Text by CLOT Magazine
Having recently celebrated 2 years from its first issue, the tekhnē journal is an online periodical offering background and reflection on sound, technology, and creative usership, run collaboratively by six European partners. Q-O2, GMEA, CTM, OUT.RA, Skaņu Mežs, and TRAFO each take the lead on one issue in turn, developing a theme in depth by commissioning artists, researchers, and academics to share their research outcomes and threads of practice.
Across its run, tekhnē has used this rotation to surface a different facet of technology’s emancipatory potential each time: DIY cultures, the often-concealed materiality of media and sound technologies, diversity and access to the stages, education and participation, transparency and open access to the internet. It is a project built on the premise that what a technology becomes has less to do with the tool itself than with how people learn to use it and reshape it collectively: a premise we tried to unpack at greater length in the first piece of this series, born from a collaboration between tekhnē journal and CLOT.
Issue 3, Mutating Traditions, was curated by CTM Festival around an ongoing thematic strand titled Resynthesising the Traditional, developed with co-curator Stas Shärifullá. It borrows resynthesis (the studio technique of breaking a sound down to its fundamental components in order to rebuild it) as a figure for tradition as such, against the fantasy of tradition as immediate, self-identical, given once and for all. The issue’s four essays, commissioned by tekhnē and published last year, cover very different geographies, but insist throughout on tradition’s mediated character: its dependence, at every point, on institutions, migrations, technologies, and states that produce it as an object in the first place. The question structuring all four is who holds the authority to define the boundaries of a tradition, and through what apparatus that authority is exercised.
Ján Solčáni’s contribution stays closest to the political edge of that question. Writing from Slovakia, he tracks how the country’s Ministry of Culture has mobilised “a return to tradition” as a nationalist project: reviving cultural ties with Russia, rewriting the national anthem, and treating folklore as something the state alone is entitled to define and protect. Against that instrumentalisation, he profiles a grassroots experimental scene, exemplified by artists such as Adela Mede, Nina Pixel, and the Punctum Tapes collective who sample, detune, recompose Slovak and Hungarian folk material as an open-ended cultural resource.
Luigi Monteanni’s piece moves to Bandung, Indonesia, tracing an unlikely lineage between the traditional trance ceremony réak and the city’s extreme metal scene. Over decades of shared marginalisation and DIY organising, these two undergrounds — one ceremonial, the other imported and criminalised by the state — coalesce into a single youth culture: metalheads incorporating Sundanese instruments like the karinding, réak troupes borrowing punk’s stage-diving and mosh-pit choreography. Monteanni reads this convergence through the concept of geotrauma, arguing that both scenes emerged as ways of sonifying the same experience of industrial dispossession.
Alanna Stuart’s piece performs a related operation on gender and diaspora. Tracing Toronto’s queer, female-led sound system culture back to Jamaica, she argues that practitioners such as Bambii, Nino Brown, and Ace Dillinger are not departing from sound system tradition but resynthesising its commitments to bass, collectivity and technique under conditions that had previously excluded them from the means of sonic production. Drawing on José Esteban Muñoz’s idea of disidentification, she argues that staying within a tradition and transforming it from within can be more radical than leaving it.
Anuar Duisenbinov’s piece, the most polyphonic of the four, is a set of conversations with Qazaq musicians, ethnomusicologists and producers, moving between the sacred and the experimental: a dombyra player explaining why Qazaq music was historically an oral, not written, professional tradition; a kobyz performer weighing how far an instrument once reserved for shamanic healing can travel into contemporary composition; a pop producer describing the ritual he performed, prayer included, before sampling a nineteenth-century kui.
CLOT’s own response to that same brief materialised in Agostino Quaranta’s essay Elettrocontaminazioni Meridiane: Sonic Speculations on Southern Italy. Quaranta, a visual artist, DJ, and researcher splitting his time between London and Ostuni, has spent close to a decade tracing how Southern Italy’s oral and rhythmic traditions, chiefly Pizzica Salentina, have crossed paths with electronic music: from the 1990s Tecnopizzica scene to his own DJ practice as AGOSTINO. He starts from a claim in a book of Ostunese poetry that his own family dialect “has no future,” and traces the counter-evidence through half-buried recordings, from Domenico Modugno’s 1955 UFO ballad to Enzo Del Re’s chair-and-siren electronics, arguing that Tecnopizzica’s rhythms resurface, decades later, in Gigi D’Agostino’s Lento Violento.
While sharing a starting metaphor, each piece works a different axis of it. Solčáni’s is the most explicitly about state power: tradition as something a ministry can legislate into existence, and a scene that resists by refusing to let folklore sit still. Monteanni’s is closer to a class analysis, using geotrauma to argue that two sonic vocabularies converge not because of shared aesthetics but because of a shared economic wound. Stuart’s is about gender and diasporic inheritance: the question of who a tradition was built to exclude, and whether transforming it from inside counts as continuity or rupture. Duisenbinov’s sits with the sacred: what happens to a tradition once its oral, ritual core has to pass through notation, archive or sample, and whether that mediation preserves it or slowly replaces it.
Quaranta’s essay works yet another axis: language and media archaeology, tracing how a claim about a dialect’s supposed lack of a future gets contradicted by a century of half-forgotten recordings, and how a rhythm can survive by migrating, quite literally, along the same routes as the people who carried it from Salento to Turin. What all five share is the underlying claim that a tradition persists not by remaining identical to itself, but by being repeatedly re-mediated through the technological and social apparatuses of successive presents.
