Martin Bewa

I've had this question on my mind for a while now and felt like sharing my personal thoughts on it. Bring it up with your professors and art school friends if you feel that it's a conversation that needs to happen at your school, and most often, it does, here in europe...

"Replica Speakers" A series of cardboard cutouts of designer speakers reduced to their visual aesthetics and made larger, with their backs left visible. Hidden speakers behind the replicas play the Spotify playlist "Songs to Test Speakers With", questioning the fetishisation of sound systems in curated cultural spaces Matte paper prints Cardboard Wood silver tape photography @rohanasin

New Kolodji music on SoundCloud•check it out! 🛋️ Link in my bio if you want to listen, more to come!

Adrian Piper - My Calling (Card) # 1 (For Dinners and Cocktail Parties) 1986 - 1990 Calling Card # 1 was performance piece in which Piper handed these cards to people who made racist remarks. It was a way to call someone out for being racist and identify herself as Black within a social situation. At first glance, Piper may appear to just be white, and often overheard racist remarks, since people did not realize she was Black. She struggled with if she should ignore the comments, stand up for herself and make a scene, and found the solution in these cards.

Dijon’s debut album, Absolutely (November 5, 2021), recorded in 2020 alongside many collaborators like Noah le Gros, Mike Gordon (Mk.Gee), and Jack Karaszewski. Using techniques like the AKG C414 microphone in omni-directional mode, Dijon creates a 360-degree sonic palette that allows the listener to be completely surrounded by his curated environment. The songwriting and recording processes occurred simultaneously, allowing for an immediate and raw expression prioritizing immediacy over perfection. As Dijon states, “We learned really quickly that the only fun way to make music was whatever you bring has to be able to immediately be recorded, that's it. So, you take the limitations of an interface input and just not think too much about it. It's everything that's counterintuitive to engineering, which is not trying to make them sound as good as possible before you record. It's just too much to think about.” The album opens with “Big Mike’s,” featuring a repeating melody and a interplay between vocals and Mike Gordon’s guitar, characterized by “jumpy picking” rather than traditional strumming. This enhances its spontaneity, a sort of “gestural explosion” that add texture and energy to the songs. In live performances, Dijon further explores real-time sound manipulation, using tools like Eurorack modules to create new soundscapes. He states, “If I can curate the sound, I can make the world [of the album] interesting, hopefully in a way that I haven’t heard before.” Since I discovered Dijon, I can’t stop coming back to Absolutely. There’s something incredibly pure yet innocent about it, filled with stories that evoke a sense of lost time. Listening to this album feels like being transported to a narrative set deep in rural America in the 80s, a time when everything and nothing seemed possible. I experience a sort of deep nostalgia for a world and references I’ve never known, yet I find myself completely captivated by it. It’s as if Dijon had tapped into a collective memory, where we can all find a place to stay and reflect on what has been and what could have been. Excerpts from Dijon - Absolutely (Film) on YouTube and other random YouTube live performances

𝑌𝑒𝑙𝑙𝑜𝑤 𝑆𝑢𝑏𝑚𝑎𝑟𝑖𝑛𝑒 (1968) was a collaboration between The Beatles and a team of over 200 animators, led by director George Dunning and art director Heinz Edelmann. Edelmann's vision broke away from traditional animation, it mixed traditional hand-drawn techniques with new approaches, using experimental techniques such as rotoscoping, limited animation, and cut-out collage. Key animators like Robert Balser, Jack Stokes, and Charlie Jenkins contributed to the film's iconic sequences. Though often mistakenly linked to artist Peter Max, the film’s visual style was Edelmann’s original creation. I watched this movie religiously when I was 8 years old. I couldn’t understand a word because I didn’t fully understand English and even less so the dense Scouse accent that the characters had. It was so strange and weird that I simply couldn’t look away; I was practically hypnotised by the visuals. Unfortunately, this movie is not really talked about, as it’s often flagged as just a simple Beatles movie, when in reality there is so much more to it. The animators clearly used the budget and the Beatles’ name to create a completely free-form animated movie that follows its own structure and rules. I feel like this movie showed me, at a young age, that you can completely break the rules of a medium and still make it coherent, even if a bit chaotic...

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