The HYENAZ edit of Paula Temple’s techno classic “Gegen” was been featured in the Electronic Beats “Right to Assemble!” playlist, which explores music as an agent of change.
Read more: https://www.electronicbeats.net/right-to-assemble-sounds/
So many assumptions are made about why people choose to move, who has the right to move, and who does not, who can simply travel on a whim and who must risk everything to leave their lands for others. Our sense of time and space is increasingly unbounded, as access to knowledge, art and the public sphere shared through electronically mediated communication. Yet so many still have to risk death or internment to cross national borders physically, with access to migration arbitrarily determined by pieces of paper distributed along class and racial lines.
We were inspired by Paula’s powerful track Gegen, whose title refers to the German word for “against” and already expresses the dichotomous terms in which media and political discourses discuss migration: Are you for or against migration? How do “we” oppose the “others” who are against “our” way of life. The urgency of its siren-like lead synth speaks to the militarised policing of national borders and the desperation that pushes people to risk everything in order to exercise the human right to move freely.
Paula Temple released her track ‘Gegen’ via her imprint Noise Manifesto in 2014, at a time the German term was being widely used by protesters during an upheaval of asylum seekers in Germany.
“As refugees are fleeing for their lives, it is shocking we are creating similar conditions and hateful rhetoric as what happened in 1930s pre-WWII for political gain,” explained Temple in an official statement. “My personal hope is in our efforts to diminish the climate of hate with an overwhelming climate of empathy.”
We wish to thank Bart Kuzniak at Studio 333 with whom we recorded the vocals and who later mastered the finished track.