Vers Libre Salon
Welcome to the Vers Libre Salon, a new semi-regular night focusing on conversations around music, sound, culture and politics.
For our first salon hosted by Knut Jonas Sellevold (Vers Libre/Radio alHara), we are excited to present a talk with Luigi Monteanni, co-founder of Artetra Records and one half of post-world duo Babau.
Venue: Bergen Kjøtt, Skutevikstorget 1, 5032 Bergen
Date: 23.06
Time: 19.00 - 23.00
FB Event: www.facebook.com/events/989606469062395
Vers Libre regulars Hildisvini, Reckless Kettle and Knut Jonas Sellevold will be spinning records before and after the talk.
Luigi Monteanni, has collaborated with Simon Reynolds, CTM Mag, Norient, Palm Wine, Aural Archipelago, X Magazine, The Attic and Zero.eu and has participated as a performer in festivals such as Roskilde Festival, Club to Club, CTM, UH fest, Terraforma and Outernational Days.
He is currently a doctoral candidate in ethnomusicology at SOAS London, where he is studying the indigenization of extreme metal in Bandung, Indonesia and working on a book regarding his 2017/2018 research on the Sundanese horse trance dances with CLUEB.
RAMÉ SOUNDSCAPES FROM WEST JAVA
Talk by Luigi Monteanni (Artetetra Records / SOAS)
“Ramé” is an Indonesian word with a dense, flexible set of meanings related to multisensory soundscapes. It has been defined in various ways, all underlining the clamorous noisiness of social life and a context where many things happen at the same time. Therefore, it has been translated as bustling, complex and busy, noisy, congested and tangled, as well as crowded, sociable and fun.
By selecting a number of soundscapes and audio files stemming from West Java (Indonesia) that I have personally recorded or which I have researched since 2016 from horse trance dances (réak) to polyphonic, playable bus line horns (Om Telolet Om) to bird song competitions (kicau mania) to Sundanese extreme metal, I will show how ramé works not only as an indigenous aesthetic concept, but also as a perceptive category fostering relationships with supernatural entities, native audio taxonomies, alternative interpretation of the animal and political opposition. A closer look at the world of ramé can inform us about how Indonesians perceive and analyze sound in relation to their sense of self, the aesthetics of noise, the natural world and their political activity.
Previous editions of this talk were presented at Terraforma festival (Milan), COMBO (Venezia) and Sonic Belligeranza Megastore (Bologna).
Event realised with the support of the CHASE AHRC funding.
