Music's institution and the (de)colonial

Description

Unsettling aesthetics. Transpositions of noise, trance and politics
Nils Bubandt and Sanne Krogh Groth


Abstract
Since 2018 we have worked with electronic musicians and noise artists from the Indonesian island of Java studying how musical practices, concepts and genres travel between offline and online contexts, between Indonesian and European festivals, and between local and global imaginaries. Using the examples of “trance” and “noise” music, we ask how we analyze music that appears to resemble particular aesthetic genres in Western European music yet are not. Instead of seeing trance and noise in Indonesia as local versions of global aesthetic genres, we work with concepts that our interlocutors use and try to make them into theory, including aesthetic theory. One such concept is that of “transposition”, our rendering of the Indonesian word alay that the electronic music duo, Gabber Modus Operandi, use to describe their aesthetic inspiration. We use the term transposition to refer to the ways phenomena change as they travel in space and cyberspace. You might say that transposition is our attempt to do decolonial theory. Our problem is that our interlocutors really hate the term “decolonial”.
This paper is developed within the frame of the presenter’s joint research project Java-Futurism. Chronotopes of Sound Activism in Indonesia.

Period	2023 May 4 → 2023 May 5
Event type	Conference
Location	Lund, SwedenShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International