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Steph Kretowicz & Kimmo ModigSomewhere I've Never Been
Nature… has further complicated her task and added to our confusion by providing not only a perfect ragbag of odds and ends within us… but has contrived that the whole assortment shall be lightly stitched together by a single thread.
Contents:
(Introlude)...

…In counts of three: “Tu jest Polska / nie Bruksela! / Tu się zboczeń / nie po-piera!”— “Here is Poland, not Brussels. Here we don’t tolerate perverts.” The looping, echoing anti-EU meter wheels into a climax then halts abruptly in time for the man who’s just been speaking to introduce a priest who’ll commence the exorcism…
1. Romania: “Pour some misery down on me.”
…That “somewhere” is a music festival in Bucharest, in the middle of a Southern European heat wave. All I can conjure when imagining the country bordering Bulgaria, Ukraine and the Black Sea is Count Dracula and institutionalised neglect; an opening quote from Cool Hand Luke and a whistle from the Wild West – the finger-picked acoustic opening of Guns ’N’ Roses’ “Civil War” song first sung at the 1990 Romanian Angel orphan appeal. These count for the few bleak depictions I have of a country that is poor, but will counter the impressions gathered from three days at B’estfest. I’m here for their big promotional push to attract an international audience, wrapped up in Vodafone sponsorship and oddly contextualised display racks of Hello! magazine featuring Drew Barrymore’s wedding photos…
Economic Report (Interlude)
2. Dubai Dreamwork: “All roads lead to the shopping mall.”

“Good evening, we have a lost boy, green jacket and pants, would the parents please proceed to the front desk immediately,” a woman says over the PA, in English, interrupting a far-off symphony of panpipes, bass and an occasional electric guitar. Wafts of perfume, a stream of advertisements and moving images are met with a rotation of stock music; instrumental covers of ‘90s US hits, from Bette Midler’s “Wind Beneath My Wings” and Vanessa Williams’ “Save the Best Till Last,” to something I recognise but fail to name, and that song from Dirty Dancing. Cara Delevingne, Natalie Portman and a nameless woman on a monitor crimping her blonde hair at an unsupervised aisle stall, all sexy and dead-eyed, stare outward. “. . . ‘Cause I’ve had, the time of my life. . .” thunder Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes.”
3. Oman: “full wadi no rivers.”

“The muezzin’s prayer pivots the day, broadcast either from the small minaret poking out from the green-palmed oasis that’s next door, or Dubai TV in the lounge… I’m stressed, trying to figure out how to unblock Skype while fucking around with the not-great Ethernet connection so I can interview a band from Australia. Hype Williams’ “London 2012” mix opens with the digitised English accent of Mac Dictation’s “Daniel” asking, “Can you spell the word on the screen?” over the subtle flush of a low-end organ.”
4. Jordan: “Ya Habibi.”

“The cute-boy harmony sings over Lebanese pop star provocateur Haifa Wehbe’s silky-sexy MILF vocals, “Easy mama, don’t worry,” in English, on the predominantly bbic , “Where is Father?”. It’s a track that comes on The Best Kid’s Song compilation CD I bought at an open-air market stall under Cliff Hostel. The vendor is listening through my headphones to snippets of songs I’ve recorded to see if he recognises anything but so far he’s only found Wafik Habib’s New Best of Collection. Its bootleg graphics look like Christian Rock re-imaginings of punk rock fonts. Otherwise, it’s the almost-entirely instrumental saxophone songs by Samir Srour, that are probably the Arabic equivalent of smooth jazz, and pop star Nancy Ajram, whose “Ya Tabtab Wa Dalla” is one of the most exhilaratingly phonetic and polyrhythmic interplays I’ve ever heard.”
5. Israel: “People not places.”
“A different man plays a harp hooked up to speakers in the shade between the tombs of Benei Hezir and Zechariah. The latter is a dusty peaked monolith carved out of the yellow rock in sharp quadrilateral lines, the stone stands as an ancient remnant of unknown origin, another solid symbol of an ongoing dispute over property. I take a photo of a single gnarled olive tree, crooked and contorted, on a ridge that once was rich with them. The lyre’s music flows listlessly over my back from behind. Chromatic notes turn up in couplets, clipping on taut strings in a dance of opposing forces, stretched and oscillating in short, rushed bursts that resonate abruptly. The harmonics move in quick and fast-paced half-shots adding a feeling of a conflictingly languorous urgency, a kind of searching sense of futility that’s oddly seductive but self-consuming. None of these notes will hold.”
Samsung Galaxy (Interlude)
6. Iceland: “We have pain on the brain, Mr. Herzog.

“It will be at the “Lunch Beat,” mid-afternoon, that the clapping (and my over-coded fixation on it) really reaches fever pitch. An Olof Dreijer remix of Sudanese child soldier-cum-hip hop performer and political activist Emmanuel Jal’s “Kuar” marches on a beat juddering towards crescendo on a CLAP. clap. CLAP. clap. CLAP. clap. CLAP. CLAP. CLAP. CLAP. CLAP. Etc. A trill holler opens Jal’s version, a contribution to a global campaign for Sudan’s first vote in 24 years. It rips through the intended and incidental soundscape as a mass of gyrating Nordic bodies converge at the front of the Seyðisfjörður town hall-cum-improvised LungA canteen. An English-speaking insert eulogises a childhood lived through war—”kids carrying guns and welding heavy spears”—and the odd Bacchanalian scene turns with the tempo in the click and cut glitch of The Chemical Brothers’ “Electronic Battle Weapon 8″”
7. Palestine: “I was doin’ alright.”

“The music shifts audibly in mood, tempo, genre, language, depending on the day. It’s mostly Arabic drumming (and the occasional gangsta rap) when the Palestinian boys arrive. A girls’ school trip is met with Minnie Riperton singing the barely subtle innuendo of “Lovin’ You.” Her famously disjunctive ribbon of a squeal drifts gracefully out of her frolicking . . . la, la, la, la, laa, laa, laaa. Do, dn, do, do, doo, dooo . . . . A teen girl in hijab says “Shalom” and giggles as I walk past in my shorts and t-shirt. Far East Movement’s “Live My Life feat. Justin Bieber” features heavily when the Israelis are about, along with the winding electropop of Dev’s “Kiss My Lips.” ”
8. Poland: “Bóg. Honor. Ojczyzna.”

“A woman asks me for a cigarette, then a light, then some gum as I’m sat near the water fountain of the recently renovated Kościuszko Square. We’re facing the relatively new Pizza Hut on the corner of Sienkiewicz and old Lipowa Road, and I’m recording an awfully formulaic pop song sung by a woman singing in English with an overpowering Polish accent about being alone and empowered and moving on. Her voice travels shakily with a finger-picked guitar current alongside an equally vanilla drum routine that seems to just loiter along beside it. It’s like the composition itself is cringing at the quality of an English pronunciation that Ania imitates after the pre-recorded announcement that follows four chimes on the Belgian-owned Polskibus, swapping “aisle” for a word that sounds like “ale” among other things.”
9. New York, NY: “Modern Jesus.”
“My ears are hearing first-hand a 12-bar blues line on an amplified electric guitar in Lorimer Street station, drifting above the Eastern European accents of people waiting for the train. It wraps itself around a steady fingerpicked guitar string that makes up the bass line and reminds me of Hey Arnold!, the ’90s Nickelodeon cartoon that always implies it’s based in Brooklyn. A man sings a velvet gospel vocal above an accompanying snare drum that’s being overrun by an oncoming train and a nasal “Ladies and gentlemen, the next L-train is now arriving” over a loudspeaker. The inflection of the automated female voice crests at the “hat” of “Manhattan-bound.”
10. Griffin, GA: “One Thing Remains.”

“Madonna’s 1986 dance-pop hit “True Blue” is pushing along a chug-chugging cheap karaoke rhythm as a noticeably not Auto-Tuned vocal moans along an almost mundane, unvarying melody, “IIII’m still in love with you”. The pop music ambience in the Japanese restaurant is so crisp, so clear and so easily applicable to all the themes of my projected personalised account of a life lived through its mediation that I switch off my recorder after Naked Eyes’ “Always Something There to Remind Me” follows Nate James’ painfully appropriate (and equally boring) Z-grade Summer pop formula in “The Message.” “I want you to express yourself through music/ and don’t hide it/ and just sing, yeah.””
Bad Boyfriend (Interlude)
11. New Orleans, LA: “Trouble in Mind.”
“Texan country singer Jerry Irby sings “Trouble in Mind” out of a record player in Laura and Eric’s kitchen. His voice drifts through the curtain partition into the room that Addie and I are sharing. “When you see me laughin,’/ I’m laughin’ just to keep from cryin’.” The Houston-born Irby adds a fiddle and lap steel to the eight-bar-blues song originally written by Louisiana jazz pianist Richard M. Jones who cut his teeth in New Orleans’ Storyville red-light district. It’s apparently where outsiders got their first glimpse into the music that started in ragtime and ended in “jass” at the turn of the twentieth century. Irby’s spritely piano and tight, emotionless composition replaces the ungainly ensemble of its very first recording that included NOLA’s most famous resident, Louis Armstrong. On Armstrong’s version, trumpet and piano balk and flounder, brilliant and dejected, under Bertha “Chippie” Hill’s suicidal howl, “sometimes I feel like livin’, sometimes I feel like dyin’.”
12. The Road: “Bye, bye, Miss American Pie.”
“The car passes highway billboards shaded by dusk and backlit by the sun—Dr Pepper, Sonic Drive-in and a Clear Channel mechanical billboard-display announcing the Powerball (“Powerplay”) Texas Lottery jackpot of 152 million US dollars. The sun fades with the life of Lizzy Grant from Lake Placid become the broken dreams for an elusive Del Rey in a song that’s dripping with sarcasm. “Money is the anthem,/ of success.”
13. On the Road: “U.S. Highball.”
“Addie doesn’t get any of my clues for famous old-timey actors in her “Heads Up” iPhone app, which is essentially a version of Celebrity Heads that films you. We’re drinking on the front porch of our Santa Fe Hostel… A very drunk man who has been drinking by himself is playing the piano at reception just inside. He’s stumbling over a clumsy, slurring version of the Korobeiniki, a folk song that I recognise immediately as the theme tune of 1984 video game Tetris. It’s a less sexy 8-bit version of the Russian one that, when played right, stalks and seduces its own tune on an almost permanent build-up.”
Blank Space (Interlude)
14. Los Angeles, CA: “Welcome to Sunnydale.”
“What’s different about my impressions of the music playing here is that it’s the sound of songs that I know, playing in the place that they came from, and it all sounds wrong. There’s the drunken big band refrain of Doris Day’s lethargic “Sentimental Journey” from 1965 that crawls through a laptop, dropping an octave and flopping out of Addie’s stand-alone speakers while we cook dinner at her place in Los Feliz. Or The Madden Brothers’ laughably optimistic “We Are Done,” its ticklish groove skipping along a “done, done, done, done, done, done, done, we are done,” while I survey the postcards of Hollywood Happyland Souvenirs—Marilyn Monroe, Hannah Montana, Kate Hudson and the Hilton sisters, one above the other.”
15. London: “It’s only suffering.”

“Taz is telling me I need to be more specific about my favourite part of the New Age meditation music that Shazam doesn’t recognise at an organic coffee place in Camberwell. “Give us some warning next time. Creepy journalist,” Bex adds as I accidentally record her thoughts, said out loud in response to someone’s Instagram post. I was actually trying to get a song by Sade, playing after D.O.C.’s “It’s Funky Enough.” I wonder why Londoners like to shorten their names to an “x” or a “z” to end—anything angular, like graffiti tags (“enunciate well/ so that you can tell”). I realise it’s probably because of grime music when I’m dragged out to see DJ Slimzee play with an emcee who isn’t Dizzee Rascal, rapping his words in what I think is a rendition of “I Luv U” because of the mention of a “mobile phone.”