The Music of Resistance is a six-part documentary series that tells the stories of musicians who fight repression and sing about injustices. Continue reading

ULTRA-RED: Raven Row Sessions in Spitalfields, London seeks applicants for Sessions: Saturdays 4, 18 April, 2, 16 and 30 May 2009; and a Concluding Public Event: 11 June 2009, 18:00PM.

What is the sound of community organising? A five-session practice-based workshop on activism and sound art open to UK-based artists, social movement activists, community organisers, and students. The artist activist collective Ultra-red will present a workshop in five daylong sessions at Raven Row, a new contemporary art exhibition centre in Spitalfields, London. The workshop introduces participants to the art of sound and learning from what we hear in the methods and politics of community organising. Continue reading

Sonic Bridge — over/through the wall/fence at the U.S.-Mexican border; a telematic event :: January 23, 2009; 9:30 pm :: Brown Rice, 4332 N. Kedzie Ave., 1st floor, Chicago, IL.

The U.S. Immigration Policy could change soon, since Obama will be sworn into office shortly as the U.S.’s 44th President. Currently hundreds of miles of wall and fence stretch across the US-Mexico border, and the Bush administration is trying to make sure that the border fence gets extended as quickly as possible — in these final waning days of that lame duck administration.

Sound artists and musicians will be part of a Sonic Bridge, a telematic performance that will run perpendicularly through the U.S.-Mexico border wall/fence, in conjunction with sound artists and musicians who live here in the U.S., Central America, and South America. Performers in remote locations will be able to interact with each other in real time. Continue reading

A History of Music Torture in the War on Terror by Andy Worthington, CounterPunch. Posted December 17, 2008 in AlterNet:

From Britney to Barney, any music can drive you mad if it’s played enough. And unlike with physical torture, you can’t mentally prepare yourself. There’s an ambiguous undercurrent to the catchy pop smash that introduced a pig-tailed Britney Spears to the world in 1999 — so much so that Jive Records changed the song’s title to “… Baby One More Time” after executives feared that it would be perceived as condoning domestic violence.

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Petit Mal’s Crisis In The Credit System is the first (and only) great pop song about the financial crisis. Combining an elegiac-compulsive piano riff, twanging synths and waves of spooked electronics with sparse, melancholy vocals this is a unique and addictive electro anthem for the end of capitalism as we know it. Emusic, iTunes, Myspace.

Petit Mal, AKA Ben Seymour and Melanie Gilligan, fuse ’80s synth pop and ’00s electronica to create emotional, intelligent and irresistible new music. Poetic, oblique and compelling, Crisis in the Credit System collides a Pet Shop Boys-style pop drama with autistic vocal repetition a la Lora Logic and ends up somewhere completely unique and contemporary. Continue reading

Voices of America is looking for new sound work employing samples of coverage of the US election as reported on Voice of America (VOA) radio, the US government broadcasting service intended for an international audience. Here’s how it works:

RECORD audio of election coverage on a Voice of America station — UPLOAD your recordings to http://thevoa.net and tag them according to language and content — DOWNLOAD from the searchable pool of available recordings — REMIX the broadcasts and UPLOAD them back to the website.

A curated playlist of compositions and remixes will be broadcast from The Sea and Space Gallery in Los Angeles in a special event on November 4 - US election day - as part of the Audacity of Desperation exhibition. Upload from August 25 - November 4 to be included in the live event! Continue reading

TINA B - The Prague Contemporary Art Festival presents Stefano Cagol: Un-Secret Signals :: October 9-13, 2008 :: Janovského 23, Prague 7, Czech Republic.

Mass communication and Babilonia. Fragmented communication and freedom of expression. Secrecy and disclosure. Locked and open. Black and white. Morse Code and Light. Hallucinatory flashes of light from the top of the Petrin Tower in Prague illuminate and disorient the nocturnal cityscape of this historical and fascinating place. Sound sequences play intermittently night and day, concurrently accompanying light signals that simultaneously spell out cryptic messages in Morse Code. Continue reading

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay’s Listening to places is a series of place-based soundscapes, incorporating field recordings, electro-acoustics and digital media. Landscape in Metamorphoses is the second album of this series.

“Budhaditya Chattopadhyay is drawing attention to the rapid social and geocultural transformation of his native India on his latest album. Landscape in Metamorphoses, a 26-minute collection of field recordings on German label Gruenrekorder, documents the stormy environmental changes taking place in Tumbani, ‘one of the busiest industrial belts at the Bengal-Bihar border’. Recorded between February and April of last year with little more than a simple MD recorder and a binaural microphone, ‘Landscape in Metamorphoses’ aims at delivering both a vivid sonic snapshot and a strong political statement.” - Tobias Fisher at Tokafi.

You are invited to participate in http://thevoa.net, a participatory Internet radio project that reflects on the media spectacle of the 2008 US Presidential Election through the lens of the Voice of America Radio Network, the US government broadcasting service intended for an international audience.

Between now and November 4, you can: RECORD audio of election coverage on a Voices of America station; UPLOAD your recordings and tag them according to language and content; DOWNLOAD from the searchable pool of available recordings; REMIX the broadcasts and UPLOAD them back to the website; LISTEN to the recordings and remixes online anytime or to the radio broadcast at Audacity of Desperation in Los Angeles on Election Day. Continue reading

Another Protest Song :: CALLING ALL ARTISTS, SONGWRITERS, MUSICIANS… What does a 21st Century Protest Song sound like? Given the continuing political climate, we feel it is time for another protest song to be sung. Upload and share your jam today!

Politically engaged music is not only a consequence of history or nostalgia, but can be timely and pertinent commentary on our contemporary world. Another Protest Song is a collaborative project which uses the social networking space of the internet to archive and debate contemporary protest music. The project went public in late May and has become a daily/weekly growing archive with a number of original protest songs uploaded and shared by you the user, and other ideological persuaders. Fine tune your power chords, generate new lyrics and poetry, and set your protest to song. To upload, listen, and comment, check out >> Continue reading