Podcast

CTM 2019 – Persistence: Lectures, Talks & Panels

When it comes to climate change, there are a lot of researchers already thinking about how to equip crops and food animals with genes to help them withstand heat and parched conditions. But what about genetically engineering humans to try to slow our constant carbon contributions?

The Carbon Gene

Bill Kouligas is the Berlin based Greek who runs the PAN label. It is a place where underground dance, conceptual art and experimental electronic music have been colliding in captivating ways since 2008. Although he himself releases infrequently (but keep your eyes peeled) the label has become a go to outlet for forward thinking sounds that range from jungle to dark ambient thanks to artists like Lee Gamble, African Sciences, Objekt and many more. The design of each release is done by Bill, who has a background in graphic design, and is what ties the whole ever evolving project together. Expect a podcast consisting of old and current favourites and of course a fair share of unreleased PAN material.


Dekmantel Podcast 053 - Bill Kouligas

Thursday 31 January 2019
CTM 2019 – Persistence 
Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin

Music has not been the only industry to feel the effects of technological shifts. Across the internet, creators of all stripes have struggled to maintain viable revenue streams in an age of centralised social media platforms and widespread use of ad-blockers. One of the key propositions of Web 3.0 is the idea that it could transform an “Internet of Knowledge” to an “Internet of Value.” What would this mean for creators? Looking outwards from the music ecosystem, could such initiatives and ideas reshape our practices?

Des Martin (from Brave browser) introduces new revenue models made possible by blockchain technologies such as the Basic Attention Token. Brave is a next-generation web browser that puts user privacy and security first. It not only allows a streamlined and quick browsing experience, but also the ability to contribute micro-payments to content creators. Users can reward their favourite publishers and content creators; publishers and content creators can receive revenue where previous streams have been hampered.

CTM 2019: Web 3.0 with Des Martin of Brave Browser

Friday 1 February 2019
CTM 2019 – Persistence 
Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin

Discourse around ethics, corporate sponsorship, independence, and autonomy continues to shape the music landscape. But despite these conversations, the landscape also appears to be largely homogenous. What room is there for different gestures, ideas, practices, and models? This panel brings together representatives from a number of festivals doing things differently. Boom is a Portuguese psychedelic festival that’s entirely independent, working to raise awareness and empathy while maximising positive environmental impact; Denmark’s Roskilde is Northern Europe’s largest and oldest music and art festival run by the Roskilde Festival Charity Society, which endeavours to foster humanitarian, cultural, and environmental work. 

Representatives from @boomfestival and @roskilde-festival speak to Sarah-Joy Lynch about why these festivals operate in the ways that they do, and why such approaches are important.

Roskilde introduced the festival with a short video, which can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgT6fv-Z_Dw

CTM 2019: Alternative Festival Models with Roskilde and Boom

Sunday 27 January 2019
CTM 2019 – Persistence 
Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin

Video available via YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZLhM4AOS5k

Mat Dryhurst’s work has long been concerned with platform politics and decentralisation, manifest through attempts to seed alternative techno-cultural pathways through public proposals, teaching, and artworks. In this talk he will discuss our duty to the musical archive in the face of ahistorical algorithmic populism, and how now might be an opportunity to reconsider first principles. What do we actually stand for? How do we encode this ideology? Unpacking decentralised economic ideas such as DAO’s, Data Guilds and new Group Equity models, he will make the argument that we might want to consider a cultural hard fork.

CTM 2019: Protocols—Duty, Despair, and Decentralisation by Mat Dryhurst

Thursday 31 January 2019
CTM 2019 – Persistence 
Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin

Critics have of late discerned a tendency towards a "chill" aesthetic in popular music. A mellowed edge is detected not only in pop but also recent predilections for ambient, fourth world, and new age reissues or in the current dominance of functional playlists as a frame for music consumption. This is usually put down to music’s easy availability on streaming platforms: a boundless stream of sound is paralleled by perceptual drift tolerated by atmospheric or ambient sonic tropes.

Looking to algorithmic curation of music on streaming platforms, this presentation examines the contemporary tendency for unmooring contemporary popular music from the figure or history, the displacement of narrative by texture, and the emotional blankness all this entails, along with the ways in which this enables the continued production of user data with minimal friction. Where production and consumption tend towards being indiscernible, it seems that music begins to lose its distinct temporal intensity.

CTM 2019: Melodies Wander Around as Ghosts—On Playlist Ambience by Paul Rekret

Thursday 31 January 2019
CTM 2019 – Persistence 
Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin

Video available via YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u96NOwC5_AY

Though the idea of resilience is often presented as a progressive solution to gender, race, and class-based inequalities, the labour of resilience follows a traditionally patriarchal division of labour, which makes women and other non-cis-men responsible for fixing both themselves and systemic social problems like sexism. Resilience is a quintessentially neoliberal technology that uses logics of investment and purported inclusion to upgrade and intensify white supremacist capitalist patriarchy to work more efficiently in the early 21st century. I use Rebecca Lentjes’ concept of “sonic patriarchy” to explain how this happens in 21st century popular music, and then identify several musicians’ "melancholic" alternatives to resilience.

CTM 2019: Resilience, Sonic Patriarchy, & Feminist Melancholies by Robin James

Berlin’s CTM Festival supports an open, networked, mutually-collaborative, global music culture through its yearly 10-day festival as well as countless collaborative and research initiatives, co-commissions, concerts, and other constantly-evolving formats. The 2 decades old festival stands out for its conscious pairing of daring artistic content and adventurous club experiences with an in-depth discourse programme, framing today’s sounds and music cultures within a shifting, hybrid global society.