Netil Radio Weekly
#033
Words
Hello and welcome back,
Thank You!
Thank you for joining in our fundraising effort on Monday. We reached our target, but even more impressively, we raised awareness and fostered support for our friends and their friends from Ukraine. The messages we received from our listeners in Ukraine were emotional, brave and full of gratitude. Thank you all for coming together in support of a nation attacked by the emperor of an alternative reality. Here at Netil Radio we can promise we will be standing with Ukraine for as long as it takes, and far beyond. We understand that to stand with Ukraine is to stand for democratic principles, freedom of choice and peace.
To do so will not be easy. Society is widely divided, hate is easy to trigger and conversations are becoming disengaged. Our capacity for critical thinking is easy to hijack. A perfect example of this is a recent social media post from a popular ticketing website, voicing a very important message from the Ukrainian music scene to the whole music industry. The marketing department took the most emotional part of the whole article to promote it. That’s what marketing people do. But the essence of art and culture can’t become another marketing ploy - any time it tries, the cultural value is gone. That’s why the Top 100 DJs chart doesn’t contain any real DJs. The social media post was a callout to a Russian DJ who dared not to post any anti-war statements on her social media as quickly as every other trendy DJ. It was accusing her of not being “underground” enough and not following the political message of techno.
Why does this matter? What’s the difference between a marketing company from the UK and a DJ from Ukraine promoting the same message? Simply put, someone whose country has just been attacked has the right to be angry at their attackers. It’s their place to speak out about it, not ours. A DJ is not an oligarch, or a state-sponsored athlete. To actually be a DJ in Russia is something that most of us in the West couldn’t even comprehend. From the far right abusing the electronic music scene, through to police raids, to the lack of state support for non-commercial art & culture, to the lack of understanding from wider society, it’s very hard to be a DJ in Russia. You’re also close to the dark side. Only people with money own clubs (with respect to all exceptions) and those are the people who are connected to the establishment. In this environment, the consequences of your choices can be dire. The new rules of putin’s alternative reality are 15 years in prison for just mentioning the word “war” on social media.
Yes, music and art are supposed to be political, and they always will be, but there are different rules in imaginary empires. If we want Russia to change, we need to give the good people of Russia some time to process what’s going on and to prepare themselves. Calling out Russian DJs on social media is an absolute misunderstanding of how to make change happen. It’s now coming to light that posts on social media are doing more damage than good. We don’t know what Nina is dealing with right now, but I’m pretty sure she doesn’t agree with war, or what’s happened to the Russian government. Or, on the off-chance that she does, we will find out sooner or later and book her accordingly. But that she was silent in the first 10 days of the war while 13,000 people were arrested for protesting against war, is no reason to chastise her. Much like marketing ploys, it’s outdated and not applicable to art and culture.
As I said last time - we should open our minds now more than ever, take time to process things, approach everything with critical thinking skills in highest mode, and... listen to Netil Radio. It’s good for us.
Thank you for reading and stay connected,
Miro
Listen back & support
This week's editorial is longer than usual, so we’ll keep everything else brief. We will keep the fundraising page open for a few more days. You can still donate to the cause whilst listening to all the sets from last Monday. We suggest you start with Miro’s breakfast show.
Once again thank you all who joined the effort and donated, all the DJs coming to the studio, Ransom Note, Sova Audio and Eat Work Art_ for getting together for a good cause.
New Music
All Ukrainian music we played in Together for Ukraine breakfast show
✧ Bad News From Cosmos ✧ The Orchestra of Mirrored Reflection ✧ Egor Grushin ✧ Mlin Patz ✧ REGINA COLLAGE ✧ marisha ✧ Kurl ✧ Світлана Няньо, Олександр Юрченко ✧ Vladimir Gnatenko ✧ Standard Deviation x Mystictrax ✧ r.roo ✧
That’s all for this week
Stay Tuned
NR Team
London’s community voice, broadcast live from a converted shipping container atop of Netil Market - project facilitated and supported by Eat Work Art