I think I call myself ethnomusicologist because in the last years I have been studying this field and I feel I'm part of a generation that wants to change it. We are more focused in cities; we try to work with experimental music, subcultures and in any places where we have other interesting things going on. So I work in different topics and I also use other methods… There are some musicologists that just study the sound, specially in the academic environment. They analyse the music score, what is innovative, what is new and so on, but they don't care about the context.

Well, it is like this, some musicologists only analyse the score, not even the sound. But our new generation doesn't believe in the score, we do believe in the music. We work with musicians that maybe cannot read a score, and even if they can, it doesn't mean that they will play it 100% as it is written. The recording is the score nowadays. We try to discuss what we hear, rather than what we see. If you only analyse the score, you cannot be precise enough.

We use “media” in a broad sense, but basically as “medium”. I will explain myself better: audiovisual items (films, music, etc.) are produced and then distributed across the globe via different media-channels, like the internet, TV or radio. All the references people sample from are often taken from media channels –for example, films from the 1980–. This is what we call "media cultures": many types of media/mediums surrounding us – screens, devices, TV, radio or internet to mention some.

I believe commercial music is the same as independent music –understood as not mainstream, not massive market focus–. It is difficult to see who are the actors and the power behind a certain kind of music. Today, mainstream pop culture in general is dominated by capital, but on the other hand, independent artists that created alternative or avant-garde music are maybe supported by family or friends who could be connected to capital as well: bankers, big companies' managers… If you travel out of Europe, sometimes it's not so nice to know where money comes from. Even in my country, Switzerland, money often comes from corruption.

Yes, definitely, this kind of music cannot reach the same public as pop music, because it is very, very different. Moreover, the purpose is different. But in any case, things are not black or white. Sometimes artists try to make music that sounds mainstream to reach the population, but they do experimental stuff as well.
There was a band, many years ago, called Corner Shop, from the UK. They were number one with their first EP in the lists in Great Britain and due to that they were invited to their first TV show. The surprise was that they were all Pakistani, but really sounded as brit-pop. They became mainstream to show that Pakistani –not just white– people living in Britain were also part of Great Britain, and that mainstream music could be done by anyone (again, not just by whites). As you see, there are different types of strategies on how to reach the public.

I don't know… I like people who have a passion for something, even if it's building his own computer or her own car, or making very strange music. I reckon that all these people with a strong passion for something are somehow outsiders: what mainstream consider out of the norm, strange, nerds. And all these nerds and freaks are the musicians I work with, it's alright to have a platform for all the outsiders in order to give them some visibility. This is what we do in Norient. I believe this is what counts.

Yes, some artists try to hide it, I don't know why. When I work in Africa and abroad, I meet all these musicians that make alternative music, and the crowd assume they're poor and what they do is really vocational. But normally it's not the case – to do experimental music, money to support the project is needed as well. Sometimes I have been in rehearsals of alternative music bands or metal bands in really huge rich villas, and it's difficult to determine if these bands are producing the money to have this type of houses, maybe they do. Or maybe they do more commercial stuff besides the alternative one as well.

In the music scene, all I can say is that everyone is trying to find a way to finance their projects and their living as an artist. It's a time of experimentation, no one knows how to make money from contemporary, arty music. The music economic system does't exist anymore, labels are falling apart, sales are gone – only mainstream music exists. Spotify takes over everything, all they publish is for free and they don't give any revenue to the musician. Facebook was very good for an organization like Norient at the beginning, we could publish in our page what we were doing so the followers were updated and our content was spread quickly. But now, they changed the algorithm – if you do not reply constantly to everyone, you get lower in the position of being shown, and you don't arrive to your followers, you need to pay and this isn't in our philosophy as a collective. Hence, basically what we do every year is to build a profile in a new social media platform. Sound Cloud is good for us now, but maybe we'll be changing soon, and we'll need to pay for using it…

Well, I've been traveling a lot in the last 15 years and I've found many musicians in different countries doing music outside of the standard circuits of Europe and the US, but it is not commercial stuff. These artists in Africa, Asia and Latin America do songs about their country: Ghana, Senegal, Lebanon, etc. We're building a network, a community that tries to experiment and wants to create music with quality, caring about content. By doing so, we try to show a world that is not just black and white, to break the idea that someone from Beirut has to sound Arabic, and someone from Africa has to sound African. They are the ones promoting a new world, one that it is not targeted in our comfortable western system. We are living difficult times with refugees, there's never been so many people leaving their countries because of war and violence since WWII. Nevertheless, more than 80% of the population worldwide wants to live in peace, without conflicts and longing to move forward with their lives. Musicians are part of this 80% – they want to show that there is another side to be seen every day.

 Not at all. Let me explain how we arrived to the six topics. We wanted to give a complete global picture of what is going on, musically speaking, nowadays, and consequently, we launched an open call for musicians to submit tracks and clips to Norient. We received more than 1000 submissions from all over the planet. Afterwards, we did a huge excel sheet with tags such as “money, love, gun shots, war, bomb, etc.” The tags we worked with were found either in the title, heard in the lyrics or seen in the videos.
The six topics selected were the most repeated in our study. In fact, "loneliness" is the only topic we found in Europe and the US, the rest were worldwide. War, for example, was found in places where, of course, there's war; but also in places where there isn't, like the UK. Some people are fascinated by it, they use sounds of bombs in the base to make it stronger, for example. Thus, you see, it's the same subject with different motivations.

As said before, I have been studying music around the world for more than twelve years now. I don't know why people believe this topic is somehow special. I think it is a logic approach, because the world is diverse – it is not about Europe and the US anymore. It's about time to pay attention to the music produced in the world we live in, and to diversity. The book features punk in Bolivia and Indonesia, electronic music in Egypt, underground pop from South Africa and Nigeria, rap in Pakistan, Serbia, Chile and Ghana, noise music from Israel, post digital pop from UK, Neuer Konzeptualismus…

There are many artists in Africa and other places parodying exoticism, what “we” in western culture understand as “exotica”. Yet, the downside of it is that it's easier for a musician from Africa, an Arabic country or Latin America –to mention a few– to make music with a local touch or flavour. If they don't add this “touch”, sounding completely placeless, experts become nervous. Curators suppose, to a certain extent, that an African musician should sound African, and I consider that's a really bad thing.
For example, I am in Nigeria and I am fascinated by death metal, why am I not allowed to do amazing death metal music in Nigeria? Why do I need to sound African to be considered a good musician? I actually understand this kind of thoughts as racist, in a way. Good music is made by many influences and references, and now more than ever, where you are “siting” right now is the less important aspect of it.

I do consider musicians and artists that are very much dependent on the internet and the use of open source software as digital cultures representatives. In the case of music, it is produced entirely in a computer, with free copies of software, hacked versions, freeware… This is what we call digital culture. Internet also inspires the works these cultures produce. I met many musicians in Pakistan last year, and a lot of them learn music or how to make it through YouTube tutorials. If you don't have music schools with the subjects you want to learn, YouTube has became an educational tool: experts or skilled people upload videos teaching how to play an instrument or use a piece of software to compose music.

Oh, it is working very well, and for us it's the best time of the year! It has a lot of support from the public. We've created a program of films that have music as their main theme, and we bring the directors along to present the movie to the audience. In addition, we program live performances and panel discussions with musicians, DJs and record labels. The 7th edition was in January, and we projected documentaries, movies and videoclips about metal, rap, punk, rock, 20th century classical music and musique concrete from around the world. Plus, the festival is celebrated simultaneously in three cities: Bern, Laussane and St. Gallen.

Yes, I am. I am co-directing, together with Peter Guyer, a documentary about protest and music today. It is produced by Norient (me) and Recycle TV (Peter). We've already filmed some amazing local rappers in Ghana, and additionally we'll be shooting a great noise artist in Israel. I leave you the teaser for the material we got in Ghana, it is a XL teaser though (around 25 minutes), but better seeing it than talking about it!