Podcast: listen to part 2 of 'For the Record'

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.

You can listen to Part 2 of 'For the Record' below or via your favorite podcast app.

Part 2: meLê yamomo

meLê yamomo has 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.

“Perhaps we should be listening. Because if we listen, perhaps we would find certain voices that might have disappeared in history.” - meLê yamomo

meLê yamomo 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. He also curates the Decolonial Frequences Festival and hosts the Sonic Entanglements podcast. In his works, engages the topics of sonic migrations, queer aesthetics, and post/de-colonial acoustemologies.

Sonic Entanglements & DeCoSEAS

As an author and sound scholar, meLê has spent a lot of time with archives and shares both some beautiful and practical insides into what it means to decolonize.

Photo: 'White Mans Voice'

meLê's project Sonic Entanglements aims to identify, organize, and analyze extant early sound (musical and non-musical) media in and about Southeast Asia (SEA) during the emergence and development of early recording and radio broadcast technologies in the region (1890-1950).

Photo: 'Residents listening to gramophone player in Batavia From KITLV Southeast Asian & Caribbean Images'

DeCoSEAS is a transnational research project focused on hearing and listening as dialogical modes of knowledge formation in order to renegotiate established understandings of heritage curation.

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