MEMORABILIA. COLLECTING SOUNDS WITH…
Mark Gergis. Part II
Music selected by Mark Gergis
After poring through hundreds of sound sources from a specific region, familiarity kicks in and things can tend to get repetitive and homogenous. But there are always surprise audio anomalies that stand out. One of my favorite things about collecting sounds is finding these anomalies in a specific regional style or genre I’m researching, mainly to see what the parameters were within that genre – where it challenged itself, either intentionally or accidentally, whether it be in the production values, the instrumentation or in the fusion of styles (effectively or not).
This collection focuses on a few standout materials recorded or acquired on the continent of Asia. The selections are from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Sumatra and Thailand and span at least four decades, but are artificially unified here by aesthetic, and reflect the nature of what I collect from a location – sounds, radio recordings and music found on vinyl, cassette tape or MP3. Featured here are the lesser heard sounds of Arab and Islamic children’s musics, a political song sung by the Iraqi women’s federation of Saddam’s Iraq, and more, intertwined with brief folk-pop musical selections from places I frequent or research often and field and radio recordings I have made while on location. Mark Gergis
+ info:
>>Conversation with Mark Gergis (PDF)
>>MP3 of his lecture
Sublime Frequencies
Mark Gergis, a regular collaborator with Sublime Frequencies, explains the project's philosophy and the cultural, logistical and esoteric implications of collecting music from a culture other than one's own.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with sound collector Mark Gergis that we were unable to include the first time around.
Conversation with Mark Gergis on his sound collection
This is a conversation by email with record and sound collector Mark Gergis, which took place on April 2011, to prepare a monograph on his sound collection.
Mark Gergis. Part I
Over the past twenty years, this North American of Iraqi origins has immersed himself in popular and folk music scenes and subgenres from Syria, Iraq, Sumatra, Cambodia, Thailand and other places, in order to rescue what he calls "sound anomalies" from oblivion.