DECOLONIZE YOUR MIND SOCIETY (HU)

Inspired by non-European traditional musics, non-standard tuning systems, psychedelic ritual performances and the legendary Jon Hassell's Fourth World music, Budapest based Decolonize Your Mind Society was founded by Nicolas Jaar’s Other People label and Opal Tapes affiliate Bálint Szabó Gosheven as a natural continuation of his creative focus and work. The band has an absolutely unique sounding thanks to the special instruments they use like the award-winning glissotar wind instrument designed by Dániel Váczi or the refretted just intonation guitar and fretless guitars, not to mention the retunable analog synthesizer that further expands their mindblowing musical planet. They float in a hazy no man’s land between microtonal psychedelic rock, avant-garde, jazz and experimental music.

The band was created with the aim of decolonizing the ear, thus raising the question to which extent the inherently infinite world of musical consonance is a cultural construct. And a closely related question: how can an inherently continuous variable like musical pitch be made discrete? If culture conditions us to a significant degree, can the ear ever be freed from its imprisonment? These are the questions that we will seek to answer this evening that will take us from the consonances of the overtone system to the different equal divisions of the octave. Throughout this process we can test the ability of our ear originally accustomed to piano tuning if it can still recreate its innate inherent flexibility.