Notes from Listening
- curated listening from the margins #1
“Notes from Listening - curated listening from the margins” is a curatorial series built around listening as a form of inquiry. Each edition begins with a small constellation of records that resist easy categorization—albums rooted in lived experience, historical conditions, and personal or collective urgency. Rather than focusing on genre or aesthetics alone, this series asks what it means to listen attentively: to follow sound back to the gestures, decisions, emotions, and circumstances that brought it into being.
Ugandan pastoral songs, experimental vocal work rooted in Indian tradition, archival lo-tech grotesque from Eastern Europe, Berber poets from Morrocco and an intimate electronic narrative of fear do not form a genre-based community. What connects them is something more fundamental: a shared understanding of music as a tool of memory, lived experience, and tension, rather than a self-contained aesthetic object.
At some point, I realized that I am no longer able—at least very rarely—to listen to music purely for its surface qualities. What draws me in now is the full story behind a record: every detail, every human gesture that shaped it. I find nostalgia increasingly tiring, especially when it flattens history into something safe and sentimental. I would rather step into the shoes of those who became part of these phenomena as they were unfolding—those who were writing history without knowing its outcome—and try to feel what accompanied them: the shiver, the fear, the euphoria, the uncertainty. This is the reason why this monthly cycle is being born right now!
These are albums that exist in the unstable space between document and creation, tradition and personal gesture, community and solitude. Each speaks a different sonic language, yet all of them demand time, attention, and a willingness to listen without the promise of comfort or immediate reward.
Obuhangwa bwa Banyankore na Bahororo - Katokye (Nyege Nyege Tapes)
This album became a reference point for the entire selection, because it presents music in its most elemental form: as a lived practice rather than an autonomous artwork. The music sung over cattle grazing in Western Uganda resonates loudly! What I love about Nyege Nyege is that the club isn’t the only space they take us to. The songs of the Banyankore and Bahororo - the first (sic!) studio album of the legendary singer John Katokye - operate here as records of collective experience: improvised, repetitive, embedded in the rhythm of everyday life. This is not “global sounds” as an aesthetic category, but a document of a sonic culture that exists independently of markets and curatorial frameworks. Listening to this record, I am reminded that music can function as a primary mode of communication, memory, and togetherness—long before it becomes something to be categorized or consumed.
Melopea - Amelia Cuni (Black Truffle)
Melopea by Amelia Cuni approaches tradition with equal seriousness, yet places it firmly within the realm of contemporary artistic inquiry. The voice becomes both instrument and historical medium—a vessel for forms refined over centuries, while remaining open to experimentation and dialogue. What interests me here is not the fusion of old and new, but the suspension of that distinction altogether. From a curatorial perspective, this work suggests that what truly matters is not chronology, but presence: focus, duration, and the listener’s readiness to remain attentive.
Troupe Asnimer & JH Burch (Black Sweat Records)
This collaboration brings together Troupe Asnimer, an ensemble working with ritual and trance-based rhythmic structures, and JH Burch, known for site-specific and process-driven sound work. Released by Black Sweat Records, the album was recorded through collective sessions focused on duration, repetition, and gradual transformation. Percussion anchors the form. Micro-variations shape the listening experience. Sound develops through shared attention rather than hierarchy. Tradition appears as an active framework shaped through collaboration. Listening becomes a participatory act grounded in time and physical presence. It’s one of my favourite works from 2025!
Trabant II - trabant (purge.xxx)
The archival nature of Trabant II does not lead toward nostalgia, but toward something closer to the grotesque. These recordings operate in a space of dry humor, awkwardness, and quiet absurdity—where lo-fi improvisation, naïveté, and dissonance coexist with a sharp, if understated, intelligence. Trabant’s music often feels deliberately misaligned with its own time: unfinished songs, fragile structures, voices that sound unsure whether they should sing or comment from the sidelines. There is something deeply unsettling and funny here at once—a sense that irony becomes a survival strategy rather than an aesthetic pose. In the context of this selection, Trabant II reveals music as a place where resistance takes the form of awkwardness, where freedom appears as a series of small, strange, and human deviations from the norm. I love it!
Fobia - Aylu
Fobia closes this selection with the most personal gesture. It is a solo album by Aylu, released in 2025. The record is rooted in electronic composition, vocal improvisation, and sound design. It explores states of anxiety, mental tension, and emotional pressure. The tracks unfold through layered sonic structures and controlled dynamics. Voice and electronics operate as equal elements within the compositions. The album situates itself within contemporary experimental music practices focused on affect, embodiment, and introspection. Sound functions as a primary carrier of emotional content.