Medium

Blinky Bill on global inspiration

Still taken from Blinky Bill’s ‘ATIE’ video OneBeat 2013 Fellow Blinky Bill (also known as Bill Sellanga) is a Kenyan producer, songwriter and member of the trailblazing collective Just a Band. We asked him to look back on his musical inspiration and experience at OneBeat 2013, as part of our upcoming OneBeat Zine.   “Growing up, my diet was a disparate musical cocktail made up from the Congolese Lingala music listened to by my father and my mother’s predilection for gospel music of any kinds. My siblings and I ingested this, yet we yearned for more. We took to stealing my father’s radio from behind his locked bedroom door so that we could listen to pop music over the airwaves: a mix of Michael Jackson and American Top 40 alongside funky African musicians like Chicco and San Fan Thomas. I graduated from the OneBeat Class of 2013 and it’s been one of the […]
Medium

Third Eye
by Luisa Puterman

Várias vezes ao dia penso que a realidade poderia ser feita apenas de som — como se o som tivesse a capacidade de construir e modelar objetos, espaços, pessoas, animais e árvores etc. Imagine um lugar amplo, bem amplo, onde o vento dança assobiando melodias de um oboé Nesse mesmo lugar sinos conversam bem lentamente imersos em rios de harmônicos… Many times a day I think reality could be made of sound alone — as if sound had the capacity to construct and model objects, spaces, people, animals, or trees. Imagine a wide space, a really wide one, where the wind dances, whistling oboe melodies. Here, even the ground is made of sound, a fat low solid sound. In infinity (the infinity of my imagination), I catch myself building places like this, some of them more figurative, some of them quite abstract. One after the other: caves, lakes, pavilions and parks that many times […]
Medium

(ANOTHER) SWAN SONG FOR THE INFINITE
by Jeremy Thal

In 1977 NASA sent two Voyager probes into space, each carrying a Golden Record. The records contained a smattering of what the great scientist-communicator Carl Sagan and his team considered to be humanity’s most meaningful sounds — a Brandenburg Concerto, greetings in 56 languages, Mahi music from Benin, and samples of organic life: whale songs, brain waves, laughter. Given the size of the universe, and the relative scarcity of functional turntables in the Milky Way, the chance of this record being stumbled upon and played on some far-off victrola is decidedly slim. And yet it’s some consolation to us terrestrial bipeds to know that Chuck Berry and Mozart are floating out there in the seemingly infinite abyss of spacetime. If the Record itself were to peer back at us from 15 billion miles away, our planet would fade into the rest of the stardust, and the din of our rock’n’roll, atom bombs […]