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SAVVY Funk
17.June-8.July

Every day, a singer sings yesterday’s news in her own way. The first day, a singer sings just the news from the day before. The following day, another singer recounts the news sung the days before, recopying what yesterday’s singers sung while also adding yesterday’s news in his own way. Over the course of three weeks the voices slowly form a choir, an iso-polyphonic composition of old news—sung, recopied, and thereby intentionally and unintentionally reinterpreted. The oral reinterpretations excite social resonances and make a common space audible in a manner that goes beyond a simple echo chamber.

The news made available to the singers as lyrics is compiled from the news feed of a public radio station. The compilation of news from this pool of reports follows the official criteria of relevance and factuality. But because the geographic coordinates of the feed are altered daily, the perspective of what is considered topical changes. Day by day this shift inscribes itself into the composition and recalls geopolitical reverberations in the echo chamber of the newsroom. Forgetting and silencing are part of the chant as much as accords, dissonances, and resonances. Adding another resonant pollutant, the singers invited to sing the news come from different traditions of music and poetry. Repetition and reiteration is corrupted by these various factors.