Download a radioclit teaser.
>> London-based Webcasters/DJs Radioclit push all the right buttons
by JACK OATMON
The name is literal, at least in part. London-based Radioclit, comprised of Parisian Étienne Tron and Sweden’s Johan Karlberg, started out as an Internet radio show early in the new millennium.
“It wasn’t a proper pirate radio, we didn’t have the equipment to do that, though that’s what we would have liked to do,” explains Karlberg via email. “London is crazy for pirate radio. Back then, there was so much cool stuff on the radio. They had big crackdowns on pirate radio, which is shit, but it’s getting better again. I just found this all-African radio station that I only get in my car and in my kitchen. It’s all traditional African stuff, they don’t even speak English, but it’s broadcasted from east London, where we live.”
In the ensuing couple of years since the duo began broadcasting their mixes online, they’ve distilled the pell-mell havoc of emerging club styles, from crunk and electro to soca and indie rock, into a sonic Molotov cocktail that charges out of the subwoofers like a car-tipping riot. The unpredictable clusterfuck of content you get from flipping through independent radio programs becomes a baroque mosaic that unites guests from all genres—TTC, Bonde Do Role, TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe and Malawian pop musician Esau Mwamwaya, to namedrop a few.
And like the central district of any cosmopolitan city, Radioclit’s multinational mix of sounds contains any number of social and political insinuations, even if only circumstantially.
“We don’t really have a political standpoint in our music, though we might have them in life. I think it’s pretty much impossible not to have politics influencing music, though. Especially with music from poor parts of the world, ‘ghetto music,’ or whatever you wanna call it. Choices of people in power create hardship for these people, and that hardship and desperation often comes out in the form of beautiful, honest, real music. From slave music to hip hop to funk carioca to South African freedom music, you pick. All we try to bring to it is something positive. Some people see us calling a remix ‘Techno Jihad,’ and they might take it the wrong way. But jihad only means ‘holy war,’ it doesn’t have to do with suicide bombs or American troops fucking around in the Middle East.”
Don’t take all that to mean that Radioclit are satisfied by just uniting the complementary characteristics of international club styles because they aim to illuminate as well.
“Who’s crazy enough to say you can have ‘done it all’ when it comes to music? Only someone who’s not inspired enough to look beyond what’s happening, I think. There are no limits to music, although we definitely see a lot of people going in circles. We try not to. I know there’s no end to creativity and imagination.
“People take 1 and 3 and make 4 and think it’s fresh, and it might be, that’s probably what we do too in a way—but there’s friggin’ Ö and Å to explore that no one has even heard. That’s what we’re working on next.”
With MC Gringo, DJ Khiasma and Peer
Pressure DJs at Academy Club tonight,
Thursday, July 19, 10 p.m., $15
Messages
Aucun commentaire:
Publier un commentaire