Music For Broke People

8,00 €

In stock

“What unites the community of affection, the circle of close relationship to which I belong, is the awareness of precariousness, of being in an edgy economic situation, in a world that does not allow for utopian feelings, that denies and hides the vulnerability of bodies. We live in the continuous struggle of positioning ourselves in this dualism between earning money to support ourselves and dedicating ourselves to creative work free from constraints related to the production of a commodity. We are forced to manage what job ads from corporations call “work/life balance.” Even in the creative act itself, we cannot free ourselves from the commodifying power of the system: on one side, the utopian feeling that wants to create symbolic discourses describing material worlds free from the pressure of capital; on the other, the push from the society of the spectacle that tends to commodify every performative expression and requires us to make every creative act money-productive.

This drive toward production leads to seeking personal affirmation and public recognition, self-celebration, manifestation of an egotistical self that hardly relates to itself critically, unable to mediate space with the otherness. Music For Broke People is an attempt to not conform to those dynamics in the realm of sounds, to rejects an egotistical individuality. Here, rather, it is the ghost of the subjective identity that moves among the remains of a world in ruins, where there is no room for narcissism. A search for the abandonment of the ego as a way for a less painful life, with more room for self-determination for everything is a minority.

Noises that seek to symbolically express a philosophical feeling, being non-functioning as a political manifestation, as a refusal of a world that demands performativity aimed at capital production. Thus, the instruments are non-functioning, broken, at the end of their strength. From this exhaustion emerges an ecstatic feeling, the sensation of ecstasy when one is at the end of the strength, the ecstasy of an indestructible love that is beyond the market and deeply connects those who are capable of creating networks based on non-exploitative dynamics.

Music For Broke People is music made with very scarce means, practically devoid of economic value: an old mixer, a couple of self-built contact microphones, and some dictaphones. Dictaphones, objects fallen into oblivion due to the continuous technological renewal, the continuous creation of new consumer needs. The dictaphone, the smallest and cheapest of tape recorders. A reel-to-reel wanna-be stuck in its condition as an office tool, useful for unspooling law lectures or good for reminding a doctor of the details of a certain appointment. For years, I’ve dreamed of owning a reel-to-reel tape recorder, but I have never had access to such a tool, so I started acquiring the cheaper and more manageable dictaphones. Slowly, I began to understand that they had their own dignity, an extremely personal sound identity, a sound that scratches the bottom of the ear canal. In particular, the sound of rewind and fast-forward has a strong kind-of-ASMR quality.

This sound leads me to explore bodily interiority, strong physical sensations often linked to conditions of discomfort that remain in the bodies and memories of those in a vulnerable condition. Thinking about poverty, hunger, lack of sleep, abuse of alcohol, smoking and other substances, violence and abuse, the feeling of disgust for the surroundings incapable of questioning itself—all this leads me to a heightened physical perception, different from a condition of well-being and clarity. It leads me to perceive internal organs almost tactilely, ASMR indeed.

In the last years, noise, the music of rejection of all conforming power, has been engulfed, devoured by the market, brought into clubs, sold through non-diy, commercial dynamics, transformed into a commodity in the inevitable and infinite process that capitalism operates, which is to track down resistance experiences and commodify them, turning them into weapons against the resistance itself.

Music For Broke People tries to answer this question:
What is left for us to do in a world where every word, every sound we produce can potentially become the basis for exploitation and monetization?
Well, we have no choice but to keep moving, to radicalize our performativity, radicalize it more and more every time our manifestation of resistance is taken from us, move a little, stay on the extremes, as someone said, “on the edges of the empire,” and perhaps there in the purity of a audio feedback, in the extreme distortion of a hacked fuzz pedal, or in the listening of the deepest silence, we will find some peace, for an instant, a moment before starting to move again. ”

Tracklist:
A1. Ear Cleaner
A2. Non-Functional
B1. Commodify This!
B2. Music For Broke People