Ladies on Records is a curated multifaceted endeavour created to represent women’s contribution to global and local music of the past decades. Ladies on Records tells the stories of women by the music they created.
Ladies on Records’ mission is to reshape and improve understanding and knowledge of female music from the 60s, 70s, and 80s from all over the world and make it re-discovered and appreciated again by the local and global audience. It sheds new light on female creation in music and exposes unspoken, forgotten, or neglected cultural, political, and aesthetic patterns. Ladies on Records’ main goal is to tell the stories of female artists from the past in a new, contemporary way.
Ladies on Records is a curatorial venture. Its primary focus is female music caught on dusty records and tapes, in the hidden archives and back catalogs of the music labels from around the world. Therefor Ladies on Records specializes in the creation of music compilations released both in physical and digital but also in creating mixes, playing DJ sessions and writing stories about music and female singers.
Who is Ladies on Records? Kornelia Binicewicz – Polish origin record collector, DJ and anthropologist of culture currently living in Istanbul, Turkey. In 2015, she moved to Istanbul to explore female music from Turkey and the Middle East. Daily, she lives on the island near Istanbul travels all around the world in search of mesmerizing music and meaningful stories to tell.
A Drop of Luck
Adaptations and sources in the music of Turkish and Israeli female singers.
Podcast
2021
“Songs are energetic and conversational creatures, alive to us in time and space. They think us as we think them”.
Martin Stokes
“For more than a decade, Israel has been present in my musical explorations. A couple of years ago, I moved to Turkey to understand the intricate cultural patterns of music. Israel and Turkey are, no doubt, the vivid centers of popular music cosmopolitanism. Both realities are interesting and puzzling at the same time, reflecting their challenging geography and history. To name their geographical location as Asia or Europe, the Mediterranean region or the Middle East evokes ideas and contexts, not free from political or stereotypical judgments. Popular music and its products – songs tell the stories of people and their culture. But they are also one of the best and most efficient tools of political engineering and creating cultural identity and national particularity. Resemblances between Turkish and Israeli popular music of the last couple of decades are stunning. They are far more than the idea of a shared Mediterranean vibe of nightclubs, taverns, and casinos with dinner, music, and belly dancers. The mechanisms behind the creation of popular Turkish and Israeli music, from the 60s until the 2000s, reflect striking correlations in the process of re-establishing identities with exclusions and inclusions of specific cultural patterns.
As usually in my work, I will let the women speak and present the fascinating story of adaptations and sources in Turkish and Israeli music. No music is apolitical and naive. I will try to trace the essential contexts – including musical, religious, ethnic, and political ones. Following Marshall McLuhan’s famous statement that the medium is the message, “A Drop of Luck” also explores a story of a medium – vinyl, cassette, and CDs and their impact on societies through mass-production and distribution of music and cultural messages. The invention of a portable cassette recorder was a political and social breakthrough for many communities worldwide.
While reading the story, feel free to listen to the mixtapes and experience the journey of songs between Israel and Turkey. The mixtape “Adaptations” takes you to the center of the story. Turkish and Israeli artists embraced the songs from Israel and Turkey, respectively, utilizing them to express their local political and cultural messages. You can explore the origins of the songs with the “Sources” mixtape and dive into the selection of songs from Israel and Turkey.” Kornelia Binicewicz