Episode 20 - Shake the City

Locust Radio

In this episode, recorded downwind from an increasingly immolated Canada, we interview Alexander Billet, author of the book, Shake the City: Experiments in Space and Time, Music and Crisis from 1968 Press (2022). We discuss music, the city, cultural fragmentation and the accelerated alienation of neoliberal culture, the “blue note,” Fred Ho’s concept of kreolization, the digital algorithm as capitalist standardization of music, sound as social control, music as a potential tool of social revolution, crackle and anachronism, acid communism, and getting “left behind” by the bourgeois rapture. Alexander Billet is a member of the Locust Collective who has written numerous articles and reviews for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Salvage, Jacobin, and the Radical Art Review.

Readings in this episode: “Feet Firmly Planted on the Earth,” by the late Iranian poet and Marxist Ahmad Shamlou, from the collection, Aida, Tree, Dagger, Memory (1963), republished in English in Locust Review 9 (2022), translated by Saman Sepheri; a selection from Sound, a serialized novella by Tish Turl, published over several issues of Locust Review (starting with Locust Review #2 in 2020).

Music featured in this episode: Enchanters, “Missing Mountains” and “Unlikely Windows” from Post-Harvest; Diamond Soul, “Screens,” from Maya-mi; and Omnia Sol, “Security to Section 3,” from X-Mas Miracle 2.

Artists, art, musicians, books, and articles discussed in this episode: Theodor W. Adorno, “On Jazz,” Discourse Vol. 12, No. 1 (Fall-Winter 1989-90), 45-69; Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” (1936); John Berger, Ways of Seeing (book, 1972), and Ways of Seeing (BBC documentary, 1972); Alexander Billet, Shake the City: Experiments in Space and Time, Music and Crisis (London: 1968 Press, 2022); Cynthia Cruz, The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working-Class (London: Repeater, 2021); Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures (London: Zero Books, 2014); Mark Fisher, “What is Hauntology?” Film Quarterly Vol 66. No. 1 (Fall 2012), 16-24 (University of California Press); Fred Ho (American jazz musician, composer and Marxist, 1957-2014); Henri Lefebve, The Right to the City (1996); Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844); Tish Turl, Sound (novella serialized in Locust Review, 2020-present); Tish Turl and Adam Turl, Born Again Labor Museum (conceptual art installation and project, 2019-present)

Locust Radio is hosted by Tish Turl, Laura Fair-Schulz and Adam Turl. It is produced by Omnia Sol.