Preludes to a Third World Collapse
My father made mixtapes. Working abroad like so many other Filipinos in the 70s and 80s, it was common to send audio letters as cassettes through the mail. Way before smartphones and sending video clips online, some people like my father and his friends sent photographs and cassettes to each other. Some field recordings, some songs they liked on the radio, their laughter and voices from before I was born.
Working in West Germany in the late 70s and 80s, my father’s friends there gave him some mixtapes and even sent them through the mail after he left, some even finding themselves in Brunei where I grew up. I played with them as a child, dismissed them in high school, finally thought they were cool in college, and now I can’t find them.
Bavarian beer songs, kitsch German pop, Krautrock, some disco and the beginnings of Eurotrash, and every now and then, some punk, new wave, and synth stuff in other languages I can barely remember. Some of them were from the second world, behind the iron curtain, and some from a third European world, a country that no longer exists, where some of my father’s friends and their families came from.
In trying to find the songs in these cassettes over the years, I instead stumbled into other cassette archives on the internet. This mix is a short selection of songs digitized from independent cassette releases from some of these online archives. Not part of the first world West and the American sphere of influence, nor the second world East and the Soviet sphere of influence, these tracks came from a nation that was, a state in between two Europes that aspired to show the world a third way: Yugoslavia.
For bedrooms and dancefloors and riots, recorded between 1983 to 1989, these were released before the 1992 breakup of Yugoslavia and the Balkanization of Eastern Europe.
Minimal synth, goth, punk, electro, darkwave, and other lo fi experiments, these soundtracked a distinctly Yugoslavian 80s cyberpunk future that never truly arrived, instead serving as preludes to a third world collapse —a world where some of my father’s old friends came from, and perhaps later disappeared back in to, much like their cassettes that I can no longer find.
Merv Espina is an artist and researcher. His practice makes use of moving image, sound, situations, performance, and text to play with the holes of history, lapses of cultural institutions, mistakes of current historiography, and the anxieties of archives. His radio show Necessary Frictions streams every fourth Wednesday of the month with Palestinian community radio radioalhara.net
Cover Artwork by Merv Espina
Tracklist:
- FUH — Davitelj
- Demolition Group — You Better Stay Alive
- Paragos — Vrata
- Naumahija — Spokoj
- DMHF — Motherfucker
- Nomidi — Danse Demo
- Digi — Erotic
- MTT — U MTT U
- Kiborg — Go Away
- Zona Industriale — Mrtvi Trubadur
- Sfinkter — EFAE
- Keller — Raphania II
- Trivalia — To Nisam Više Ja
- Psihokratija — Kutka
