On Sunday evening, the PSi#15 team is hosting a special event – GANGA-PARTY, a hybrid performance involving a live ethnic music concert, a multimedia presentation and a party.
GANGA is a type of vocal polyphony based on the major second interval and the singer´s breath. It belongs to the centuries-old system of music making cultivated in the Dalmatian hinterland, one of the last resorts of archaic musical thinking. Falling outside the standards of Western European traditions, ganga is perceived by non-experts as crude, primitive and untempered singing. Musicologists, on the other hand, praise the harmonious polyphony of its closely knit intervals as “the perfect effect of a unity of sound”. An amusing inversion of GANGA’s aesthetic appraisal, this inherent flaw of sound is further enhanced by dark controversies surrounding the “political incorrectness” of the themes GANGA sings. GANGA lyrics liberate humanity in its neutral state, “primitive” insofar as indistinguishable within the prevalent contemporary parameters of “joy and fear”. Its crystal-clear decameter verse knows no rhyme, and may well dispense with meaning in the conventional sense. It channels the cultural context itself, a reserve of rocky land and “stone carved” genes, marked with renegation, banishment and resistance. Neither beautiful nor ugly, good nor evil, regardless of whether it sings about sex, God or politics, GANGA is singing with a “bite”.
Accompanied by “ritual” wine drinking from a wooden cup (bukara) circulating in the audience, a GANGA party further focuses on experimental research into the “danceability” of GANGA in a contemporary musical arrangement, as well as the reducibility of the philosophical abundance of sense to the unfathomable performativity of GANGA’s restricted form. Be it the “proto-intervals” of human voices, a minimalist brazenness of sense, the concession of an English translation, Wittgenstein’s fragments in GANGA style or the “homeopathic” drink of local wine from a common wooden cup – one or all of these elements will hopefully give a knock on the door of that oceanic feeling we all supposedly share.