Non-binary feminine entity with a penchant for experimental electronic music, cats and neoperreo. Also writes for Bandcamp Daily, The Wire, Positionen, Revista Arta and other publications.
Bucharest, Romania - For the first time in 15 years, the yearly pride march organized by the LBGTQI+ NGO Accept has faced cancellation. Romania, the former east bloc European country whose claim to fame is a highly restrictive communist dictatorship followed by a televised revolution in December 1989, only de-criminalized homosexuality in 2001.
Andra Nicolayi reflects on a year of hope, unrest and incremental progress A friend recently started an email saying something along the lines of ' hope you are doing well '... "with the winter and COVID and the fascists."
29 iunie 2021 Andra scrie despre artă contemporană, muzică electronică, societate și felul în care acestea se întrepătrund. Se ocupa, până nu demult, și de organizarea de evenimente muzicale și speră să revină pe un dancefloor curând. Queer și ușor antisocial, preferă pronumele neutre (they/them/iel), iar în română vă roagă să-i folosiți prenumele ca pronume.
Festival Simultan 27th September - 3rd october 2020, Timisoara/Romania For fifteen years now, the interdisciplinary art and music festival Simultan has been a consistently solid output in both the Romanian and the international cultural circuit. Founded in 2005 by artist and curators Levente Kozma and Alin Rotariu, the annual Timișoara festival has slowly become an international favorite.
Eastern Europe has always been quite strange for me; perhaps it's the mix of the novel with the deeply familiar that doesn't allow it to be fully perceived as a territory of its own.
LABEL PROFILE The Queer Underground Dance Music of Honey Soundsystem Records By Andra Nikolayi · April 16, 2020 Queer underground dance music would not look the same without the San Francisco collective Honey Soundsystem and their eponymous record label.
On "Foreigner" Kaffe Matthews Returns to Stereo By Andra Nikolayi · April 21, 2020 For over two decades, British composer Kaffe Matthews has explored the various ways human beings perceive and experience sound. Whether it's live improvised performances, multi-speaker set-ups, or sound art installation, her work is at once cerebral and highly intuitive, using entropy in controlled settings to generate unexpected results.
AGF/poemproducer's Electronic Feminist Histories By Andra Nikolayi · February 19, 2021 ''For me everything comes from the voice first. I have no formal music education, so for me it was always singing aloud," Antye Greie-Ripatti, aka AGF, says over a video call from her studio on Hailuoto, the island in Northern Finland where she lives with her husband Sasu Ripatti (aka Vladislav Delay) and their daughter.
Manja Ristić Finds Emotional Weight In Humble Field Recordings By Andra Nikolayi · May 27, 2021 From its origins as an ethnographic practice in the '40s and '50s, to its popularization in the 1970s by way of Bernie Krause's legendary soundscapes , to its continued proliferation today, the universe of "field recordings" has expanded considerably over the past century-not only in terms of construction, but sophistication.
A Guide to Bergsonist's Sprawling, Intuition-Driven Electronic Music By Andra Nikolayi · November 04, 2020 With over 50 releases in two years' time, prolific might be too small a word for Bergsonist's output. The alter-ego of Moroccan-born, New York-based artist Selwa Abd, Bergsonist is a genderless persona she created for her musical endeavors.