Playlist from Practitioners

Playlist from Practitioners starts much like any of our other projects, as a curiosity of what our fellow cultural practitioners listen to. Listening in an expanded sense of what is not only on their playlists but what sounds or music has accompanied them in their practices as well as throughout their lives. Launched as a playlist showcase and sharing platform between artists, curators, collectives and other cultural workers. It is a personal look into how music and sounds have shaped, inspired, and effected them. From their regional discourses, their contemporaries or personal journey, this project is an invitation for a shared time of listening together across geographies, cultural confluences and multiple timelines. Playlist from Practitioners takes place every Friday at MUSIC PROJECT.

As part of AAA’s 25th anniversary program, Archive for All: Growing with Communities, the playlist was created by Ho Tzu Nyen and compiled by Asia Art Archive for the exhibition At 25: Artists’ Early Worlds, Part I. Asking What were you doing when you were 25?, Ho Tzu Nyen offers a glimpse into what he was listening to in the 2000s, tracing fragments of his musical interests and influences during that period. Moving between memory and speculation, the playlist is an instigation to recall how narratives are formed in a generation, how it influences and is in turn influenced by the circumstances of the time. A recollection of a coming of age — it reflects on a particular moment in time while offering insight into his formative years, life and practice.

Koichi Shimizu offers a playlist with tracks produced over the past several years from his own live performances and in his collaborations with Apichatpong Weerasethakul. His practice spanning a wide range of genres, he approaches his compositions as a soundtrack for a film that does not exist, implicitly linking the languages of the sonic to that of the visual. An electronic music producer, composer, sound engineer and artist known for his label SO::ON Dry FLOWER, he has been at the centre of the development of local sound artists, indie and experimental musicians and has supported platforms for experimentations which has been integral to the current music scene today.

Rafi Abdullah, a cultural worker working within research, writing and curation from Singapore. Imagined as multitudes of understanding and manifestations of semangat, the playlist combines different genres of Nusantara music, a blend of Malay scales and melodies with Western influences. Nusantara or ‘Archipelago’ (Indo-Malay archipelago) offers a definition of semangat as a form of greeting as well as the invisible and spiritual life force. From upbeat contemporary takes to more traditional music, Rafi suggests time as not a straight line but rather the semangat as a convocation, layers of harmony and dissonance of the concept that flows through oneself.

Chantana Tiprachat, an artist and filmmaker originating from Issan brings together film soundtracks, indie pop, electronic music, folk songs, and recent discoveries, the selection traces an emotional landscape shaped by films, cities, travels, work, and memories accumulated over time. Rather than following a single genre or theme, each track marks a particular encounter or moment in life and in turn reflects the vernacular sounds and music relevant in the cultural consciousness throughout the ages. Together, the playlist unfolds as a map of personal recollections, revealing how music, moving images, and stories continue to accompany and inform her.

A playlist is never just a playlist, for different artists and listeners they function in different ways, and in this case a proposal for world building. Riar Rizaldi presents his playlist as a notebook for his radio art practice. Where sound, music, and tracks weave together into one, moving between sonic fictions and audio essays. Between the ominous to the soothing, threatening to the calming, the playlist suggests a sense of narrative structure and a desire to build a world through sound. An Indonesian born artist, filmmaker and researcher. Riar’s artistic practice focuses on world-views and the possibility of theoretical fiction using speculative science-fiction.

Continuing the thread of world building, NUH PEACE’s playlist is about pop music after the future has collapsed. Not arranged by genre, era, or scene, rather a psychological state when nostalgia ceases to be comforting, pleasure feels synthetic, and identities mutate at the whims of machines, platforms, bodies, and desire. A time where pop culture becomes both memory and malfunction, where the past leaks into the present. It is a playlist for normalized post-dystopian conditions and the strange beauty of surviving after the end of something. Considering the pop consciousness but through a post-dystopian condition, NUH PEACE’s multidisciplinary practice blends fashion, art, performance, video, makeup and party settings through his consistent exploration of contemporary neoliberal capitalism. Often deconstructing club and pop music, his perspective draws and originates from the marginalized such as the working class and queer culture.

Liew Niyomkarn is a sound artist and composer based in Brussels and Bangkok. Exploring layers of sounds composed through field recordings, repetition of notes, different harmonics, and reframing and reconstructing various tuning systems, her playlist serves as research material for her upcoming record. Approaching the theme of memory illusions through various sonic frameworks, her deconstruction of the standardization of tuning and the proposition of alternatives offers a mode of hearing and listening that foregrounds relation. The tracks and excerpts explores how sound sources can reshape one’s perception, understanding and their position across multiple planes as how time moves through us.

As there are playlists for experimentation, studying, driving, and almost every activity under the sun, Kru Tuk, an aerobics teacher presents a playlist for dancing. Specifically one normally used in her classes at Lumphini Park, of which she has been teaching for 28 years. Athletic experiences since time immemorial have been accompanied by music as it serves to rally the participants, and legitimize the gathering as a form of social ritual. Collective identities formed themselves through a shared experience of listening and moving in conjunction, from the personal to the national. Selected from its tempo and sense of camaraderie, the playlist offers an optional stationary experience of intently listening to music one is supposed to move to.