Parties, concerts, come and go. You go, you drink, you see, you hear, and then? Then all you have is a memory. A memory of what was expected, what happened, and how it all ended, condensed into a series of images in your brain. Distorted by the excesses and abscesses. That has changed, now something persists, and is probably nicer than the images lodged in your brain. Flyers have been round for a long time, a small, cheap advertisement of the event to come. A few words announcing the bands, Djs, music, location, whatever. Make a bunch of photocopies and distribute. Easy, effective. If you aren’t given one you can usually pick them up off the floor where they are scattered at the exit of a concert. But lately the floors have been surprisingly clean. Why is this, why is it so difficult to get the flyer from next weeks party? It is simple, they have now mutated from simple advertisements into small works of art. It’s not the guy who runs the club printing something and taking it to the nearest Xerox centre. Now they are being designed by the trendiest Graphic designers in town. Colourful, intelligent, stupid, irreverent. They now have images which conjure up all these things and more. The designers sometimes spend more time on the flyers than the actual event will take. You may find 6 different flyers for the same night! It’s back to being a kid and collecting stickers. People keep them as a souvenir, they pin them up on their walls, stick them on their folders. They are the Pokemon cards for Adults. Image is a very important part of music nowadays, that’s what the Flyers and posters are, the images which take part in the music.
This is what Expozitie cu Tema Muzicala is about. Brought together by the 2020 collective you can find flyers, posters and articles on events from the Bucharest life. Milos Jovanovic (www.hardisco.com), Vlad Nanca, Tom Wilson (DJ Democracy) and Stefan Tiron bring us a sample of the works you can find around these days. Presented in Galeria HT003, a small but perfectly suitable gallery, it is shown that Music is not only what you hear but what you see. Flyers and posters designed using photography, illustration, and computer design show us the multitude of media that the designers are employing for their final pieces. The themes in them range from 1950’s advertisements and their conservative images to the cheesy images of pornography today. We can also find the lists of DJs used at the successful DJ Democracy events held in Bucharest and Cluj, where each night gave people their 15 minutes of fame by Djing to a packed crowd, below huge posters with their names in bold letters. As well as these printed memorabilia you can see the Parazitii video for “In focuri…”, directed by Andreea Paduraru, breaking down the conventionalisms of rap videos trying to emulate the American lifestyle. Rather than this we are presented with a recording of the band watching their video on the telly whilst an array of bizarre situations revolve around them.
All these visions show how Romania is growing in this sense, with new things popping up each week. Painting the grey walls with neon pink and breaking down barriers with new beats. These images are a pleasant warning which can fit in your pocket, or which you can see in the street. Which make a spark flash in your brain for a second whilst you take it in, thus breaking the monotony of the boring conversations and the cigarette smoke.

Andrew Luke

For more information about Expozitie cu tema muzicala check www.2020.ro/muzicala.