On october 22 we premiered Christopher Trapani’s new song cycle Noise Uprising at Transit Festival in Leuven.
We = Zwerm (with Christopher playing with us in the band!) and amazing singers Sophia Burgos and Sofia Jernberg.
Click here for more info and fututure dates of Noise Uprising !
The inspiration comes from Michael Denning’s book Noise Uprising, which chronicles the explosion of vernacular recording that took place in the late 1920s in port cities around the globe. The historical 78 rpm records of this era are the not-so-silent witnesses of the birth of son, jazz, samba, rembetiko, fado, tango, etc. They reveal a kind of B-side of music history, a people’s history of music-making driven by the bustling marketplaces of colonial port cities. Noise Uprising is a polystylistic atlas that unravels a subterranean, cross-cultural network far away from, and with a wider reach than, traditional concert halls. Using Denning’s book as a starting point, Christopher Trapani plans to “fill in the map” by composing a series of pieces for four guitars and two singers, sometimes including live electronics. In studying these 78s as primary source documents, Trapani transcribes and transforms their musical gestures. These recordings will be in turn woven into electronic collages, often alongside his own field recordings, made on site in the cities where the source material originated, imagining alternative histories, fictive encounters and cross-pollinations between styles which in reality may never have intersected: gamelan meets tango, fado meets samba. With Noise Uprising Trapani uncovers hidden connections between geographically distant genres, but in doing so he always strives to create work that ultimately represents something more than a travelogue or a book of postcards. The short works he composes for this cycle will be meant to call into question notions of cultural appropriation and authenticity, to challenge rather than to romanticize notions of the exotic, and to draw attention to the dangers of “overtourism” and the unreflective, superficial consumption of place.
The guitar, in all its possible variations, forms a common thread. But also the human voice plays a central role in Noise Uprising. We play a wide array of plucked string instruments, small percussions, shruti box, melodica, mbira, stroh-cello and much more.
Here are some pictures from the rehearsal studio:
