January Chronicle by Sara Alberani and Christelle Makris

Everytime A Ear De Soun by Mutabaruka 

Album: High Times (1981)

Producer: Mutabaruka

After many hours of study, 

when we were tired and lacked concentration, 

we would turn on the sound. 

Gunshots and a shout. 

BANG AHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Let's get out of our chairs

let us roll our shoulders

let’s put weight on our knees. 

Oh no, you will not have us on our knees 

No pleas

Let's jazz

Every time a ear de soun 

Every time a ear de soun 

de soun de soun de soun… 

Sometimes I smile at you 

and other times attention takes me away 

to the visions we read about 

towards the drums that have sounded from places without return,

from places that are boiling up from the underground and the sea.

We feel trapped by neon and ice 

so when we talk, we all look each other in the eye and keep our words very sharp

we listen to the folds of our mouths as they speak.

When we switch on the speakers

the mouths close, 

dozens of valves without a name on a sampler synthetise years of vocal cords, noises, melodies.

We double a version filled with words

Dub makes the body and all surfaces vibrate

Manuela created an echo where there were pauses 

she mixed sounds that were far apart, 

voices that spoke to each other through an oral history 

We are delayed in Mutabaruka

Looping around

Repetitions are necessary to fix things that are unspeakable 

And if these things reverberate now, they have different notes from before

Voices are loud, more, more, more loud! 

They are made of words, let's take them out

No words out of the mouth 

What's gonna happen?

Drums, drums, drums! 

(Sara Alberani)

This Is the Voice of Algeria 

Every evening, from nine o'clock to midnight, the Algerian would listen.

For an hour the room would be filled with the piercing, excruciating of the jamming. 

Behind each modulation, each active crackling, the Algerian would imagine not only words, but concrete battles. The war of the sound waves, in the gourl~i, reenacts for the benefit of the citizens the armed clash of their people and colonialism.

[...]

The national struggle and the creation of Free Radio Algeria have produced a fundamental change in the people. The radio has appeared in a massive way at once and not in progressive stages. What we have witnessed is a radical transformation of the means of perception, of the very world of perception. Of Algeria it is true to say that there never was, with respect to the radio, a pattern of listening habits, of audience reaction. Insofar as mental processes are concerned, the technique had virtually to be invented. The Voice of AIgeria, created out of nothing, brought the nation to life and endowed every citizen with a new status, telling them so explicitly.

(Franz Fanon, This Is the Voice of Algeria, from "A Dying Colonialism", 1959)

Hello Alice!

“An appeal from Radio Alice!

Radio Alice has the police at its door.

All comrades of the legal defence collective, please hurry here to Via Pratello.

I don't know if you can hear the shots over the radio. 

The police are behind the door with their guns drawn.

I refuse to open until they drop their guns and show us the warrant.

Stay down, stay down.

Stay down, they have orders to shoot the carabinieri.

Hello Alice!

they got in, they got in, they got in, we are with our hands up.

they broke in, we got our hands up.

they snatched our microphone, our hands are up”.

At 23.15, the police broke down the door of Radio Alice. 

Ambulances were called before shots were fired. 

5 comrades were arrested, but the other 12 escaped over the airwaves.

Radio Alice was a radio station of militant political intervention, active in Bologna since 1975, founded in Autonomia circles and one of Italy's most important free radio stations.

The radio began broadcasting on 09 February 1976 on the 100.6 MHz frequency, using a military transmitter previously used on a US tank, a relic from the Second World War.

The radio station was based in Via del Pratello, in the centre of Bologna, and its antenna was manually mounted on roofs.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi, one of the founders, described Radio Alice as a "mix between a classical medium of militant information and a sort of art experiment in media sabotage." 

11 March 1977, a policeman coldly shoots Francesco Lorusso, Lotta Continua militant, in the back. News that came from the street, people present at the sites of the clashes called the Radio and told what they saw, what they felt, about the death of Francesco Lorusso and what was happening in real time. These phone calls were put live, without filters, and the voices reached the homes of that part of the city that had not ‘bowed its chin’.

The next day Radio Alice, the movement's radio station, was shut down over a year after its opening, at 11.15 pm by policemen with bullet-proof vests and guns. 

The station broadcast live the entire course of the police raid, right up to the moment when the equipment was destroyed. All those present were arrested on the accusation, later found to be unfounded, of having directed over the air the violent clashes of the day before, following the killing of student Francesco Lorusso.

Those arrested were taken to the police station and later transferred to the prison of San Giovanni in Monte, but were later cleared of the charges against them. Hence the accusation of providing tactical information to the protesters, which was the pretext for the police action.

The investigation against the carabiniere who shot Lorusso and the captain who commanded him never got off the ground: the case was dismissed.

Radio Alice then re-opened again for two years and became politically aligned with the autonomism movement.

On The Trading Ship

“Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is.”

—Marx, Capital

This is the way to know you’ve already shattered

Stone salt in your intestines glows, bitter-saline glows

Numbers carved into your tailbone, like orphans’ names

Even the inward-growing moon can’t be chewed, they say

Each mouthful, a sheet of pitch-black sands

So let the lung lobes hatch full of wet wings

Are you the drag returning in the folds?

The singer standing on the scales?

Splitting organs sway endlessly, in the light flows

Mommy: Why do you always curl yourself into the waterwheel?

You: I’m learning to swim back to your past!

When draining begins, storms crystallize in your belly

Cunning time crawls up the corroded thread of sky

Your skin peels off piece by piece, liquefied whale

Some say it’s ruins, others say provocations

Now only weight mourns its own weight

Ear hung with salt grains and another ear

I’m learning to swallow the shadow leaked onto the ground

Ask no more, ask no more

Throat will rust in marine snow

You’ve already been tricked into your own spell

A small piece of floating night

Drinkers by your side, take turns

(Muyang Teng) 

(a,e,g,h,i) Drawings by Christelle Makris

(b,c,d) The Battle of Algiers by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966. Still images

(f) Police raid and destruction of Radio Alice, 12 March 1977, Bologna