#dead media
Deloyloy also serves as an historical document, providing a detailed account of the events of the conflict even as it interprets and comments upon them. Names of key the figures of the resistance and names of the places are noted. Details such as how the British flew in reinforcements from India to battle against the Kurds are also described in the song. The main tone of this sonic battle for the Dengbêj is the notion of betrayal. Each stanza of the song closes with the refrain: Oh the Kurds, the traitors… This is an allusion to the internal divisions among Kurdish groups, some of whom collaborated with the British, such as the native policemen in the silence cabin, delivering the message in Kurdish, from inside the modified Victoria Vickers. Taken by the microphone, his voice is amplified 1.600.000 times, and pushed through the speaker cones, raining down as “verbal bombs”.
Let’s remember the microphone in the silence cabin of Victoria Vickers and whisper these questions to it: Could this same microphone delivering the verbal bombs, be used by Kawîs Axa to record the songs of the rebellion? Can the machine take sides, can it be forced to betray itself? And in the contemporary landscape of militarized skies, can the song speak louder and for longer than the machine?
Published in The Illustrated London News on April 8th, 1933, this report details the novel psychological war tactics used by British empire. The cutaway drawing reveals the guts of the giant flying machine called Vickers Victoria. This state-of-the-art machine is depicted in utmost detail, with labels for the power amplifier, the control panel, and four loudspeaker cones with nine loudspeaker units in each. The illustration also shows the position of the pilots, the wireless operator, the political officer and a native (Kurdish) policeman who speaks from inside the “Silence Cabin” into a microphone that amplifies his voice 1.600.000 times[3]. The rig is shown gliding above a mountain range and three villages, each labelled “Kurdish Village”. The article gives us the names of these villages as Mawata, Argosh and Banan, located in the Barzan Region of the current Kurdistan Region of Iraq, on the border to Turkey.