Sounds of Democracy

Program at Pavillon für Baukultur, Budapester Str. 7, 53111 Bonn:

Saturday 31.08.2024
16:00 — 17:00
No story begins at the beginning — sound installation

17:00 — 19:00
The Living Archive — Panel discussion with listening session
with Bradford Bailey, Bulat Khalilov, Timur Kodzoko, Miki Yui and Stefan Schneider
(discussion in English with German translation!)

Sunday 1.09.2024
16:00 — 17:00
No story begins at the beginning — sound installation

17:00 — 19:00 Uhr

Sound of Democracy — listening session with Bradford Bailey
Live music: traditional music from the Caucasus region meets electronics
Timur Kodzoko, Esen Erhan and Stefan Schneider

Extensive collections of music, sound and speech recordings – assembled, catalogued and evaluated over many decades – make up the holdings of music archives almost everywhere around the world. Today, the core activities of these archives are clearly focussed on the future, instead of simply reappraising the past. Knowledge of traditional forms of music and their diverse connections to social, religious, political or playful aspects of coexistence are elementary today for the individual and collective redefinition of present and future. 

Listening examples drawn from archives in Ghana, the Northern Caucasus region, Beirut, London andVenezuela demonstrate the roles of contemporary music archives in nurturing democratic structures.

Guests:

Bradford Bailey is an author from London who has been publishing work on sound and democracy over the years as The Hum. In addition, he writes regularly for the English magazine THE WIRE — Adventures in Modern Music.

Esen Erhan is a singer and multi-instrumentalist from the Northern Caucasus region who currently resides in Istanbul. He is deeply familiar with various musical traditions of the Northern Caucasus region and has devoted himself to keeping them alive in the diaspora.ORED Recordings is an independent, ethnographically oriented music project founded in 2012 by Bulat Khalilov and Timur Kodzoko in Karbardino-Balkaria, in the Northern Caucasus region. Since then, ORED has been dedicated to the systematic documentation of local music forms from the various regions of the Caucasus. The audio recordings produced here are each realised in the field with mobile recording rigs, in close collaboration with the local musicians. ORED’s approach shares a kinship with the works of well-known “artist-ethnologists” such as Oswaldo Lares, an architect who recorded music in Venezuela for decades, or Kwabena Nketia , the first Ghanaian to pursue the comprehensive documentation of the music traditions of his immediate surroundings. Within an overarching systematic artistic-scientific approach, a living archive takes shape, one accessible to a broad, digital public. With the ever-accelerating rate of change in today’s world, there is an urgent need to examine questions concerning the connections between archiving, regional tradition and community.