Brazzaville/Qalam
Qalam strives to explore the interpenetration of different cultures. To this end, we have decided to launch a series of playlists in which music mediates between different geographical and ideological spaces. Our first playlist is called ‘West to East: One Hundred Best Songs’. It will be updated several times a week, and its curation will focus on how Western pop culture has reflected the realities of the East, whether they are musical, geographical, religious, or political. (The terms ‘West’ and ‘East’ should be taken as broadly and arbitrarily as possible.)
David Brown, the old Californian nomad dandy who settled in Barcelona a long time ago, came up with the Brazzaville project in the late nineties. It is commonly believed that there are bands that reflect their time; Brazzaville, however, reflects space. It is actually not quite clear when these elegies were written or what musical age or style they belong to, but they always have clear outlines of a landscape—be it the shores of the South China Sea, Osaka, Vladivostok, Broadway, or Almaty, where Brown was also a frequent visitor. Brazzaville is the music of wandering and coziness at the same time. Brown’s songs resemble a collection of postage stamps mixed with boarding passes hidden between the pages of a long-forgotten book, and his old ode to the Bosphorus wedged in among the decades one would want to keep forever.