Browsing: Music

The digital archive aims to make visible the arts and cultures of the Sinti and Roma in Europe – and thereby illustrate their “contribution to European cultural history”.

Heinrich attended an event at the Volksbühne in November 1997, to which the English publicist Kodwo Eshun was also invited. Eshun was probably talking primarily about the African-American underwater worlds of the enigmatic duo Drexciya from Detroit.

In 1979, the publicist Henryk M. Broder, together with Michel R. Lang, publishes a book: “Fremd im eigenen Land. Jews in the Federal Republic.” Some thirteen years later, three young musicians from Heidelberg are unable to find a label for their songs, so without further ado they self-publish their single in 1992.

The singer-songwriter and activist Fasia Jansen, born in Hamburg in 1929, fought all her life against racism, economic and social exploitation, against war and for emancipation and equal rights for women.

Art

It jingles and rings, here and there bright bell tones, a wide bass surface moves up and creeps under the smooth keyboard sounds, hisses and hisses monotonously. This album sounds like a video game, threatening, is slick and superficial, this album doesn’t falter for long, you listen to it and realize right away: something is wrong here.

Founded in 1994 by artists and activists in Los Angeles/USA, the collective uses sound art, sound and listening as a strategy for political action. Topics of the internationally active network include migration, racism, urban development and HIV/AIDS.

Published in 1998, British journalist and writer Kodwo Eshun’s book spoke and speaks so eloquently about music and identity(s), drum computers and (non-)human bodies, electronic sound aesthetics and Afrofuturism, forms of world appropriation and worldliness of popular music, that one can easily become dizzy.

The debut single by Cologne rapper Leila Akinyi talks lightly and proudly about her self-image as a Black woman in Germany.

The album by the Belgian-British musician Natacha Atlas is a frequently cited example of an attempt to sonify existential experiences of (post-)colonial life worlds.

The track by SXTN from Berlin is quite a lot at the same time – resistant, fresh, empowering, ironic, danceable and clever are just a few possible characteristics.

The track by Berlin rapper Quio (“Qu for quatsch, I for Eisbein, O for Otto-Motor”) tells of national belonging, cultural representations and essentialist notions of “German” culture – and of how crumbling it all is.

The duo consists of Ghanaian and Ghanaian-Romanian musicians M3nsa and Wanlov the Kubolor. They do “Gospel Porn” – making them, in their own words, “the most celebrated Ghanaian music duo in the world due to their most unconventional way of entertaining with ingeniously tasteful shock lyrics, revolutionary performance art & indulgent progressive sounds.”