Sonic Traces: from the Arab World – Liner Notes | Norient.Com 5 Oct 2021 08:36:12 Sonic Traces: from the Arab World – Liner Notes by Thomas Burkhalter
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Sonic Traces: From the Arab World – Liner Notes | norient.com 5 Oct 2021 08:36:12 Sonic Traces: From the Arab World – Liner Notes by Thomas Burkhalter The accelerated processes of globalization and digitalization have revolutionized music making on many levels. Austrian music sociologists Kurt Blaukopf (1996) and Alfred Smudits (2002) use the term media-morphoses to describe in detail major changes from the first recordings on cylinder phonographs to the advent of cassettes and CDs to the complete digitalization of musical production from the 1980s onwards. The digital media-morphosis alone continually brings revolutionary changes. Throughout the world, musicians find new ways to produce music at low cost and to promote it globally. Today’s music markets became a confusing mosaic of a million minimarkets and microstars. The geographical location of a musician, label, or distributor becomes a minor factor, it seems. Thomas Friedman (2005), among many others, highlights the newfound power for individuals to collaborate and compete globally. It is some of these individuals, musicians from the Arab World, that our audio-visual performance «Sonic Traces: From the Arab World» was about – and that our vinyl – and radio-mixes of it are about. https://norient.com/stories/sonic-traces-liner-notes Page 1 of 19 Sonic Traces: From the Arab World – Liner Notes | norient.com 5 Oct 2021 08:36:12 New Sounds from Africa, Asia, Latin America – and the Arab World Musicians from Beijing to Tijuana, from Istanbul to Johannesburg, mix and manipulate local and global sounds and ideas within their music. They network with artists and multipliers (e.g., curators, producers, journalist, and scholars) worldwide and experiment with new ways of producing, distributing, and selling music. This recent music from Africa, Asia, and Latin America is progressively reaching Euro-American reception platforms and is being discussed by ethnomusicologists, popular music scholars, journalists, and bloggers with increased interest. Style-wise, the sample is broad: commercially successful styles of pop music like reggaeton (Marshall, Rivera, and Hernandez 2009) and kwaito (Steingo 2005; Swartz 2008), and electronic music styles like kuduro (Alisch and Siegert 2011), nortec (Madrid 2008), baile funk (Stöcker 2009; Lanz et al. 2008), shangaan electro, or cumbia electronica form the popular end of the spectrum. The experimental end offers African, Asian, and Latin American musique concrète, free improvisation, noise music, and sound art (e.g., Wallach 2008). In the Arab world, we find a large number of upcoming musicians. On CDs (e.g., from the label 100copies and platforms like SoundCloud, we find them experimenting with the noises of Cairo and electronic music (e.g., Mahmoud Refat, Ramsi Lehner, Adham Hafez, Hassan Khan, Kareem Lotfy, and Omar Raafat). Using Casio PT minikeyboards, Kareem Lotfy and Omar Raafat mix noise with distorted, psychedelic-sounding Egyptian melodies. Mohammed Ragab – alias Machine Eat Man – works with analogue synthesizers. He defines his mixture of Arabic voice, flute samples, drums, psychedelic synthesizer movements, and electronics as «Egyptronica». Further, https://norient.com/stories/sonic-traces-liner-notes Page 2 of 19 Sonic Traces: From the Arab World – Liner Notes | norient.com 5 Oct 2021 08:36:12 musicians range from pioneers like Halim El-Dabh to composers in Syria, rappers in Palestine, and metal musicians in Egypt. The list includes Nassim Maalouf with his «quartertone trumpet» and many other contemporary musicians (see Burkhalter, Dickinson, and Harbert 2013). In addition, there are musicians of Arab origin in Europe and the U.S. who frequently network with musicians in the Arab world. Mahmoud Turkmani, a Lebanese musician and composer living in Switzerland, experiments with Egyptian takht ensembles, video art, and film. In his piece Ya Sharr Mout (Son of a Bitch), he harshly criticizes both the Europeanization of Arabic music and the extreme commercialism of Lebanese postwar mainstream culture. Despite the many differences between these musical styles, some commonalities can be clearly identified: These musicians offer alternative musical positions and try to fight old «ethnocentric» Euro-American perceptions of their home countries in, for example, challenging and mixing up ideas about «culture», «place», «locality», «tradition», and/or «authenticity» in music. In Europe and the U.S. not many years ago, small niche audiences listened exclusively to music from the Arab world, Africa, Asia, or Latin America. Specialists were primarily interested in Arabic maqam music and small Arab takht ensembles or sufi singers, whereas others were drawn to the famous Arabic singers Umm Kulthum, Asmahan, or Fairuz and Algerian or Franco- Algerian raï by Khaled or Cheb Mami (Schade-Poulsen 1999), or they listened to what is often referred to as oriental jazz, crossover, or world fusion. The latter include musicians like Rabih Abou Khalil, Anouar Brahem, and Dhafer Youssef, among others. This variety of music was (and is) often categorized as «world music» by record industries and media. British record producers invented it as a marketing label in the 1980s (e.g., Erlmann 1995, Taylor 1997, Mitchell 1996, Broughton 2006, Binas-Preisendörfer 2010), and the goal was to diversify the Euro-American market in order to sell more music. Consequently, to this day, «world music» is based on musical difference and otherness at its core. Due to this focus, the world music catalogue for the Arab world contains the music mentioned earlier, but few of the current rock, punk, metal, and electronic music, or electro-acoustic experiments and musique concrète, despite the fact that this very music has been produced not only in Beirut, but also in other Middle Eastern, African, Asian, and Latin American cities for many years. After a long period of nonrepresentation, musicians of these genres have now started to perform on various Euro- American reception platforms – with the help, support, and initiative of mostly small European and US-based producers and labels (some of them from within the world music networks). Many new supporters of this emerging music ignored music from Africa, Asia, and Latin America for a long time – mainly because it fell into the category «world music». World music to them sounded «too cleanly produced», «too https://norient.com/stories/sonic-traces-liner-notes Page 3 of 19 Sonic Traces: From the Arab World – Liner Notes | norient.com 5 Oct 2021 08:36:12 much of a middle-class taste», «too boring», or «too cliché» (interviews and discussions by author 1994–2013). Today, many authors of blogs, disc jockeys, and curators – the multipliers of the present – are considering a multitude of new and «trendy» terms to categorize these upcoming styles, for example, «global ghettotech», «shanty house theory», «worldtronica», or «ghettopop». In some of my articles I use the term «World Music 2.0» (Burkhalter 2010) – and I do so for various reasons. Many people – including me – hope that these latest tracks, songs, sound montages, and noises from the Arab world, Asia, Africa, and Latin America contain revolutionary meanings: That the old model of center and periphery is less valid than it ever was; that we are living in a world of multiple, interwoven modernities (Eisenstadt 2000). In other words, modernity emerges polycentrically through exchanges between the «global North» and the «global South» (Kolland 2010). We hope that these musics will support claims by social and cultural scientists that declare the one-sided theories of modernization to be unsound (Randeria and Eckert 2009). Whereas terms like «modernity», «global North», and «global South» are debated upon and deconstructed in academics, they are still in use in cultural networks and markets. Multisited Modernities In Beirut, musicians challenge Euro-American perceptions of the Arab world, the Middle East – and the world. They search «locality», «place» – or even «tradition» not in maqam based music or Arabic songs exclusively, but in the noises of Beirut; in specific media sounds and samples from present and past; and in Lebanon, the Arab world, and elsewhere. They approach taboos in manipulating the Lebanese Civil War and play with irony, sarcasm, and black humor. Peace is Overrated & War Misunderstood is one CD title of the punk and indie rock band Scrambled Eggs. Experimental musicians Cynthia Zaven and Sharif Sehnaoui meanwhile take A Minefield Bicycle Ride (2010). They provoke and confuse when stating in public that they have nostalgic feelings toward the Civil War. Is this pure provocation? Do they make fun of an outsider’s fascination with war? Or is what they express just a normal human reaction to one’s childhood? Certainly, their media performances are smart and challenging and far from black-and-white. Serge Yared confirms to me that his peers from Beirut love black humor and controversy: «Sometimes we work with images from war and violence because we know that it appeals to people outside. We can play a variety of roles.» Mazen Kerbaj speaks about possible interrelations between war memories and his music to a journalist in Berlin first. In other interviews, he denies this connection and states that he is just a free improviser. He and others enjoy negotiating between different roles. Tarek Atoui too knows that war is a good-selling argument. «Let’s take advantage», he says and laughs. «It’s only a joke.» He admits that he used to worry about benefiting from exoticism: https://norient.com/stories/sonic-traces-liner-notes Page 4 of 19 Sonic Traces: From the Arab World – Liner Notes | norient.com 5 Oct 2021 08:36:12 «I am who I am. I might have advantages, but also many disadvantages by being Lebanese. And I do not take profit in an easy way: I don’t mix beats with Oriental flavors, and I don’t put bombs directly in my music. War is not an argument to produce shit. We should not only moan or shout; we should try to do something different, and to create our own language out of our knowledge and our experiences.