Title: “Disco pirata, the Aural City, and the Promise of a Sound Archive of Postnational Memory”

Abstract: French sound artist Félix Blume started Disco pirata in 2016 as a project to record everyday sounds that he identified as endemic of Mexico City. The recorded sounds were packaged and presented as a pirate CD, imitating informal economy circulation strategies, and later featured as part of a larger sound installation at Mexico’s Fonoteca Nacional [National Sound Archive]. This exhibit sought to encourage Mexico City natives to develop more deliberate ways of listening in detail to the sounds of their city. Eventually, Blume uploaded Disco pirata as an open-access Internet archive available for free downloading and use. This move presented sound designers in the Mexican film industry with a significant resource to recreate the sonic environments of Mexico City in movies. Based on Cristina Rivera Garza’s conceptualizations of noriginales [non-originals] and her theorization about archives as the previous future of a hyperreal present, this lecture examines the potential and shortcomings of this archive as a repository of postnational significance in continual flux rather than as a database of fixed, static meaning. The author argues that the dynamics at stake in this archive speak of an Aural City, an intellectual elite interested in a type of production and circulation of knowledge based on sound and aurality that seeks to bypass the logocentric character of the Lettered City as model of epistemic and social organization.

Alejandro L. Madrid is a cultural theorist of sound and music working in Latin American and Latinx studies. He is the author of more than a dozen books and has received several prestigious national and international awards, including the Humboldt-Forschungspreis, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Dent Medal —given by the Royal Musical Association for “outstanding contributions to musicology”—, and Cuba’s Casa de las Américas Musicology Prize; as well as top prizes from the American Musicological Society, the Latin American Studies Association, the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, the ASCAP Foundation, and the Society for Ethnomusicology among others.

Madrid is editor of the series Currents in Latin American and Iberian Music at Oxford University Press and is frequently invited as an expert commentator for national and international media outlets, including BBC-3, New York Times, The Washington Post, Agence-France, etc. He was also musical advisor to renowned Welsh director Peter Greenaway for the film Eisenstein in Guanajuato (2015). Madrid is currently working on a book about the album Días y flores by Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodríguez, and collaborates with the Momenta Quartet in the recording project of Mexican microtonal maverick Julián Carrillo’s complete string quartets for the Naxos label.

After earning a Ph.D. in musicology and comparative cultural studies at the Ohio State University in 2003, Madrid has held professorships at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Cornell University. He is currently chair of the Department of Music at Harvard University where he is also the Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Music.

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