Universal Library: Culture& Netil Radio

The Universal Library aims to immerse listeners into a mood by creating musical narratives, generally regardless of their time period or genre unless specified. Netil Radio is a community led radio station broadcasting live from a converted shipping container atop of Netil Market in Hackey. http://www.netilradio.com/

17^th October 2019, Afrofuturism:

In this show, Eno looked at the musical heritage of Afrofuturism. The origin of the term Afrofuturism is usually credited to American author Mark Dery, who first used it in an interview with Tricia Rose, Samuel Delany and Greg Tate in the South Atlantic Quarterly in 1993.[1] Dery defined Afrofuturism as a speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20th-century.One key/ leading figure in the Afrofuturism music scene was Sun Ra, often referred to as the Godfather of Afrofuturism. Sun Ra sought to look to the past as well as the future to re-imagine and claim new metaphorical and material spaces for the African diaspora. Moreover, throughout his career, Sun Ra had methodically assembled a striking visual and musical aesthetic that incorporated images of the future with cosmic costumes and sounds that were suggestive of ancient civilisations and utopian futures. These utopian futures represented a time when the current societal and racial strife and division had been overcome,

Follow the link below to listen to a compilation of Afrofuturistic music from the show.

20^th February 2020, Jazz in France:

This episode from 20th February highlights the jazz imprint on musicians in France from the 1920s onwards. Jazz in France has its roots in encounters with African American soldiers during the First World War. The unconventional nature of Jazz provided the perfect sound of ‘Les Années Folles’ or ‘The Crazy years’, which saw the arrival and confirmation of Paris as the home of Avant-Garde art in the 1920’s. The first hour of the show is dedicated to Jazz in France with music from Josephine Baker, Miles Davis, Francois De Roubaix, Jef Gilson, Martial Solal amongst many more and offers the listener an abstract timeline from 1920s ragtime to the 1970s fusion and the experiemental Zeuhl.

Follow the link below to listen to a compilation of French Jazz music from the 1920’s onward as featured in the show.

18th June 2020, West Africa (1960s-80s):

This show will focus on West African Music. West African Music is composed of many rhythms or polyrhythms. African rhythms became syncopated by playing around the rigid European metre and emphasising the gaps or off-beats largely ignored in Western tempo. This is a tradition that continued into West African Music in the 60s’s-80’s while also being influenced by African American Soul and Psychedelic Rock. Although this wave hit Liberia first, it was Ghana and Nigeria that would become the pioneering countries and provide fertile ground for Afrobeat to flourish.

16th July 2020, Brazil – (1960’-70s):

This show will explore the history of Tropicalia music from Brazil in the 1960’s – 70s. Tropicalia was a Brazilian artistic and political movement that surfaced in the 1960’s. Though the movement included poets and visual artists, Tropicalia is most notably known through its musical outlet, expressed as an amalgamation of traditional Brazilian genres such as Samba and Bossa Nova with West African rhythms, Musique Concrete and Psychedelia. Tropicalia was a cultural criticism that arose during Brazil’s military dictatorship. The lyrics of the musicians involved included anti-authoritarian and anarchistic lyrics, which soon enough made them a target of censorship by the military junta. This lead to sentiments being cleverly concealed to guarantee that their music was released. 1969 witnessed the official end of the movement as leaders Caetano Veloso & Gilberto Gil were arrested by the military for their political content. The pair were forced into exile in London until being allowed to return to Brazil in 1972.

[1] The term Afro-futurism was coined by Mark Dery in 1993 in an introductory essay that accompanied an interview with cultural critics Tricia Rose and Greg Tate and theorist and sci-fi writer Samuel Delany. See “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose,” in “Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture,” ed. Mark Dery, South Atlantic Quarterly 94.4 (1993): 735–78; quotation at 738.