SAVVYZΛΛR meets RADIO ALHARA

Fellow listeners, Mondays are becoming even more beautiful: Every first Monday of the month, our two radios join energies to imagine, make, fill and offer a space for counterhistories, popular musics, rhythms and echoes, inviting a variety of voices and sonic perspectives. 

One the first Monday in January, we share Ay Ae Sankofa Ay Ae Sankofa, by which we continue to honor an entire weekend spent jamming with the kaleidescopic group of musicians from Mar, Río, y Cordillera in Venice at Oscars Murillo’s exhibition “A Storm Is Blowing From Paradise”. This constellation of about 20 singers, musicians, and percussionists from the Valle del Cauca region of Colombia bring us traditional music from the Colombian Pacific, which is a home and connector for and to African Diasporas. Their instruments are the Colombian marimba, which resembles the African balafon; guasá, typically made from bamboo and filled with light seeds or rice; as well as maracas, drums, and wind instruments. Their repertoire covers the rich knowledges, beats, and vibrations circulating within the Bullerengue sentado, Bullerengue Chalupa, Bullerengue Fandango, Peregoyo, Puya, Currulao, Bambuco, Cumbia, Gaita corrida, Puya, and Merengue.
 

On the first Monday in February, we will feature Endometrio, a mix by Malu. Like a rose in the desert, Malu is a woman of contrasts who likes to explore the shade between light and darkness, considering femininity as an interplay between soft and hardcore. She takes us on musical excursions often alternating between spoken and sung scenes, operatic and popular songs, noises, maracas, reverberations, and suspicious harmonies, that narrate stories as diverse as music itself. 

On the first Monday in March, SAVVYZΛΛR meets Radio Alhara راديو الحارة by returning to the Cosmoaudiciónes which we were honoured to collaborate with last year. „El tiempo ritmo“ is a musical lecture-performance which circulates around notions of non-linear time and is part of "Cosmoaudiciónes" – an artistic project by Miguel Buenrostro with the participation of Laura Robles, Trigo Santana, Fabiano Luna, Robby Geerken, Tom Kessler and Banda Hodi. Musicians of the diasporas have been invited to reflect on the movement of migration through musical improvisation. „El tiempo ritmo“ is a crossover of musical entities that exist in complementarity, hosting each other in rhythm. The presentation touches on questions of time and timelessness, rhythm and the rhythmlessness. Through improvising with the listening materials of the archive, the hope is to restore notions of time that exist through musical memory.

The performance acknowledges music which has been static and enclosed in ethnographic collections. Through a process of listening to materials from the Berlin Phonogramm Archiv, the Cosmoaudiciones artists have re-embodied rhythms by improvising and hosting them around notions of non-linear time, synchronicity and aural travel. The sonic presentation imagines musical travel through water flow, waves, currents, oleajes which made possible encounter and exchange. Through music improvisation we recognize the legacies that have brought worlds of meaning in and out of the Atlantic. The recording you can hear today was presented at Errant Sound, Berlin, in October 2022, hosted by Brandon LaBelle.