaborative and innovative way outside the intellectual property box.
The Free Music Archive is an interactive archive-cum-library with high-quality free legal music downloads. From the website: “Every mp3 you discover on The Free Music Archive is pre-cleared for certain types of uses that would otherwise be prohibited by outdated copyright law. Are you a podcaster looking for pod-safe audio? A radio or video producer searching for instrumental bed music that won’t put your audience to sleep? A remix artist looking for pre-cleared samples? Or are you simply looking for some new sounds to add to your next playlist? The Free Music Archive is a resource for all that and more, and unlike other websites, all of the audio has been hand-picked by established audio curators.”
The Arcive was created by WFMU, one of the longest running freeform radio stations in the US (freeform being where the on-air DJs have creative control over the music they play). Located in Jersey City, New Jersey, WFMU is a non-profit listener-supported broadcaster (90.1 fm) with a long history of supporting independent artists and providing a fecund alternative to commercial radio’s cultural wasteland.
The basement of the Elks Lodge was steamy hot. Two hundred or so jammed into the dark, low-ceilinged room (complete with elk heads on the wall) to celebrate opening night of the Megapolis Audio Festival in Boston. It was an all-star line-up: The Lothars, Radio Wonderland, Die Schrauber, Boston Typewriter Orchestra and Peace. Loving. I stumbled in just in time to catch the last bits of Radio Wonderland’s outrageous and wildly eclectic improvised soundscapes made with homemade instruments and remixed live samples from local FM radio. The room was captivated and electrified as Joshua Fried staggered around the impromptu stage with boom box, bicycle tires, shoes and assorted electronic instruments. Although no one was dancing, it was an existential sweaty frenzy in the crowded room.
While the Typewriter Orchestra was setting up their complicated set (six typewriters all specifically miced, punch clocks, hole-punches, staples, telephones …) I grabbed a whiskey at the bar from the two burly but friendly bartenders. The vibe was good, and the crowd was delightful intergenerational, from a toddler yawning and rubbing his eyes on his father’s shoulder to the septuagenarians roaming around (were they audio pioneers?) including the oldster running sound for the performers. The whiskeys came in doubles, which I should have paid more attention to, but the atmosphere was celebratory, stimulating, electric.
The Typewriter Orchestra filed out onto the stage, all wearing white shirts and ties.
Stephen Harper, if you touch CBC Radio 3, I swear I will cut your hair
At the CBC dog-and-pony show I attended way back in 2007, I sat in disbelief among the journalism, arts, and culture community as a string of corporate lackeys with all the wrong experience were paraded out as the new executive team. A Hollywood fiction producer was put in charge of Canadian documentary. Hmm.
Like now, it was also a time of cuts, and feeling particularly invincible I got in the line of questioners. When my turn came, I summoned my outrage so as to appear the “average viewer” and asked the new team: “Why, oh jesus why, has the CBC decided to cut Zed? This was the ONE program that was cutting edge, that reaches out to a younger audience.” One of the suits smiled and slowly gathering his tenor, responded: “Don’t worry, we’re replacing it with something even better.” I think he may have even winked after he said it. The problem of course is that they didn’t replace Zed, an amazing user-generated late night television show (OK, with obnoxious hosts) way ahead of the current everyone-is-a-producer orgy curve.
So with CBC turned off on the telly, and while some of my favourite radio programmes are being ruthlessly slashed by the Harperites, I’ve been clinging desperately, feverishly, almost religiously, to CBC Radio 3.
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