Jeph Jerman, For Alvin Kelly

Cheshire - Carl Turney & Brian Campbell
West Sussex - Otis Jordan

Ceremonial County Series Vol.I - West Sussex | Cheshire

Artist: Memeshift
Album: Echoes
Format: Digital / Tape
Cat.No: CHI048
Master: Justin Randel
Artwork: Dhomas Kampretz Yudhistira
Design: Saphy Vong, Morgan Sully
Release Date: 19 April 2022

Echoes, Chinabot’s first release with Morgan Sully of Memeshift, takes us from Borneo to Berlin, collapsing decades and continents through electronic experimentation and personal recordings. Through the process, he asks if it is possible to reconfigure a cohesive sense of home from the diverse elements of a diasporic experience.

Echoes’ fifth track, Balikpapan, takes its name from one of Sully’s first homes, a city on the eastern coast of Borneo that Sully fled with his family as a six-year-old in 1986. When his American father couldn't pay the bribe asked by corrupt local officials to validate their exit visas, his family hired a smuggler to ferry them by sampan from Batam Island across the Strait of Singapore. Under the cover of darkness, after the gunboats passed, they found themselves on a secluded beach in Malaysia, the first leg of a journey that took young Sully to many homes between Hawaii and (eventually) Southern California.

Balikpapan was started shortly before returning to the city, some 35 years after he left, and features a field recording of insects from a mangrove swamp near his former school. Pulsing with humid, clicking beats, and laced with haunting synths, Balikpapan transports us into the physical environment, as well conjuring an emotional landscape filled with a complicated nostalgia.

The journey through time and memory is revisited in Sad Sunda, which samples a cassette of ‘pop sunda’, a form of popular music that blends western pop and traditional instrumentation from Java, that his mother brought with the family to Hawaii when they fled Borneo. Composed on an Elektron Octatrack over three decades later, Sully cut the samples into small snippets and randomly resequenced them. The percussion is from Roland CR-78 samples and drum loops pitched down and resampled in the Octatrack; through the frenetic club beats, we hear his current life in Berlin, where he now lives, bleeds into the music of his past.

His migratory experience is apparent in Sully’s music influences, which he names as “Sundanese gamelan, the Beach Boys, pop melayu and eventually punk, industrial, and noise before utterly relinquishing to the music of clandestine raves of Southern California in the late 90s.” For Echoes, Sully synthesises all these through his DIY electronic lens, finding both a sense of playfulness and a melancholia. “Echoes is an attempt at recollecting a hybrid sonic language, an unattainable and elusive ‘home’,” Sully says.

The album ends with a trip to his mother’s actual home. The churning, meditative Mom_s Kettle was recorded in his mother’s California apartment in 2021, as she was recovering from an anti-Asian hate attack that hospitalized her, part of a wave of violence that had become a second, shadow pandemic throughout the United States during the Covid pandemic.

The track relies on deeply personal, diaristic textures. “The sound of my mom's kettle which starts off the track, was recorded on my iPhone while I searched for talismans to bring to my mom in the hospital,” says Sully. “The pointillist melodies came later in Berlin from a recording session with my friend, while the granulated percussion originates from heavily compressed recordings of the recorder shuffling in my bag.” In a final personal touch, the colours of his mother’s hand-made dayak Borneo beadwork inform the Echoes album cover, embodying the spirit of the record – a creative force that blossoms despite aggression and displacement.

Echoes

Balikpapan

Memeshift - Balikpapan

The 1970s is often depicted straightforwardly as the moment when the radical movements of the 1960s fractured, failed, and radicalised in ways that were self-destructive. In The Subversive Seventies Michael Hardt argues that not only is that a much too simplistic understanding of the decade, but that it serves to prevent us from drawing important lessons and inspiration from the radical movements of the 1970s. We talked about popular misconceptions about the movements of the 70s, how to understand the turn towards projects characterised by autonomy and in some cases armed struggle. And finally we also talked about why the emergence in the 70s of a multiplicity of struggles can be seen as a source of strength for the left, rather than evidence of irresolvable division.

The seventies and us w/ Michael Hardt

Folklore Tapes Ceremonial County Series Vol.II - Suffolk | Dorset

PAGE LINK: https://radiofantasia.online/indigoblue
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indigoblue is a musician and sound artist living in Toulouse, France. With a strong interest in collective and horizontal practices, they’re involved in several local organisations and actively contribute to Toulouse’s scene.

They’re a cofounder of the collective Le Comité des Fêtes, which organises festive events in an autonomous ethos, driving inspiration from sound system culture and anti-authoritarian readings. They’re also involved in the organisation of the festival Les Siestes and the decentralised community Global URL Nation.

indigoblue’s solo practice takes interest in experimental forms of electronic music, with a particular focus on drone and field recording. They engage in diverse mediums such as composition, production, live performance and djing. Additionally, they run ‘spinal spiral’, a recurring show on Toulouse-based web radio Egregore.
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" I've been working on a collage including personal recordings and music with which I resonated. Most of the recordings were collected in the context of the preparation of festive events organized by a collective I'm a part of, Le Comité des Fêtes. Our events are organized in an autonomous and horizontal ethos, drawing heavy inspiration from sound system culture and anarchist readings. They usually take place in a community-driven space in Toulouse or temporary outdoor venues, where we try to think and act in resistance to oppressive and capitalist dynamics. Other recordings are extracted from my personal archive."
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"As attachments, I'd like to include fundraisers for medical aid in Palestine.
https://www.globalgiving.org/fundraisers/43177/
https://www.map.org.uk/donate/donation-details/488?gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwzZmwBhD8ARIsAH4v1gW-QZ0Hx3NpbVY_8RXE9mthJOrRUP3VNQXlTC6QiedknEUnMwlxgFEaAnMnEALw_wcB "
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Tracklist:
Simina Oprescu - Sound of Matter I
Sandra Boss, Jonas Olesen, Anders Lauge Meldgaard - Fuglene
Daou - Magnetic Dream I
Fangyi Liu - jan4 je6 夤夜
Samo Kutin – prepared hurdy gurdy and acoustic resonators
Remo Seeland (with Laya Ensemble) - Baldachin
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Artist links: 
soundcloud – https://soundcloud.com/indigoblue97
instagram indigobluuuuue –  https://www.instagram.com/indigobluuuuue
instagram comite2teuf – https://www.instagram.com/comite2teuf
instagram lessiestes – https://www.instagram.com/lessiestes
instagram globalurlnation –https://www.instagram.com/globalurlnation

086 – indigoblue

An hour a month from LA label Total Stasis, responsible for releases by Ramzi, Aquarian Foundation, Anom Vitruv, Elysia Crampton, Bobo Eyes & Plush Throw, CS + Kreme, Fmvee, Second Language, Regularfantasy, Private Lesson, Alexi Baris, Laila Sakini, and Sebastiano Carghini.
 
Find the full tracklist and related episodes on NTS: https://www.nts.live/shows/total-stasis/episodes/total-stasis-16th-april-2024

Total Stasis 160424

Air Ambient Takeover - Khey Mysterio (Avril 2024)

The inimitable Kranky Ltd, live from LA once a month. 
Find the full tracklist and related episodes on NTS: https://www.nts.live/shows/kranky/episodes/kranky-2nd-may-2024

Kranky 020524

What is technology trying to tell us in an emergency? James Bridle, in conversation with Serpentine Galleries CTO Ben Vickers, discusses 'New Dark Age' and the dark clouds that gather over our dreams of the digital sublime.

As the world around us increases in technological complexity, our understanding of it diminishes. What is needed is not new technology, but new metaphors: a metalanguage for describing the world that complex systems have wrought. We don’t and cannot understand everything, but we are capable of thinking it. Technology can help us in this thinking: computers are not here to give us answers, but are tools for asking questions. Understanding a technology deeply and systemically allows us to remake metaphors in the service of other ways of thinking – without claiming, or even seeking to fully understand – and to ask the right questions to guide us through this new dark age.

The discussion, presented in collaboration with Serpentine Galleries and the Goethe-Institut, also featured a performance by artist and writer Erica Scourti and a screening of We Help Each Other Grow (2017) by They Are Here, a collaborative practice steered by Helen Walker and Harun Morrison.

New Dark Age: James Bridle and Ben Vickers on Technology and the End of the Future

INTERVIEW + TRACKLIST > https://inverted-audio.com/mix/phew

Japanese musician, vocalist, and avant-garde royalty Phew presents her first ever recorded mix for Inverted Audio, ahead of her forthcoming 'Vertigo KO' album on London's @d_i_s_c_i_p_l_e_s

IA MIX SERIES

Read

IA MIX 338 Phew

Podcasts, readings, lectures and events: big ideas and radical discussion from authors and collaborators with Verso Books

New Dark Age: James Bridle and Ben Vickers on Technology and the End of the Future

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