Against the backdrop of AL.FESTIVAL, the Berlin festival centering music from the Arabic world and diasporic communities, we gathered an expert group to discuss liberating technology from some of its Western biases and exclusionary design. Now you can listen back (and read more), with artists ABADIR and Basel Naouri plus Ableton’s Dr. Laurel Pardue, as chatter ranged from critical views of futurism to ways software can mesh with Indonesian gamelan.
The full panel (I was the moderator/organizer), hosted and recorded by AL.Berlin and Refuge Worldwide:
Dr Laurel Pardue – Software Engineer and Researcher (Ableton)
Basel Naouri – Independent Curator, Media Artist, Musician (Slowfuture, TimeLab, Recordat, El Morabba3)
Rami Abadir – Producer, Journalist ( ABADIR, ma3azef)
Ready for a deep dive? It’s worth reading and catching up on each of these individuals. Rami and Basel come from the region, but part of our intent was widening the conversation and hopefully continuing to press the industry and technologists.
We should talk more about Tuning Systems, in fact. I wonder if part of the reason they haven’t gotten more attention is actually because they’ve done such a good job, that there’s less to go complain about. But more on that later. In addition to her being a driving force behind Ableton’s Tuning Systems, Laurel’s done some research and writing on that topic together with Astrid Bin:
Choice quote:
Laurel Pardue, and S. M. Astrid Bin. 2022. The Other Hegemony: Effects of software development culture on music software, and what we can do about it. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.21428/92fbeb44.0cc78aeb
“Viewing this problem through an historical lens of imperialist legacies misses the influence of a more recent – and often invisible – hegemony that bears significant direct responsibility: The culture of technological development.”
Rami has written extensively on the topics in the story, too. Required reading is his piece on dystopia and futurism, published in both Arabic and English (with proper translations) on The Cartography of Darkness:
The Aesthetics of Darkness in Electronic Music: Between Dystopian Lures and Futuristic Fixations
See also this interview in YUNG:
Rami Abadir on Sound, Theory & the Politics of the Present
Or for Strum and Iodine:
“I had my memory travelling” – In conversation with ABADIR
From the essay, he hit this note in the conversation, too:
When interpreting sounds that are new, special, unusual, odd, or rare, many western writers resort to a “futuristic” classification, and they might throw in some “dystopia” or “cyberpunk” to make it more sensational. The future has become a worn-out cliché, especially when it comes to understanding and decoding non-Western cultures. Just because a sound is new, unfamiliar, or unheard in the global West—due to their limited knowledge of the history and music legacy in Asia, Africa, or the Arab region—doesn’t mean it’s a universally “new” and “futuristic” sound. The lack of effort to understand and learn more about the origins and influences of different genres is striking. Such futuristic claims simply fail to trace the “new” sound to a specific geographic location where artists were influenced by their own culture and technology.
When it comes to non-western electronic music, futurism reduces and dehumanises the artists, depicting them as alien creatures making weird noises. In simpler terms, it’s a form of othering.
Rami’s new music I want to sit down and review properly, but here’s a taste:
Going back a little further (and he talks about why he came around to working in this way without it being fetishism for Western audiences in that Strum and Iodine interview above):
Basel Naouri, born in Jordan, based here in Berlin, is a man of many talents and directions — a musician, an architect, a curator, transforming spaces in various dimensions. “Slowfuture,” the name, already speaks volumes — about this process of reversing hyper-capitalist, Western-privileged futurism, about even simply slowing down.
Basel was playing AL.Festival in El Morabba3, too (unfortunately also with personnel changes owing to Germany denying visas for some artists). That act is also too deep to do justice here, but have some sounds. (Their live show was breathtaking and deeply emotional, speaking in earnest to a lot of what’s happened in the past months and years and years and years.)
As a solo composer, he’s also made this excellent soundtrack for a film about female plumbers:
Basel has some wonderful reflections on slow futures and the manifesto he wrote for a festival literally called Manifest:IO, but maybe most relevant are these words from a furniture exhibition in Jordan:
Today, furniture, food, entertainment and everything else comes readymade and packaged, the architect noted, underscoring that “our alienation from inanimate objects is leading to a deeper alienation from the essentials of life” …
According to Naouri, “we’re living in a time where there’s too much separation and alienation between us, between people, and the objects we interact with.”
“The side effect of our rapid modernisation and increasing pace of technological advances, especially in terms of production, has led to items being created at such a capacity that the options have become endless,” he said, adding that “he believes that this has to an extent distanced us from what’s important, and weakened, if not dehumanised, many of our experiences in life.
From way back in 2017, but I love that he’s cycled back to these ideas in new ways:
Designer seeks to lessen ‘alienation of modernisation’ by merging music, wood and steel [The Jordan Times]
Finding those wavelengths and resonances, rehumanizing and slow-cooking — that fits as well in food as in music as in music software.
Give it a listen, and I hope we continue all these conversations. Maybe over some slow-cooked food.
Full description for the panel:
Liberating music technology: Re-engineering for Arabic music and beyond.
Music technology’s strong bias toward a narrow set of so-called “common-practice” Western European conventions is well-known. And it can exact real political, societal, and human costs as a vehicle for exclusion and erasure. But how can artists and engineers break that normative, restrictive design? With Arabic music practice (traditional and new) and other regional and diasporic practices around AL.Festival as a frame, we ask our panel to consider how to challenge those norms. We invite examination of engineering and design, music and digital media, journalism, and production and performance practice. Where are there possibilities for industry and artists to change course — especially with the danger that machine learning could make culture more flattened and extractive than ever before? How can this be living and active, and not reduced to “preservation?”
All our minds have been colonized in some ways, especially across the diaspora. We’ll look at practices of musical creativity that can liberate them.