Informal Archiving: Crate-Diggers, Selectors, Reissues

Archived music is not only stored as ethnological field recordings in German museums or US universities – a common way to access the collective memory of music today is via mp3-blogs or the growing market for reissue records. More and more traveler-explorers release their “sound souvenirs” from North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, from Southeast Asia or South America, often taking a DIY-approach. If globetrotting Cratediggers and amateur ethnographers act as gatekeepers – how do the practices of the informal collector influence the way music is selected, sustained and reanimated? What practices and ethics of appropriation have reissue labels developed, what controversies have they spurred? And, actually, why is it that audiences in Europe and the US have developed this obsession with West African funk records of the 1970s?

With Mark Gergis (Sublime Frequencies), Temitope Kogbe (Odion Livingstone, Lagos), Brian Shimkovitz(Awesome Tapes From Africa), Elodie A. Roy (Music and Cultural Studies, University of Newcastle), and Michael E. Veal (ethnomusicologist, Yale University)
Moderator: Florian Sievers (journalist)