What does this project aim to do? What is the point of taking the sounds of local places and voices and transcribing them into musical unity? Among other things, emphasizing the qualitative experience of place, instead of the statistical, normalization that quantified neoliberalism employs, is acting against the neoliberal market economy. Re-igniting an emphasis on sensation, and the way art shows our intersubjectivity through empathy, is key to reacting against our currently socio-political, ecological and cultural climate. The quantification through statistics has ultimately created a breakdown of systems of communication, an excess of alienation. We can see this in the music industry; charts ranking not on quality of music, but quantified sales, Spotify creating algorithms based on persona; ‘data’ encrypted by numbers, and compression tools used so much that music is squashed to a level where music sounds most similar; the list goes on. This is what my project is reacting against, and hopefully the audience will be able to feel that.
*It would be unfair not to mention the fact that I wrote this particular post after reading the pre-published version of Robin James’ Sonic Episteme, which relates Neo-liberal politics and music.
Composing the North East 