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LP
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N 071LP
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Fehler Kuti on the album (Munich, Autumn 2019): "I remember the first time I read W.E.B. DuBois eclectic masterpiece The Souls of Black Folk. The way in which this Weberian scholar flowed from personal account to prose to sociological analysis to music and even political intervention has had a lasting impact on my own work as a cultural anthropologist. It made me understand that as scholars we must use different means in order to give expression to the totality of the lived experience: There is only so much in an academic text . . . The medium changes the message. In this sense, I guess, I'm a singing cultural anthropologist . . . The widespread availability of Digital Audio Workstations, sequencers, loopers, and delay pedals has led us into a futuristic cul de sac best described by Mark Fisher as the very absence of future. Likewise, I am most skeptical of the 'naturalist' countermovement, the return of folk . . . I involuntarily returned to pop music in its two-folded meaning of something popular and addressing not an essentialist notion of 'Volk' or it's woke cousin 'communities', but society as a whole. I entered the studio just with a few lo-fi sounding melodies and rhythms from my circuit bent CASIO synthesizer. I had no clue what the finished product would sound like. But as soon as Markus [Acher] started drumming, in a way strangely reminding me of Can's Ethnographic Forgery Series, my uptight sounds were suddenly embedded within a warmer global sound spectrum. The alien at home and abroad and the strange overlapped: We were seeing one and the same sound differently but were gently held together by Tobias [Siegert]'s producing. Making music is about building coalitions. It's about suggesting an articulation of styles, sounds and people, that hasn't materialized, yet, but may help us in the current crisis: I wanted Amon Düül II to send their drug-induced archangel thunderbird to rescue the refugees, that had tried to escape the police by climbing up a tree in Munich in 2016. I wanted Sun Ra to taunt far-right protesters in Chemnitz in 2018. And I wanted to mourn the loss of a former kebab shop cum discotheque that served as proof that there is such a thing as a minoritarian universalism..."
Music by Julian Warner, Markus Acher, and Tobias Siegert. Recorded and mixed by Tobias Siegert in Munich. Includes download code; Edition of 300.
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