Alan Hilario: Alan Hilario

Kara_wOke-pieces explores the role of music in society using a 12-step, supposedly linear scale that categorises and classifies political music. This idea is absurd, and the premise is clearly false; however, it serves to demonstrate that the relationship between music and politics is multidimensional, multifaceted and full of inherent contradictions, and cannot possibly be reduced in this way.

 

The twelve levels, which can be expanded at any time, are listed below:

 

1. Music in which aesthetics take precedence over political stance

2. L’art pour l’art by an underprivileged person

3. Pro-‘pagandá’ (Tagalog: ‘to beautify’)

4. Deliberately apolitical, à la cis-white man

5. Subtle, but not ‘harmless’, political music

6. Satirical political music that aims to change the world

7. Political music that stirs up emotions such as feelings of guilt

8. Brilliant, catchy protest music, such as that by Letzte Generation

9. Anti-anti-woke music

10. Music against hypocritical facades

11. Decolonial political music for the classroom

12. Political music against genocide

 

All twelve Kara_wOke songs are based on 4’33”–though they counteract and contrast with it. For ‘the pause, the silence’ in Cage’s work–or rather, the current catastrophic ‘silence’ of a society in the face of genocidal crimes–is filled and drowned out by music and sounds, so that the silence is, at least in this piece, undermined.

 

The four musicians improvise to the installation’s 8-channel recorded track.