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katherinemacbride · 4 years

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WORKING ON/WORKING THROUGH/WORKING WITH a mix for connective listening broadcast notes

WORKING ON/WORKING THROUGH/WORKING WITH

Katherine MacBride

Hotel Maria Kapel

Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee

10:00 01-05-2020

https://jajajaneeneenee.com/jn/shows/working-on-working-through-working-with/

BROADCAST NOTES

solidarity actions

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Minimal vierteen euro voor iedereen. Een eerlijk loon.

https://www.voor14.nl

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The Voice of Domestic Workers COVID-19 Emergency Response Fund: In light of the current COVID-19/Coronavirus outbreak in the UK, migrant domestic workers are encountering further prejudice and precarity - both with clients cancelling their services and ‘live in’ Migrant Domestic Workers being asked to vacate their work places and homes. Like other precariously employed workers many of us exist without savings and are at the mercy of our employers who provide income and housing as part of the conditions of our work and our visas. https://www.thevoiceofdomesticworkers.com/post/covid-19-emergency-response-fund

Indonesian Migrant Workers’ Union: Most of the members of Indonesian Migrant Workers’ Union, one of Casco’s long-term and close-collaborating communities, are in a dire situation. They have lost their jobs as domestic workers and consequently their means to buy food and, likely soon, to keep their homes. Once again the community shows how powerful they are in organizing to support each other by arranging and distributing weekly emergency food packages. Yet this cannot be done without donations from anyone who has the room to do so. Please donate to R. Saptari. NL93 INGB 0006 3903 55. (via Casco newsletter)

CRIP FUND is an ad-hoc care collective pooling money for chronically ill, disabled, and immunocompromised people living in the United States in serious financial need during this ongoing time of love, coronavirus, and apocalyptic joy & pain. With your support we’re hoping to support your real hope of collective care. Crip Fund will privilege people who are immunocompromised and/or disabled* in need of in-home care; Queer/Trans/Black/Indigenous/People of Color (QTBIPOC) in financial need will also be prioritized.

*”Disabled” here is cross-disability cultures, and may include: those experiencing chronic illness, those on immunosuppressive meds, bone marrow or solid organ transplant recipients, inherited immunodeficiency, HIV, and other immunocompromised people, those with physical disabilities, cognitive disabilities, mental health disabilities, Autism, neurodiverse people, D/deaf, Blind, DeafBlind, and many more whether or not someone identifies with the word “disability” or is recognized as “disabled” by the Medical Industrial Complex.

a mix for invoking connective listening

I wrote that this was to be a mix for invoking connective listening. The word connective often makes me think of Juliana Spahr’s Poem Written after September 11, 2001, which is one of two poems in her book this connection of everyone with lungs. Juliana often writes using looping rhythmic repeating lists, adding one element each round in poems and prose about environmental politics, settler colonialism, unlearning white feminism, extraction, warfare, and writing. In Poem…the list scales out before scaling back in. It crescendos around here (in flow but not force, because she uses the silence of microscopic air particulates to hit the final impact later):

as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands and the space around the hands and the space of the room and the space of the building that surrounds the room and the space of the neighborhoods nearby and the space of the cities and the space of the regions and the space of the nations and the space of the continents and islands and the space of the oceans and the space of the troposphere and the space of the stratosphere and the space of the mesosphere in and out.

Differentials in death rates from COVID-19 indicate that “we are” not actually “all in the same boat.” Some of this is to do with the long term effects of air pollution: “we” breathe the same air while “we” do not breathe the same air, while every cell of every “we” contains bacterial DNA whose ancestors breathed the “air” into b(r)e(ath)ing.

This mix for connective listening includes music of forms where listening to the others sounding around you while you improvise together in relation to a context, a social purpose, or a shared task is especially important—music made as a way of manifesting togetherness together. Of course there is much to say about what happens when such forms are indeed recorded but I won’t address that here.

I’ve been thinking with a section of Eileen Myles’ book The Importance of Being Iceland:

All the churchgoers were singing the same hymn not the same notes or tunes. No organ tone set the pitch so they would find it instead among themselves. People were literally singing their hearts out. When the organ was introduced in the 30s some of the older people stopped going to church because the idea of everyone singing the same tune at once seemed “obscene” to them, it offended their Icelandic sense of religiosity, or privacy, or just their understanding of what being part of a community could mean. The radio also upset the applecart with the same songs played over and over with those same versions and the same notes. It’s amazing to think about what the radio might have upset. I’m getting this from all sides. I heard about this singing, and then I read about it, and finally the book I read was co-written by a composer that my friend Mark studied with. These rediscoveries are not accidental. There’s an imprecise mourning needed to see where we are now. I think it’s like the species rediscovering itself. learning to be stubborn in our awkward speaking and hearing.

F told me about the way her friends would organise a collective ritual to connect to their language that, like their land, is endangered. After a time certain older people would arrive at a state where they could access parts of the language that they didn’t know in their everyday state. Certain younger people would use their mobile phones to record what the certain older people were saying. The community would send the recordings to the anthropologists at the university and the anthropologists would analyze the recordings and add any new words to the dictionary of the community’s endangered language so that certain older people and certain younger people could continue to fertilize their language when they spoke it together.

Eileen follows the turf churches radio applecart with a description of a singing form called Kvaedaskapur. The distinguishing characteristic of the singing was a variable voice, which always sang the poem with differing melody…Typically the Kvaedamadur denies authorship. He (or she. There were female Kvaedamur too) didn’t steal it. He just didn’t write it. Maybe the implication being the poem just kind of grew…

In the darkness of winter the singing would generate a sonic connectivity between the singer and the listeners who would also actively keep the song alive. The singer drops his energy at the end of the line but several people in the room come in (vocally) and sing the end of the line for and with him. They hold him up so to speak.

connecting messy links

I haven’t included fragments of Taraneh Fazeli’s text in these notes because it was a working document shared to be spoken since she was in bed sick at the time of collaboration. Instead I’ll share this link to a text she published a while back — http://temporaryartreview.com/notes-for-sick-time-sleepy-time-crip-time-against-capitalisms-temporal-bullying-in-conversation-with-the-canaries/ — and these words she wrote about the text I read from in the mix: In “Labour of Love: To curate is to care,” Taraneh Fazeli thinks alongside Lisa Baraitser, Tanya Titchkosky, Stefano Harney, and Fred Moten. Additionally, her text emerges from a working on/in/through with the many folks who have been a part of her traveling exhibition “Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time: Against Capitalism’s Temporal Bullying” which addresses the politics of health and care. (Note: “crip” is a political reclaiming of the derogatory label cripple by disability activists.) Based in an ethic of care emerging from disability justice that values interdependencies and dependencies, artworks within counter the over-valorization of independence in American society and examine how racialized global capitalism has produced debility in many populations while, at the same time, creating bureaucratic infrastructures that support very few people. At the core of the project is the pairing of artists with community groups organized around creating or sustaining alternative infrastructures of care, such as groups of young single mothers at Project Row Houses, women recently involved in the carceral system at Angela House, and refugees and asylum seekers via Lutheran Family Services. Excerpts from the text are specifically rooted in collaborations with Cassie Thornton, Park McArthur, Constantina Zavitsanos, and the Young Mothers.

Panelaço, Flamengo, Rio de Janeiro, March 2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvDSXLeijuk

Panelaço is the Brazilian word for a pot banging protest. Mobile phone recordings of people protesting against Jair Bolsonaro’s pandemic response by banging pans from their apartments window and balconies. Compiled by O Globo news service and uploaded to YouTube.

Repente, CPTM, São Paulo, May 2019

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOBjc4PbVKM

My friend G once described relationships to me in terms of a dynamic equilibrium over who plays the tambourine while the other sings. Of course sometimes everyone can sing and sometimes everyone can play the tambourine but taking turns means everyone gets a change to breathe. Repente is a form of music from the north east of Brazil where two singers have a battle of improvised lyrics on a theme, often political, usually funny. While one sings the other holds the beat on a tambourine.

Yelli water drumming, 2011

last video down on https://face2faceafrica.com/article/the-liquindi-water-drumming-of-central-africa-reserved-for-women-hunters

I was looking out for a video I half remembered of a man playing the water in a very kitschy-beautiful way. I couldn’t find it but I learned about this shared drumming practice done by Baka women in Cameroon and Gabon.

Cloth waulking in South Uist, 1982

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CmGJ5dwBuk

Waulking is a process of textile finishing where woven wooden cloth is soaked in urine and beaten on a table to soften and shrink it. In the Outer Hebrides in Scotland waulking was done by hand to tweed cloth. This work was done by groups of women who would sing and chat while they waulked. It’s a call and response form with the caller holding the rhythm of the collective movement, meaning that song structures had to be somewhat loose and open to improvisation according the situation on the table, in the room, in the moment. When this video was filmed, the waulking was probably being performed for the camera in a university effort to record the practice while there were still women alive who carried it. Waulking is done today as a form of cultural reenactment or historical research by practice rather than as a living tradition.

Women gathering mushrooms, The Music Of The Bayaka: Volume I, 2007

I wrote Louise: I’ve been thinking a bit this week about this recording of women singing while they collect mushrooms in the forest. I’ll try and find if for you, have only found it mixed with something else so far. What I like is that the women sing in relation with their environment, so that different species in the forest sound at different parts of the sonic spectrum and don’t cut over each other, producing a sonic environment/composition where everything has a place but together co-creates very beautiful music. This way of singing without dominating others feels very special. I’m thinking about this in relation to the birds I am hearing, wondering if they are making more sound with the reduced traffic because they feel more space, or if the more space is just in my perception, but for sure there is some more space happening somewhere.

Toumani Diabaté plays the kora, 2007

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8luhdxS2KuM

Ballu Tundu, Orgosolo (Nuoro), 1969, Musica Sarda Vol. 3

Sardinian confraternity multipart singing occupies a space that is remote from any concept of concert music; it is in fact a living musical practice through which collective relationships are represented and enacted. It is a major element of the social life of several villages through which many people—both locally situated performers and competent listeners—‘think about who they are’ and ‘the world around them’. (Confraternity Multipart Singing: Contemporary Practice and Hypothetical Scenarios for the Early Modern Era, Ignazio Machiarella)

Lampedusa, Toumani and Sidiki, Toumani Diabaté and Sidiki Diabaté, 2014

We were very shocked - Sidiki and myself - while we were recording in London in November 2013 and we watched on TV that more than 350 people had died in the sea trying to arrive in Europe by boat. Since them many Lampedusas have happened. Nothing changes. I don’t know the solution. I don’t know how to do but I think we must talk about it. This is why Sidiki and I composed the song, to talk about it. (http://shufsounds.com/interviews/2015/5/8/toumani-and-sidiki-diabat-interview)

Huku ine Ronda (originally by Chartwell Dutori), played by Gift Mugwidi, 2012

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKbfUEhjuH4

Gift Mugwidi makes and plays mbiras and sells them in Mbare Musika in Harare. Someone he knows films him playing them in cars and uploads the videos to YouTube. I found his name and a basic education in Zimbabwean chimurenga music deep in the comments.

Sa Ugoy ng Duyan, sung by Mimi Jalmasco and Wendy Caballero, mixed by Louise Shelley, London, April 2020

Louise wrote me: Katherine if it’s ok please can you read this before playing the audio, thank you. What you will shortly listen to is a recording of a Filipino lullaby sung by Mimi Jalmasco and Wendy Caballero who are two members of The Voice of Domestic Workers in London. Over the past 8 years I have been a volunteer with this organisation, they are a self organised support, education and campaign group, by and for migrant domestic workers. The passion in their politics in inescapable - their collective labours focus on care and support for each other, to get justice as workers for each other. Their precarity like many others is increased at present, whilst they re-organise and figure out what to do, what needs doing and how to do it, their work continues in their employers households. This is a song from their homes, from their childhoods, from their early motherhoods that they now sing to the children they work for and to each other and now to you. The recordings were sent to me to be shared here, they are mixed with the sounds of listening in my own flat with my back door open onto east London in isolation in April 2020. This invitation to them was also a way to move money from the arts in solidarity with their struggle and also very simply to share their voices, their energy, their beautiful song to soothe but also to awaken you, to 11.5 million migrant domestic workers in the world.

thanks

Thanks to: Radna and Arif at Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee for hosting the broadcast; to Miriam, Rik, and Annelien at Hotel Maria Kapel for supporting the residency where this began brewing; and to the contributors Louise Shelley, Taraneh Fazeli, and Mimi Jalmasco and Wendy Caballero from The Voice of Domestic Workers.

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