17 x 24cm, 80 pages, Single colour printed, Perfect bound, Softcover, 2019

“A proposal for a radio project on the diffusion of world music in thedigital age, focusing on the concept of “seismographic sound”.

The publication Music as Seismographic Sound / Tracking Down the Idea of Cultural Translation is a written radio pitch by Ania Mauruschat, closely following musicians in bi- or multi-lingual cultural contexts. Ania Mauruschat is a radio journalist who has produced several features on sound art, with the German radio station Bayerischer Rundfunk, and the Swiss national radio station SRF.

The written pitch comes in the form of an appendix of source materials, including excerpts from interviews with selected musicians.

“Music is the fastest traveling medium. As some scholars like to argue, it even might have a seismographic potential. Thus, the Swiss ethnomusicologist Thomas Burkhalter speaks of "seismographic sounds" regarding the rather new phenomenon of global digital "world music 2.0". This musical phenomenon developed predominantly in the urban centres of the "Global South"—São Paulo, La Paz, Lagos, Cape Town, Jakarta, Beirut or Manila—, long before it drew the attention of journalists and researchers from the "Global North" in the early 2000s. [...]
To scrutinize and better understand this situation of in-betweenness, the radio feature will focus exemplary on two very distinct and yet similar case studies of seismographic sound generating hubs: firstly, the label Outhere Records, which is based in Munich, Germany and serves as a platform especially for the young Pan-African scene of world music 2.0; and secondly, the label Aakuluk Music in Iqaluit, Nunavut, the northernmost territory of Canada, which is devoted to developing the young musical scene in the Arctic to facilitate the search for identity and independence of the Inuit musicians in their postcolonial reality of community building.”

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