Stan Douglas

ISDN is a two-channel video installation by the Vancouver artist Stan Douglas, commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada for Canada's presentation at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022. While four photographs from his series 2011 ≠ 1848 filled the Canada Pavilion, ISDN was shown in the Magazzini del Sale No. 5. Its title refers to a technology from the 1980s that carried high-quality digital audio over copper phone lines. This record gathers its music, issued in 2024 by The Vinyl Factory, which had already released his Luanda-Kinshasa in 2016. That year the installation was shown at Serralves in Porto and in The Vinyl Factory: Reverb at 180 Studios in London.

Douglas sets the piece around 2011, the year of the Arab Spring and of protests in London. Two screens face each other and the viewer stands between them. The London grime MCs Lady Sanity and TrueMendous trade 16-bar freestyles with the Cairo mahraganat rappers Raptor and Joker. The verses appear to travel live over ISDN lines, but the two pairs were recorded separately, weeks apart, in their own cities. Each pair performs in a makeshift studio furnished with scavenged recording and mixing gear, at a tempo of about 140 BPM, as Wallpaper described it. While one pair performs, the other listens and dances, which gives the exchange the form of call and response. Their lyrics deal with race, class, love, identity and justice. In the installation the layers of sound beneath the voices are remixed in changing combinations that take more than four weeks to repeat. The record fixes two edits chosen by Douglas. The magazine noted that grime and mahraganat emerged around the same time, both taking hip-hop as their model. Mahraganat faces official bans in Egypt, so its political references stay veiled, while grime has its own history of clashes with the UK authorities. Douglas told the magazine that when someone from a disenfranchised community says "I'm important" on stage, "it's a political act" (Wallpaper, 2022).

This is a 12" of two edits selected by the artist, pressed on 180-gram black vinyl, in an outer sleeve printed with a still from the film, limited to 1,000 copies.