tracktitles
1. Ghetto Express
2. Geopolitik
3. Liberté de Mouvement
4. Rotlicht
5. Siyaset Giris
6. Movement for Airports
7. Illegalization
8. Freedom of Movement
9. Responses (Border Regime)
10. Frankfurt Bahnhof

releaseavailability
Click here for free download. Released February 2005 as a joint internet-only release between Public Record (Los Angeles, US) and EGOBOO.bits (Zagreb, Croatia).

projectdescription
In 2001, the Los Angeles-based audio activist group Ultra-red joined forces with the Frankfurt chapter of Kanak Attak for an extended collaboration. Founded in 1997, Kanak Attak is a German anti-racist network producing cultural and poltical actions that support the autonomous networking and organizing of migrants. Kanak Attak is mostly comprised of immigrants with chapters in various cities such as Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg as well as Frankfurt. The network also collaborates with other immigrant groups such as Brandenburger Fluetlichlingsinitiative in Berlin and Doña Carmen in Frankfurt.

The CD ULTRA-RED PLAY KANAK ATTAK compiles tracks from joint performances with members of the two groups. Besides live recordings of performances from Club Transmediale in Berlin and the Pol Festival in Frankfurt, and the "Neue Wirtschaft" radio series produced by Ultra-red for FrankfurtŐs public radio, hr2, the tracks also feature site recordings from numerous locations around Frankfurt. These sites resonate with particular significance for migrant history, everyday experience and political struggles.

For example, the track ROTLICHT features site recordings from FrankfurtŐs red light district as heard through the ears of organizers with Doña Carmen. Working with Latin American immigrants in FrankfurtŐs sex work industry, Doña Carmen provides health and legal advocacy for women, men and transgender sex workers who come to Frankfurt. The recognition of immigrant sex workers as workers serves a central place in Doña CarmenŐs politics for the legalization of migrants.

Kanak Attak has been forceful in German cultural politics rejecting the standard notion of migrants as victims of economic push and pull factors. Rather, Kanak Attak argues that migrants are political actors and subjects organizing social movements out of the everyday networks in the need for housing, work, community, companionship and safety. These networks are in themselves political efforts to which government policies respond typically with punitive measures.

By releasing ULTRA-RED PLAY KANAK ATTAK on the fair-use label Public Record, Ultra-red hope to begin a dialog within electronic music and within popular culture at large. Both Ultra-red and Kanak Attak see this effort especially urgent as the expanding European Union seeks to pressure perimeter countries to standardize their immigration policies. This is particularly crucial in the former Yugoslavian countries, and Serbia and Montenegro specifically, where a coalition of E.U. actors, the U.N. High Commission on Refugees and national governments are drafting new immigrant policies establishing an expanded border regime for the European Union. Do the people of those countries wish to have their governments employed in the task of policing migration on behalf of the E.U?

The free movement of people must be recognized as an aspect of everyday life. Such freedom must be recognized for all people, from sex workers, to agricultural workers, families and lovers seeking reunion, Roma people, political refugees, and not just the sole right of privileged workers of the neoliberal order, like NGO workers, technical elites and cosmopolitan electronic musicians.

All tracks written by Ultra-red. Published by ListMat 2005 (ASCAP). Except track 9, 2002; tracks 1, 3, 4 and 6, 2003. Tracks 3, 6, 8 and 9 are based on material originally produced in cooperation with Manfred Hess at Hšrspiel, Hessischer Rundfunk hr2k, 2002. Mastered by John Tejada.

For more information about Kanak Attak, go to www.kanak-attak.de.