This playlist is about hitting your 20's and realizing you're stuck in this uncomfortable safety net between adolescence and adulthood. It so often feels like we have the weight of the world on our shoulders and are expected to have everything figured out. I find myself taking one step forward only to take three back. I'm learning that success isn't linear, the path to healing isn't linear, and most importantly that mistakes are part of growth. Life is moving faster every day and it's hard not to be left feeling like time is running out. It can be exhausting to balance so much, but I want this playlist to serve as a reminder to slow down, be kind to yourself, and to invest in the people in your life. If this year has taught me anything, it's that I still have a lot of growing up to do. Here's to my 20's and here's to your 20's--may 2019 bring us all the best. - Alex Verberkmoes (@eco_bitch96)

radio síbín 02 -- feeling 20

Israel is perhaps the thorniest issue within the American conscious. It is weighted on both sides with tragedy and loss, and it is an issue in which the American people play third-party participant. It dictates our own domestic norms of speech and practice, wherein it is often better to say nothing than anything. Yet silence and political apathy are becoming an ever-expensive luxury that, in the current context, our generation cannot afford. Last week, the Combating BDS Act passed through the Senate and was introduced in the House. This bill discourages state governments from signing contracts with companies and supporters of BDS, a movement which aims to boycott, divest, and sanction any company that profits from settlement expansion and occupation within Israel-Palestine. At a practical level, this means abstaining from goods and services produced within the Occupied Territories, where Israeli settlement expansion is illegal under international law. On a personal level, this meant I refused to use Airbnb until they stopped renting spaces within these settlement communities in the West Bank. We make these purchasing decisions daily, like refusing straws at a restaurant, meat on Mondays, or Chick-fil-A in general. They are an essential (and precedented—Iran, South Africa, etc.) expression of free speech. In the past, our government has instilled corporations with personhood through campaign-finance laws, yet Marco Rubio and proponents of this bill are ready to strip purchasing decisions from the public and the very companies they enabled to participate in our electoral process. Worse, we as an American public sit complacent in a war-of-words that labels racist or anti-Semitic any criticism of the Israeli government. Israel has every right to exist that the U.S. does and with this right comes a weighted responsibility to observe human rights standards in compliance with international law. In the toxic-relationship that defines our foreign policy, our government often over looks these violations in preservation of our status-quo alliance. Because our current government is unwilling to act retributively, BDS is one of the last remaining options that we as individuals and a collective can.

radio síbín 03--boycott! divest! sanction!

Disco is more than dead. America threw it away for reverberated pop and hair metal, but globalism is always latent (and surprising). Full of pop, crystalline synthesizers, and punchy bass, Italo-Disco gave a breath of  new life into the 7” standard. Face value, it seems this genre simply relocated; all with the same bells, whistles, and cheesy vocoders it could muster. But often in globalism, mistranslation can lead to something beautiful, and in this case,  more funk than you can handle.

radio síbín 04--piacere

I am infatuated with the dynamic nature of culture and how it changes through time, and space, and generation. My mother made soda bread with wheat flower this year and this substitution served as a medium for cultural change and adaptation, two generations and a continent away from my grandfather’s family in Northern Ireland. Time,  migration, and generational difference posit distinct transformations on custom. This month’s set is an exploration of the adaptivity of custom—what is learned, what is inherited, and what is kept. In this divide, in this third culture between old world  and new, artists build upon spolia foundations and contribute to a global community or ummah—the dunya al-disco.

radio síbín

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