MEMORABILIA. COLLECTING SOUNDS WITH…
Sublime Frequencies
Founded in 2003 by Alan Bishop, Hisham Mayet and Richard Bishop, Sublime Frequencies has become a benchmark in the exploration of popular and folk music from parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
Deliberately avoiding traditional ethnomusicology and academic approaches, they never lose sight of their mission to rescue music and sounds that would otherwise very likely be destined to be forgotten. They work with a highly varied repertoire that ranges from regional radio broadcasts to field recordings, folk compilations and pop and documentary video/film.
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.
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.
Radio Maghreb
In this project Alan Bishop vindicates the use of radio as an electronic instrument in a journey through time and space that unearths old recordings from the AM and FM airwaves made during his first trip to Spain and Morocco in 1983.
Mark Gergis. Part II
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.