5 Questions with Fjorn Bastos
Fjorn Bastos is an artist, researcher, and community-event organiser.
As an artist, she works primarily in sound and narrativised performance under the name Papaphilia. She also maintains a visual art practice that merges digital collage and oil painting, to interrogate the less visible visual-compositional tropes of colonial landscapes.
As a researcher, she is interested in how neoliberal forms of governance in the colony use racialised and sexualised discourses to shape the political; which then informs her writing on sound-poetics and the challenge they pose to anglophone notions of sound and music as property.
NO.1
Can you briefly run us through the process of creating Remembrance of Things to Come? Was there a catalysing moment or was this something you’d been wanting to explore for a while?
The album has been an on and off project for several years now—half of the songs that are on the album are tracks that I have developed and played live for years. The other half were developed throughout Victoria’s lockdowns and so there are two very different types of musical storytelling colliding on the album. One half represents three years of upheaval and turmoil due to huge life and relationship changes. The other half represents the upheaval and turmoil of 2020: a time when I was processing the loss of some very significant people, and delving into the shadow work of processing how to move forward and grow in a meaningful way.
I had been unable to develop, produce and record the album due to both financial and time restrictions. [I was] running a business, engaging in a lot of community projects, and dealing with community issues, but also focusing on other artistic projects had taken my focus away. Musically, I had been working on trying to refine my work down from these long ragas with all these disparate bits and pieces to shorter pieces that had a strong drive and flow. I think the biggest hurdle for the project has been my technical production limitations. Mainly making the recorded music sound like what I envisioned has been impossible without help—honestly, how many musicians out there pull together an album on their own? Getting to work with an extraordinary team of musicians and techs was the key I never previously had access to and exactly what I have needed to be able to record from my analogue gear properly, edit and mix in a way that was careful and thoughtful rather than rushed, composing with producers who I know I can trust to understand the project, and engage in a meaningful way. Making the development a collaboration changed everything and has allowed me to learn so much.
The concept for the album is a reference to the Chris Marker film [of the same name]. His portrait of photographer Denise Bellon’s work between WWI and WWII is an essay on the feeling that the catastrophes of WWI should have left a grand enough impression on the social imaginary to have halted what was to be an even more devastating and destructive war to follow. This is a power analogy to me: there are so many events and traces in our shared imaginaries that we can learn from, that can show us how the future is just an echo of the past—that time isn’t linear, but a constant cycle of consequences set in motion by precedences that did not have to be set. There is so much knowledge that precedes us that is subject to collective forgetting. Lies, contortions delusions are the substance of colonial reality, and always has been; there is much to learn from all that which precedes us because that substance is the fabric that has already shaped our possibility.
NO.2
You also do community organising and researching work alongside Papaphilia. Do you see your musical projects as an extension of that work? How do they inform one another?
I think all parts of my work are informed by the other through their shared political and cultural values. They always have to some extent but it has morphed over the 15 years I’ve been making music and engaged in community organising.
When I started making music I didn’t want to be involved in the music industry so I kept to DIY and underground circles. It was a ‘we can make our own world outside of institutions’ agenda but the spaces were still governed by white men. It was hard being a young brown woman making cooked music with tape players and weird objects and trying to push to be heard even in my own circles at the time; Naarm’s music communities had huge gender, sexuality and racial issues. Melbourne music communities felt like they had such a narrow vision of what was acceptable and platformable music, even in the underground. Local women who made experimental and noise music didn’t get to tour and very few labels would engage with you. If you weren’t playing into cis male fantasy, [if you weren’t] talking about themes in vague feminist fashions like making music about ‘the body’, or yelling about ‘the man’ while relying on the man to get ahead, then very few people cared about you. I was lucky to have people support me on the way, truly—but there’s very little evidence of years of my work. How I made and played music reflected the work I was also trying to do in terms of setting up shows with diverse line-ups, cracking the shits very publicly at other organisers and individuals for not diversifying line-ups, causing shit about how the scene made space for literal Nazis and white supremacists. The music was loud, obnoxious and my intention was to shock the body with volume and harsh frequencies.
Things changed when I got more serious about research and worked for a few Victorian Aboriginal corporations—those two pathways were life-altering in important ways. I was deeply fortunate to be exposed to worlds of knowledge, community, deep cultural pride articulated in an embodied manner, and modes of resistance that were beyond anything I’d witnessed. It also exposed me to the world of racialisation and colonisation that had shaped my life and those around me, but which had been veiled. In terms of my research I know that I would write and think very differently if it wasn’t for this experience, but also [due to] my creative background. My interest was initially very ontologically-focussed: I was thinking about imagination as this bodily and collective phenomenon of entanglement that exceeds space and time; creation and its poetic dimensions in our collective reality. This was ultimately the foundation for how I started to approach thinking about all things political. My focus now is unpacking the governing logics and relations of the colony, and this is always interwoven into how I think about and work with sound and creative communities too.
Nowadays, I feel like I can be more of an organiser that doesn’t react to—or is stuck in—communities dominated by white men. I can just focus just on voices I deem important, not that it’s easy because systematically the world still isn’t set up to support communities on the margins. That said, the music community has changed over time, in terms of who is included and what people are listening to. Given my change in trajectory my practice changed in terms of what I use to make music, how I configured the music compositionally, the personal poetic messaging, and the communities I play music with. I now prefer to tell stories through music that engages the body and memory in a more emotive fashion, rather than [in a] confrontational [way]. Dance music has become my primary vehicle and this is how Papaphilia was formed. As before, it’s still dense collages of sound material, exploring the relationships between sound elements, finding ways for all parts to speak to one another in a unified voice while still holding together their singularity and differences. But now it’s about sound and collective movement rather than sound projected at inert bodies. I think this echoes my current political positions on collective action, the importance of conflict and change—so yes, music and community life are absolutely integrated.
NO.3
In the press release for Remembrance of Things to Come, it is stated that you ‘continually draw the listener’s attention back to intangible experiences that guide embodied and ancestral forms and knowledges […] transmitting the incredulity felt by those resisting oppressive power structures’. Can you speak more to this?
When talking about ‘intangible experiences that guide embodied and ancestral forms and knowledges’ I’m referring to a personal belief, and a set of ideas that speculate on what is inherited ancestrally: memories, experiences, traumas, knowledge that isn’t just genealogical data that informs the production of our physical structure, but knowledge that informs the modes and styles in which those physical elements are built. How that structure forms then informs the resonant possibility of what we are, and how we live. I do think that bodies are resonant vessels; bodies are receptive of and respondent to energy in general, and the specificity and singularity of that resonance is then informed by the possibility of what precedes it—genealogy, and the experiences and growth it experiences overtime as an alterable and perceptive thing. Sound is a form of energy we experience as waves, and memory is an energetic experience—it creates waves within us that can hum anew when those strings or chords are struck or scratched. I do feel that there is something to sound and memory that is also inherited.
In her amazing article ‘Noise is the N***a of Sound’, Sultana Isham states that like Jung she believes ‘we carry our ancestors memories in our DNA’. She invokes an idea from Alvin Ailey to talk to this on a collective level, [in that] ‘blood memories’ are the ancestral collection of experiences that link us all. This knowledge is so embodied and intuitive and its relationship to the quality of sound needs to be acknowledged:
Sound is a vehicle for this collection of memories. Sound carries memories and travels
fastest through water. Since humans are mostly water, we are sound.
—Sultana Isham
In the colony of so-called Australia thinking about who we are, where we come from, what we have inherited, is important. If we aren’t Aboriginal peoples [then] we are a culmination of settler-invader migrant waves—and these waves of migration need to be traced, not assimilated into a white fantasy. I’m forever trying to understand my inheritances: there’s the British colonist with a long invasion history that is one of violence and mixed ancestries hidden by racial shame, and the side of my family awash with three waves of colonisation of Sri Lanka and a short history here in Naarm. The push to assimilate purely into whiteness, the experience of racialisation as a somewhat visibly melanated person, the intuitive aspects of a body informed by genealogy and the traces of cultural life that don’t leave regardless of assimilation, and my colonial subjectivity are aspects of my reality that shape my resonance.
Speaking to ‘incredulity of resisting oppressive power structures’—[that] was from a review of my last release that I received from Uvika Wahi. Her words were deeply appreciated, as that is something I could only hope to be translating in my music. My music practice is as much about collecting traces: utilising sounds that invoke a sense of familiarity mainly through the way that a feeling is expressed. The feelings of concern are difficult to articulate or describe with words or concepts, hence why music feels like the right vehicle to emit these sorts of explorations of emotions; sound doesn’t rely on concrete concepts to be absorbed and felt.
For example, in the song ‘The Name of the Sun is Slowly Spoken’ I went back to Toni Braxton’s ‘Unbreak My Heart’ because the way she moans in that song resonated with the way I wanted to exert my feelings of loss that were experienced throughout 2020. Her vocal is played in reverse and repeated over and over, and when put into a relationship with snare drums that hit in a way that demands attention, creates a feeling of sad alarm and tenseness that resembled that grievance I had felt.
NO.4
How do you think you incorporate your myriad identities into the music that you make?
It’s been hard to balance trying to be a multidisciplinary artist with trying to make a living and run, float, and grow a consultancy business, engaging in community matters, continuing to educate myself, maintaining meaningful relationships with everyone in my life, having free time to go on a trip, let go, and also keep up with your own admin. All things I engage in I try to do with strong intention to keep a harmonious balance between all life’s elements, and to allow the creative development processes to unfold as they must—all engagements take time and energy and I care to honour that. Some days I lament that I can’t do a PhD anytime soon or don’t have time to tutor students, that I haven’t been able to finish 7-year-old paintings, missing people because I’ve been strapped to a desk for a week, and some days I feel like I could be learning so much more from playing around with music if I just found a slither of time to do so.
I think the one way I not only balance but incorporate all these identities is to just give in to the idea that they are all unified elements that make up who I am, and sometimes I’m going to be pursuing one domain more than I am another. More importantly, I am careful to make sure that I always engage in a manner reflective of my personal values, and act in a way that is reflective of my political thinking and understandings. There’s no point engaging in projects just for money if they’re against my values—[that said], but this isn’t always easy— being a purist isn’t possible as nothing is pure when it comes to human activity. People and organisations are going to either surprise you or disappoint you, if not immediately then over time. I guess making public work means continual self-reflection, navigating self-doubt, being open to being wrong, and [being] confident with making difficult decisions. I think my music practice tries to incorporate and emulate these aspects in the actual practice of making, of developing and in what experiences are being addressed and emulated through sound and composition.
NO.5
I remember an interview I’ve done with you (for Gusher magazine), where you said that—in the context of electronic dance music—’there are people who use it as a vehicle to think about the political.’ I feel that this is very palpable in Papaphilia. Do you want to talk about how this works towards a more equitable future? How can audiences, ravers, musicians, artists, etc, envision a reality where we can use EDM as a stepping stone to begin political conversations?
Dance music has always been political, even if it wasn’t expressing a message directly, or delivering it in a fashion that emulated a recognisable or existing political aesthetic. When folk like Juan Aitkins began making techno music based on sounds that governed their environment—[in their case] the industrial city—there’s a political poetic relationship that’s evident. Taking those sounds out of the context of capitalist production and making it into music that can be enjoyed and brings people together over sound and movement is political. Using references from music culture like disco or soul and bringing it into those productions is also a political act of honouring musical histories that are significant, especially when you’re working against dominant cultures that don’t honour those musical fields to the extent they deserve to be honoured.
In Naarm (and I can only really speak for here), the conversations that music is having as a vehicle for reflecting the politics of the community here is starting to get exciting. I do think that there is still too much of an outward focus on appropriating from other imperial cultures like the US and UK rather than creating from within. It’s a balance because so much of our realities are global and decentralised, but there’s stories to be told through sound and movement that are specifically relevant to the people here. For one, there’s First Nations cultures and specific marginalised diasporas that need to be given the space and resources to develop voices and gain prevalence. I think people are getting more confident at sculpting sound and dance languages that make sense to our environment here but it’s still a work in progress. This is one way we can be platforming the political realities we are governed by here.
I think that dance music itself has and can continues to be political in this poetic way but it also has been the vehicle for more action-based political acts of subversion and insurrection. Music communities are very much enmeshed with political movements, from rallies, to pushing radical ideas and pedagogies, and mutual aid funding. Parties in alternative venues —like raves in empty warehouses or spaces run by the community—have been important for taking dance music out of the control of the hands of capitalist institutions and back into a space of communal control and joy. In Naarm I feel there’s work being done, and then also a bit of work to be done in terms of reimagining how dance music culture shows support to their communities, acts as a vehicle for political conversations, and provides spaces where you can experience the sort of care and joy in the world that is hard to find. What I do see is people trying their hardest with limited resources, a lot of police intervention and bad legislation or internal conflict. I think we can become better at aligning networks to share knowledge and combat some of these issues. We can also get better at looking after people coming to shows, deprioritising the consumption of drugs and alcohol while also providing safe spaces for consumption to take place without stigma, making sure there’s clear plans around protecting those most vulnerable to harassment, and to police violence if/when they do show up. It takes work but there are enough people in our communities—it just means making community building a practice as much as celebrating and getting on one is.
Papaphilia’s new release Remembrance of Things to Come is a series of meditations on the cyclical character of time, and grieving the violence of life within the decaying colonial politics of so-called Australia.
In collaboration with producers Kuya Neil and Various Asses, Papaphilia transformed her initial improvisations into a concise collection of high-intensity tracks. Remembrance operates at the intersection of several dance idioms, intertwining hard kicks, industrial beats and acid oscillations with mutated vocals.
Listen to the premiere of ‘All are syllables of the great tongue’ below: