Rim Jasmin Irscheid (KCL) - 2020-21 Students
rim.irscheid@kcl.ac.uk

(Post)world music experimentalism and curatorship: Collaborative music practices across Germany and the MENA region

Rim Jasmin Irscheid is a doctoral candidate in the Music Department at King’s College London working on experimental music and ‘world music’ festival culture in Europe. Combining ethnographic research and curatorial practice, her practice-led project is looking at the social and cultural implications of musical collaborations across Jordan, Lebanon, and Germany.

The project aims to find out musicians in emerging cross-border networks produce, showcase and experience experimental music in places that facilitate and amplify affective encounters between artists and curators with shared beliefs and value systems marked by antagonism against narrational strategies of ‘world music’ productions at European festival sites.

Focusing specifically on representations of difference, movement, and uncertainty in collaborative music projects, this project aims to shed light on the significant role of mediated audience engagement and the sonic reclaiming of physical and digital spaces as a pedagogical tool to contest ‘world music’ narratives. This includes the textual analysis of images and video material used in the marketing of these projects with regard to cultural representations of Arab musicianship in German media texts.

Primary supervisor: Professor Martin Stokes, KCL
Secondary supervisor: Dr Katherine Butler Schofield, KCL