“Circle A: Making Eurodance a Threat Again.” – Practice-Based Autoethnographic Reflections on Political Musicking

tina and Malik are excited to be invited to talk about their music project Circle A at a practice-based research symposium on music, sounds, and the political. They founded Circle A in 2014 as the first Radical Eurodance act ever, with the self-declared mission of “making Eurodance a threat again” and framing it as “a four-to-the-floor declaration of war against any kind of injustice and oppression that haunts the world we live in.” Over the past few years, they have only occasionally performed or recorded, due to their time being taken up by kids, other bands, and a pandemic. In early 2024, they meet over a beer to revisit their joint work and think about the topics they would like to discuss at the symposium. They reminisce about when, how, and why they founded Circle A; how the band and its music developed; what the future may hold for it; how and to what ends they mixed Eurodance and politics; and what all of this has to do with their shared background in musicology. In the process, tina and Malik also engage in discussions about fundamental questions regarding the relationship between music and the political, such as: What makes music political? Who are the audiences of political music, and how do they influence musicians’ practices? What are criteria for deciding whether a piece of political music is “good,” or maybe rather: “successful”? Can (political) music change the world? If so, how and to what extent? How can the seriousness of social struggles be squared with humorous modes of artistic expression? – As the conversation unfolds, tina and Malik switch back and forth between spoken language and song. In the end, they fail to produce notes for their symposium presentation, but they certainly enjoyed the intellectually stimulating – and sometimes controversial – exchange.