Cassettes 100

José Maceda’s work staged by Aki Onda, with performance and public talk

Thursday 18 September, at 15:00–17:00

Deichman Bjørvika

Free

Showings and tickets

Thursday, 18/09

15:00–17:00

Deichman Bjørvika

Free

One hundred cassette players. One hundred performers. A drifting procession through public space.

In Cassettes 100 (1971), pioneering Filipino composer and ethnomusicologist José Maceda created a shared soundscape built from recordings of indigenous instruments and environmental sounds. As the cassette players are physically carried around a space, their overlapping loops ripple like a living drone.

This was Maceda’s first large-scale public work: a quiet revolution that brought the sound of the village into the heart of the city. Inspired by Southeast Asian musical traditions and Western avant-garde ideas, he replaced the speaker arrays of the latter with a choreography of people in motion, using low-tech devices to reshape space through listening.

Central to Maceda’s thinking was the drone — not static, but alive: a dense, shifting field of sound without hierarchy, where tapes meet, drift, and recombine into shimmering constellations.

Yet this sonic freedom unfolded in tension with power. The work was enabled by cultural support from the authoritarian regime of the time — a paradox that haunts its realisation. Maceda’s legacy remains shaped by bold experimentation and the contradictions of working in proximity to state control.

At Ultima, Cassettes 100 is reimagined across the vertiginous levels of Deichman Bjørvika, in collaboration with nyMusikk. One hundred students from Edvard Munch videregående skole — dancers and musicians — carry sound through the library under the guidance of artist and curator Aki Onda. A living archive in motion, the performance echoes like a murmuration of memory through the architecture, carried in the steps of youth.

Following the performance, a public conversation reflecting on Cassettes 100 and its contemporary resonance will take place in Deichman’s music department.

Programme

15.00 Cassettes 100, first performance
15.45 Public conversation, Music Department, Deichman Bjørvika
16.30 Cassettes 100, second performance

Fakta

The performance unfolds throughout the public areas of Deichman Bjørvika. Be on time – and follow the crowd.
The Marcos dictatorship ruled the Philippines under martial law from 1972 to 1986, marked by censorship, repression, and the politicisation of culture.
Over the past decades, curator and sound artist Aki Onda has revived international interest in José Maceda. Aki Onda also presents his own work at this year’s festival in Classic Album Sundays.