Le Guess Who? presents 'The Big Playback', a conversational, in-depth podcast about all things music. Episode 3 is a four-part series entitled For the Record, exploring the role of the archivist from all angles, released in weekly installments.
In this series, host Margaret Munchheimer talks to an independent archival collective in Indonesia; a sound and performance scholar decolonizing sound archives; a journalist turned label founder offering alternative histories of the global South; and a producer/dj using archival material as a springboard for musical collaborations in the here and now.
While it may seem like a coincidence, we must remember that ‘records’ are in fact, just that: records- documents… testimonials. They’re meant to capture a moment, to tell a story. Which if you think about it, makes every record collector an archivist of sorts. The question is just how much the collector shapes the work in how they present it-the story of course is in the hands of the storyteller.
Part 2: meLê yamomo
meLê yamomo lived in Manila, Seoul, Bangkok, Warwick, and Munich, and now inhabits Amsterdam and Berlin researching, teaching, and creating performance/theatre and sound/music. Through his personal experience as an academic and an artist of color, navigating a white world of classification and knowledge production, he offers insight into how intrinsically white value systems are assigned to cultural objects and practices, shedding some light on ways to rethink this.
He is Assistant Professor of Theatre, Performance, and Sound Studies (University of Amsterdam), the author of Sounding Modernities: Theatre and Music in Manila and the Asia Pacific, 1869-1946 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and project leader and principal investigator of the projects »Sonic Entanglements« and Decolonizing Southeast Asian Sound Archives (DeCoSEAS). meLê is resident artist at Theater Ballhaus Naunynstrasse where his creations Echoing Europe, sonus, and Forces of Overtones are on repertoire. meLê also curates the Decolonial Frequences Festival and hosts the Sonic Entanglements podcast. In his works as artist-scholar, meLê engages the topics of sonic migrations, queer aesthetics, and post/de-colonial acoustemologies.
Host of 'The Big Playback' is Margaret Munchheimer, an American visual artist and writer living in the Netherlands, and veteran Le Guess Who? supporter since 2012.
Credits
Production: Margaret Munchheimer & Le Guess Who?
Audio Post- Production: Francisco Marujo
Artwork: Marishka Soekarna