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« radio web macba » memorabilia - william bennett

Mittwoch, 20. Nov 2013, 04:00 bis 06:00 Uhr
2013-11-20 04:00:00 2013-11-20 06:00:00 CoLaboRadio
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MEMORABILIA. COLLECTING SOUNDS WITH… Sublime Frequencies 28.12.2011 (14' 57'')

Founded in 2003 by Alan Bishop, Hisham Mayet and Richard Bishop, Sublime Frequencies has become a benchmark in the exploration of popular and folk music from parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Deliberately avoiding traditional ethnomusicology and academic approaches, they never lose sight of their mission to rescue music and sounds that would otherwise very likely be destined to be forgotten. They work with a highly varied repertoire that ranges from regional radio broadcasts to field recordings, folk compilations and pop and documentary video/film.

Mark Gergis, a regular collaborator with Sublime Frequencies, explains the project's philosophy and the cultural, logistical and esoteric implications of collecting music from a culture other than one's own.

>>> SUBLIME FREQUENCIES <<<

MEMORABILIA. COLLECTING SOUNDS WITH… William Bennett. Part II 19.01.2012 (38' 55'')

Music selected by William Bennett

There's something particularly intoxicating about sheer physiological functionality in music. About being acted upon to the extent where granted permission and forceful imperative become giddily indistinguishable. Not that you're worrying over the distinction anyway when a sound takes you whipsawing around into juddering surrender bordering on then slipping into ecstasy. There just isn't any need to worry about responsible agency, who or what is answerable for the sudden tyranny of basest autonomy. You're a character, very nonfiction.

The height of aural power is when a piece you've never heard and can't place finds you more wantonly suggestible than you'd readily volunteer. And manifests its hold physically. Experienced outside and beyond their original context these specially mixed African and Haitian percussion pieces evince an extra-intentional intent, a rhythmic seizure of rational faculties. Timidity of the permeable body, rigid abhorrence of the ass, are not long for this world. Too much won't be enough.

Merciless non-judgmental ambiguity: your balled-up two-fisted convictions defer to a point of gravity somewhere lower, tag team target of relentless djembe and doun-doun polyrhythms. Best let it exercise full reign, best allow yourself a suspension of the bounds of good sense, an equivocal lapse into that unsafe territory where content is subservient to effect. Sublime indulgence in existential power-play. William Bennett and Mimsy DeBlois

MEMORABILIA. COLLECTING SOUNDS WITH… William Bennett. Part I 02.12.2011 (54' 38'')

Produced by Roc Jiménez de Cisneros

From the outset, William Bennett's career has steered clear of the simplicity of transparency in favour of double or triple readings that invite listeners to delve further. The name of the group he founded in 1980, Whitehouse, was chosen as a sarcastic tribute twice over: on one hand, it refers to ultraconservative activist Mary Whitehouse, and on the other, to a homonymous pornographic magazine published in the United Kingdom in the seventies. Although this is just one example, this kind of subtext is a constant element that has been present throughout a career that could be compared to an audible Rorschach test. Bennett’s artistic oeuvre is a network of myths, taboos and bête noires designed to pull listeners (sometimes by force) out of their natural comfort zone. Not only through noise, but also metaphors, symbols and twisted uses of sound and words. And this particular approach to understanding the creative act or collective catharsis is reflected, almost down to the last point, in Bennett’s obsessions as a music collector.

In spite of the huge variations in cultural contexts, timeframes and even functions, his four main areas of interest (twentieth century avant-garde, Italo disco, soundtracks and percussion music from Western Africa) conceal numerous keys that shed light on Bennett's hermetic musical universe from many angles, and also on his conception of the act of collecting itself. Far from merely accumulating objects, Bennett's approach to collecting entails a meticulous process of constant purge and renewal, in a quest for what he calls 'purity', or what we could – in a direct reference to Whitehouse – describe as 'asceticism'. Because the radical reductionism that hovers over much of William Bennett's work also prevails in his incredibly varied but enormously consistent music collection, in which nostalgia takes on overtones of archaeological research. Like the ten inkblot images of the Rorschach test, the British artist's collection brings to the surface his interests and obsessions, and an entire way of understanding music as a cultural and human process.