It occurred to me while listening to the debut album from Disko Telegraf from Romanian duo Balkan Taksim, that the way dance, electronic, sound collage, and, yes, even hip hop, artists view sound can be a little objectifying towards the human experience. It kind of has to be. The point of sourcing sounds for artists working in any of these fields is to find raw material that will aid them in encouraging a certain mood or enticing a particular response from the listener. Whether that be to influence their thinking or inspire them to boogie, whatever context there was for the original sound is more or less obliterated in pursuit of the artist's ends. Again, this is not a bad thing, but it is worth examining the flattening effect this tends to have on culture and human experience when thinking of contemporary popular music. The general approach of popular music in a post-modern world is guided by the assumption that any sound or substantive human experience can be fed into the engine of creation as a raw datum and processed to achieve a discrete, and sometimes, profligate, object.
While Disko Telegraf is without a doubt an electronic dance record, one that combines the folk music, oral traditions and prayers of various Bulkin cultures into infections doses of electronica, the care with which Sașa-Liviu Stoianovici and Alin Zăbrăuțeanu approach the capturing and repurposing of sounds on the record demonstrates a respect for the source materials that is almost unheard of within the genre. In some ways, it almost feels ethnographic- showcasing the vibrancy of traditions of Eastern sounds and practices in the context of modern music in a way that does not lose its connection to people and the places where the music owes its origins. In still other ways, it feels like a work of fiction- the hurdling forward into a foreign place, of people and ideas, where they become enmeshed in a futuristic scenario where baseline assumptions about culture and human expression are tested and allowed playout under fantastical conditions— illuminating the contours of their true character in the process.
Disko Telegraf is a strange and beautiful album that opens up some interesting philosophical questions concerning contemporary music's use and appropriation of sound. Not as an indictment, mind you, but as a meditation on the common conditions and catharses that structure the human experience, in all its colors, creeds, forms, and patterns.
Disko Telegraf is out via Buda Musique.