Cedrick Fermont
Cedrick is a berlin based composer, musician, mastering engineer, author, radio host, concert organiser, independent researcher and label manager (at Syrphe) who operates in the field of noise, electronic and experimental music since 1989. His compositions and installations vary from sound art and electroacoustic to noise to industrial to more conventional “dance” music such as electronica or acid and so on.
I found Cedrick really intriguing as he started in the kind of scenes that i’m interested in; industrial, punk, goth ect. And found it interesting when he was taking about the “decolonisation of culture” and how that accessibility to culture is a privilege in itself. I found it interesting that he wanted to find music that is typically Western in pockets of the world where you wouldn’t think of it being there. He was taking about Yugoslavia, which is where my mums from, and its intrigued me to delve deeper into its goth/post-punk history.
He was saying that undiscovered cultures/scenes almost have a benefit to being so anonymous is that they can observe and document Western culture ad absorb ad be influenced by said work, but the rest of the world has no idea of the small scenes existence, almost like a one way mirror. This allows more detached cultures to create that kind of music but from a detached perspective from the reality of privilege in the west and therefore may come up with their own style and finding solutions to being limited.
When I was a teenager and young adult, in Belgium, I often asked myself why I was one of the very few ‘brown’ persons in the punk, goth, industrial, experimental, EBM, noise scenes and it quickly pushed me to try to find out what was happening in non-western European and North American countries. Back then, in the 1980s and early 1990s, even accessing alternative music from eastern Europe, apart of a few Yugoslav, Soviet, Polish or Czechoslovak artists, was not an easy task, so no need to tell how difficult it was to find music from far away places, even from Australia or New Zealand.
I also believe in decolonisation of the arts and culture in general (and I don’t only speak about the results of western colonisation) and am a strong supporter of networks and cultural exchanges in all directions, and as much as possible, to refer to Deleuze and Guattari, rhizomatic networks and collaborations, we all have to learn from each other, even when some may have a greater knowledge in a certain domain than others; treating the other person as an equal, providing the other person the same opportunities than any western artist would be able to access, no matter what their genre, philosophical and cultural background are.