SORRY, THIS PROGRAM HAS BEEN CANCELLED!
World music. It’s only for people over 40. And it’s not really hip. Really...? World music authority MPS PILOT (who’s not only a DJ but also an ethnomusicologist) takes you on a spoken and musical tour of world music. After which he hands over to a fast-rising talent in the UK dance scene: Romare.
If you just think about it for a moment, you’ll see that the term ‘world music’ is a bit simplistic. And it’s also very euro-centric. Because world music usually means just about everything, except for music that comes from the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Western Europe, from Norway to France, and from Iceland to Germany. While all the rest, from anywhere on the planet, conveniently falls under the title of world music.
To help you take your first steps in non-Western music, whether you want to understand it or dance to it, we’ve called on Horst Timmers, better known as DJ MPS PILOT. His travels have taken him to the Balkans, Spain, India, Turkey, Morocco, Senegal, Mali and Burkina Faso, where he’s submerged himself in modern world music. He’s focused mainly on cross-fertilization between all the different genres. His styles range from drum ’n bass to flamenco, and from Indian Bhangra to Latin American percussion and back again – all forming an organic, rhythmical whole. He’s appeared at venues from Mysteryland to Sziget, from North Sea Jazz to Mundial, from Lowlands to Oerol. But as well as his DJ work, he’s also a producer and an ethnomusicologist, and we’re specially interested in the latter. He’ll introduce you to world music by playing lots of clips. And after that, he’ll introduce our other guest Romare with a short interview.
Romare is a new DJ from London, and a producer who’s spent the past few years collecting samples for a new concept: a form of music created by sampling the differences and similarities between two musical forms and cultures and bringing them together to form a new whole.
Samples of songs, speeches, interviews, open-air recordings and films are carefully selected and rearranged to reveal the links between African and Afro-American music. Rhythms from West Africa are integrated with voices from Harlem, conversations about race and identity are constructed between writers and ethnomusicologists, and speeches by activists are mixed with voices of prisoners – all resulting in his four ‘Meditations on Afrocentrism’.
It may all sound like heavy stuff, but once you’re on the dance floor you’ll soon see that it has a sublimely light quality. If you really have to give his music a label, you could call it Post Footwork. But just listen to it for yourself and shuffle to the sound, as it shifts smoothly from house, through funky hiphop to an exciting bass-filled electronic beat.
Students free entry / others 5 euro