Events

CISM in the Archive: Archive Khanah: Kurdish Media History and the Role of Cassettes in Iraq - Hardi Kurda (Goldsmiths, University of London, Music)

Archive Khanah, part of SPACE21 Sound Gallery in Slemani, is an experimental archival project exploring Kurdish cassette culture. Using colour organization and gaming, it challenges institutional archives by emphasizing community-driven preservation. By redefining media circulation, diasporic memory, and sonic history, it demonstrates how displaced communities rely on alternative media to sustain cultural continuity. The project not only reimagines Kurdish archival structures but also deepens our understanding of how media circulates within and beyond Kurdish communities.

 

  1. May 14, 2025 - 3:30pm to 5:00pm
SCREENING: Sisters with Transistors

Sisters with Transistors tells the remarkable untold story of the pioneering women who shaped electronic music, crafting the sounds and technologies that define the genre today. Narrated by Laurie Anderson, the film delves into the lives and work of trailblazing composers such as Clara Rockmore, Delia Derbyshire, Pauline Oliveros, Wendy Carlos, Laurie Spiegel, and Suzanne Ciani, among others, whose experiments with early synthesizers, tape manipulation, and unconventional soundscapes pushed the boundaries of musical composition.

 

  1. May 7, 2025 - 7:00pm to 9:30pm
TALK: Sirius Musicology - Michael E. Veal (Yale University, Music)

This talk presents an exploration of Julius Hemphill’s seminal 1972 recording “Dogon AD,” in its relationship to the jazz avant-garde, Afrofuturism, and renegade notions of jazz theory. Professor Veal has been a member of the Yale faculty since 1998. A self-described “musical pan-Africanist,” Veal’s work has typically addressed musical topics within the black Atlantic cultural sphere of Africa and the African diaspora. His 2000 biography of the Nigerian musician Fela Anikulapo-Kuti uses the life and music of this influential African musician to explore themes of African post-coloniality, the political uses of music in Africa, and musical and cultural interchange between cultures of Africa and the African diaspora.
 

  1. April 23, 2025 - 3:30pm to 5:00pm
TALK: The Afterlives of Sound: Memory, Ethnography, and the Borderlands - Alex E. Chávez (University of Notre Dame, Anthropology)

An immersive poetic and musical passage, Alex E. Chávez’s Sonorous Present extends sonic meditations on loss, migration, and memory across America’s borderlands—as physical place and liminal space. What began as an experimental and improvised performance in 2019—inspired by the music and poetics of Chávez’s multi-award-winning book Sounds of Crossing—was subsequently reimagined as a studio album in collaboration with Grammy Award-winning producer Quetzal Flores, and features luminaries from the worlds of traditional Mexican son and jazz—including, Aloe Blacc (2015 Grammy Award-nominee), Martha Gonzalez (2022 MacArthur Fellow), and Roger Reeves (Guggenheim fellow, National Book Award finalist, and Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and Griffin Poetry Prize recipient).

  1. April 16, 2025 - 3:30pm to 5:00pm