When I was 16, my hometown Yogyakarta was hit by a huge earthquake, killing 6,000 residents and displacing 600,000 others. Yet, as she learned in OneBeat’s Building Radio workshop, radio can also have dividing effects. And as the once-pulsing samples of electronic dance music motifs are being reconstructed and abstracted, a hazy and reflective sentiment takes the place of dancefloor euphoria.Īs a teenager, our writer experienced a natural disaster, and the only radio nearby united the survivors. As the lyrics suggest a sense of belatedness yet remain sparse and ambiguous throughout, the idea of a late and faded reincarnation is further implied, feeding into my understanding of post-euphoria as a subjectivity that entails fleetingness and retrospection. The vocal line, which fragments a lyrical and melodic phrase from a previous song, can be seen as further embodying the idea of a fragmented ruin – mediated and transformed through my own singing body, which operates as a sampler-like device. The conversion also served as a useful compositional and arrangement tool, with which I was able to create different musical sections, distinct in timbre and pitch, based on a single loop. The misconfiguration of the audio sample was in this way emphasized to present a mutated and reincarnated ruin of the original sample.
As the original audio sample is being converted to MIDI, it inevitably transforms and becomes mutated, with some musical information being lost due to failures in the digital conversion process.
In particular, the audio-to-MIDI conversion made me think of drawing a connection between the malleability of sound and the shifting mental image of recollected euphoric experiences. Employing these production strategies enabled me to playfully reimagine elements of electronic dance music and to explore new meanings and associations that emerge through their reconstruction and decontextualization.
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