"Other Voices: Echos from a Warzone"
by Gordan Paunovic - Presentation of the Kunstradio CD.
"You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you" (Trotsky) "Other Voices: Echoes From a Warzone" was conceived soon after the military operation "Allied Force" began, and was performed live on air, on line and on site as a KUNSTRADIO program on April 29 1999 at the Vienna studios of the ORF (Austrian Broadcasting Corp.). It was aimed to strongly support and emphasise the sounds of reason coming from the other side of the war-coin. "Mainstream media, following guidelines from political establishments on both sides, transformed the reality into a huge propaganda stageset. Beyond the Potemkin villages of the big TV networks , there was another life going on - a life of people who spent years and decades fighting totalitarianism and nationalistic hatred with the power of their expression and creation. Writers, sound artists, radio personalities, media workers, journalists and musicians, suddenly became collateral damage of the war in Yugoslavia. However, they were not just another victim of geography. They became god-forgotten people, "second-rate citizens", those whose opinions have never been politically-current or media-attractive enough to deserve to be heard and shown in public loudly and on time - neither in Yugoslavia nor in Europe. Anyway, they have never asked for that - they have just continued to live and create - while preserving sanity in a warzone. Some of their earlier works were reborn in the war, while at the same time giving birth to new original war-zone artefacts: diaries on living and dying, destruction-soundscapes, messages to the outside world. Above all, they have continued to resist everything they have always resisted. It is now up to the world to listen to that sound. "Other Voices..." is about them, and for them." Gordan Paunovic, Budapest, June 1999
From the KUNSTRADIO archive:
From the archive of B92:
Other sources:
During the whole program one of Gordan Paunovic's sources was a Real Audio Live Stream from Belgrade, created and encoded by Robert Klajn. This Real Audio Live Stream included sounds picked up by a microfone hanging out of a window in Belgrade, while the city was being bombed, as well as loops of different sounds recorded during the bombing. |