EASTERNDAZE X BERLIN 2021 DIY MUSIC TOPOGRAPHIES
Easterndaze x Berlin first took place in 2016 as a music festival and film series geared to present music from Eastern European DIY music scenes in Berlin, where music from Eastern European countries is under-represented despite the city’s proximity to Central and Eastern Europe. The Easterndaze x Berlin 2021 edition brings together community radios, zine/tape launches, video installations, panel talks, live broadcasting, and more.
As the world is unraveling this past year, cultural events in physical space remain postponed indefinitely. Most of these happenings have shifted online with artists and audiences atomized across the world, connecting via 0s and 1s. With Easterndaze x Berlin, the connection between communities and collectives will be symbolic—it will not happen physically per se, nor via online streams or virtual get-togethers. The collaborations will take place in the form of a compilation and zine, a video installation, a week-long community radio marathon, and a presentation of historical and contemporary music videos. RSVP here.
“An Embrace” is a collaborative project between the Bulgarian experimental music collective Amek and the German music label Vaagner. “An Embrace” is a mutual undertaking which aims to create a bridge between two communities from different cultural environments in Eastern and Western Europe, by pairing artists from the respective regions into four duos. The final results will be compiled and presented as a joint release of Amek and Vaagner, comprising both a limited edition cassette tape, and an accompanying riso-printed zine—formats that have been the key element of DIY labels and initiatives for many decades. The zine will offer further insight into the creative process of the release, including interviews with the artists and information about the activities of the labels involved.
Another project is the is a video work by Holly Childs & Gediminas Žygus titled “Forking”, presented by Subtext Recordings. In “Forking”, the nearness of a star creates the planetary experience of an atmosphere so severely clear so that the one holding the camera cannot see what they’ve shot across the sun glare. Forking is a video work, made in collaboration with Angela Goh and Metahaven, based on a piece of music by Holly Childs & Gediminas Žygus from their upcoming second album.
Community radios from Central and Eastern Europe will connect through the Easterndaze x Berlin platform in an effort to encourage collaboration between these DIY mediums which play a crucial role in their respective artistic and community milieus (being implicitly political, especially in Poland and Hungary). The project’s participants are these community radios from Central or Eastern Europe: Radio Kapital from Warsaw, Lahmacun Radio from Budapest, and IDA Radio from Tallinn/Helsinki, hosted by Berlin's Cashmere Radio. The project will encompass a week-long collaborative programming (including swapping shows and moderators, i.e. a Cashmere Radio show would be moderated and presented in a way remixed, or recontextualised on Lahmacun by their own moderators, etc). The week will culminate in a live broadcasting session and a panel talk about community radios on Friday, 23 April.
A selection of current and past music videos from the CEE region will be shown at Zönotéka in Berlin's Neukölln, a collaboration with the Klipzona project, an archive of audiovisual music from Central and Eastern Europe, from the 1960s to the present.
PROGRAM: MARCH – SEPTEMBER 2021
Compilation & Zine
Amek (Sofia) x Vaagner (Berlin) present “An Embrace”
Compilation format: cassette & digital
Bandcamp release date: Friday March 26, 2021
Audio preview & pre-order: link
Video Installation
Subtext Recordings (Berlin/Bristol) presents Forking by Holly Childs (Adelaide) & Gediminas Žygus (Vilnius)
Date: September (tba) 2021
Venue: Bärenzwinger, Berlin
Community Radio Week
Cashmere Radio (Berlin) x IDA Radio (Tallinn / Helsinki) x Lahmacun (Budapest) x Kapital (Warsaw)
Dates: April 19 – April 23, 2021; live broadcast event on April 23, 2021
Easterndaze x Klipzona
Videodrome at Zönotéka
Date: September 23 – 26, 2021
Kupalua (Voodoohop, Berlin) 
ABOUT EASTERNDAZE X BERLIN
Easterndaze x Berlin first took place in 2016 as a music festival and film series geared to present music from Eastern European DIY music scenes in Berlin, where music from Eastern European countries is under-represented despite the city’s proximity to Central and Eastern Europe, drawing on the Easterndaze project which aims to inform about underground music of the CEE region. Other key aims were the facilitation of cooperation and networking of these scenes and contributing in a small way to changing the exoticizing discourse often still rooted in Cold War clichés. Two further editions took place in 2018 and 2019, also facilitating such collaborative works as the split tape of Exiles, Technologie + das Unheimliche and Total Black imprints.
PARTICIPATING COLLECTIVES 2016 – 2019
WIDT (Warsaw), Christoph de Babalon (Berlin), Praxis (Berlin), Future Nuggets (Bucharest), Sameheads (Berlin), Trade (Berlin), Baba Vanga (Prague), Portals Editions (Berlin), Farbwechsel (Budapest), TEYAS (Warsaw/Berlin), LAND3C (Vilnius, Sofia, Berlin), Exiles (Budapest), Technologie + das Unheimliche (Budapest, Berlin, Leipzig), Total Black (Berlin), Intruder Alert (Warsaw), Room4Resistance (Berlin), Care Of Editions (Berlin), Muscut (Kyiv), Conditional (Berlin), Serious Serious (Tallinn/Vienna), Paradaiz (Bucharest), Voodoohop (Berlin), Forbidden Planet (Berlin), MECHTA (Minsk).
The project was initiated by Easterndaze x Berlin and funded by Musikfonds e. V. by means of the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.