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Cassette
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SUC 031CS
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Mark Gergis is a producer, musician and audiovisual archivist known for his radio and video productions, recordings, and performances. His work has focused on regional folk-pop music from the Middle East and Southeast Asia, including choubi and dabke from Iraq and Syria. As an archivist, Gergis is currently working on the project Syrian Cassette Archives, for which he aims to restore, preserve, catalog and share his large collection of Syrian media from what can be called Syria's "cassette era" (1970s-2010). As an artist, under his name and others (Porest) he has released music on the Sublime Frequencies, Discrepant, and Nashazphone, to name just a few. It's a wonder that amongst this hectic schedule he still finds time to present us with a new (old) collection of early century recordings (1999-2013). Locational recordings, radio, and TV intercepts, cassette excerpts, environments, and street music all expertly all expertly meshed into a vivid sound journey from places that were (and might) never be again.
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CD
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SF 095CD
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Radio is an audio compass; the radio antennae, a divining rod. Positioned anywhere, it opens an exclusive window directly into the location in which it sits. Signals received on the medium wave (AM) and FM bands reveal programming intended for a local population by governmental, independent, pirate, or corporate media broadcasters. Anything from low-powered ethnic minority transmissions, high-powered westernized pop stations, and omnipresent state-run radio can be found on these bands. Shortwave bands expand the breadth and scope, pulling in regional and international receptions. Everything received factors into the experience. Music, news, talk shows, advertisements, station IDs, cross-phased interference, errant or intentional static-generated sounds, distant detritus, and random broadcast anomalies all become equally relevant. This disc continues the Sublime Frequencies locale-specific radio collage series with Vietnamese radio recordings culled and assembled from signals received in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City between December 2013 and November 2014. Inside the 70-minute program are moments of outstanding folkloric, traditional, and pop music, including performances on the electric guitar and the dan bau (a one-stringed guitar-like instrument), eclectic Vietnamese folk and rock stylings, dramatic effects-laden radio theater and musical segues, new wave pop forays, traditional percussion and vocal chants, news segments, dynamic radio bumpers, jingles and advertisements, comedic interludes, phoned-in karaoke sing-a-longs, English-language programming, early-morning exercise regimens, and coded messages from the outer ether. The grand total sum of these radio recordings doesn't aim to present a certified ethnographic study of contemporary Vietnam. Rather, the material here aims to distill and replicate the excitement, engagement, and discovery gained during heavy exposure to Vietnamese broadcasts over an eleven-month period during the teenage years of the twenty-first century. CD comes in a beautiful digipak with full color images, a booklet, and liner notes by Mark Gergis, who recorded, compiled, sequenced, and produced the project for Sublime Frequencies on location in Vietnam.
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