This soundscape marks the beginning of the residency project of Emiddio Vasquez at Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee. With nuum FM, Vasquez revisits a recent exhibition/performance, HARDCORE CONTINUUM, that took place at The Island Club, in Limassol, Cyprus.

The exhibition’s point of departure was a recorded factual encounter between grime music producer, Skepta, his young Cypriot cellmate, George, and a policeman at the Ayia Napa police station. During their conversation, George is asked to say something into a snuck-in voice recorder for Skepta’s future album release, to which he replied: “I don’t understand”. This recording made it into the track, “Ayia Napa Skit”, which was released on Skepta’s debut album, Greatest Hits, in 2006.

For the first stream, nuum FM revisits the soundscape of Ayia Napa, during the 2020 lockdown, only this time most clubs play the music that George learned how to produce during his time at The Island Club.

Read more about this broadcast here.

To conclude his radio residency at Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee, Emiddio Vasquez presents MF muun: a dj archeology, a backspin on his opening work nuum FM. Here he approaches radio through its “transmission-reception” operation in a dual form: its political character in the history of pirate radio and its ecological role in bat’s echolocation. Though a “dj archeology” approach that digs through discogs’ release catalogues and treats radio waves as a disseminated site for sonic excavation, all these drawn lines and references run in parallel to the sonar echoes of military radar and bats, both serving as navigational devices that help one make sense of their vicinity. In the overlayered soundscape of field recordings and rave culture’s sonic semiotics, MF nuum ultimately frames a certain dialectics between radio infrastructures and cultural hegemony and highlights the complexities of the diasporic production of culture.

While nuum FM focused and fictionalized George, Skepta’s Cypriot cellmate in Ayia Napa, MF muun draws a similar parallel to another “George”. This time the work unfolds through George Power, a transliteration of George (Akis) Heracleous. George Power was a Cyprus born dj and entrepreneur, son of a club owner, who fled the island at the age of 14 during the mid-60’s decolonial upheavals and relocated in London and would thereon become a local legend, a lauded dj and a crucial albeit under-documented figure of London’s music scene: from playing a key role in defining the rare groove culture and the Jazzdance genre all the way to releasing seminal UK garage works through his Nice n’ Ripe record label, the story of George Power is one defined by radio as a community building process.

Read more about this broadcast here.

Images below:

1. George Power

2. George Power at The Astoria flyer

Emiddio Vasquez is a Cypriot-Dominican electronic musician and artist. His practice deals with material transformations that blur the encoding-decoding processes across media as a way of engaging with the larger infrastructures at stake. Drawing on memories of uprooting and his interest in media technologies, his work looks at themes surrounding the politics of visibility, mediated sensing, and the processes of subject formation, with a particular interest for the contemporary condition of the neoliberal subject.

In 2018, he founded Moneda (@moneda_._) a record label, sound event series, and publishing initiative.