Upcoming music program
Join us at e-flux for two nights of live music featuring Through Rust and Dusk: Jad Atoui and Tarek Atoui, and CDJs are Instruments: Basel Abbas and chukwumaa, followed by a conversation with Gavilán Rayna Russom. Admission is 15 dollars.
Through Rust and Dusk: Jad Atoui and Tarek Atoui
Monday, September 26, 8pm
A live music set featuring Through Rust and Dusk, an experimental music duo by Jad Atoui and Tarek Atoui that incorporates improvisation techniques, custom made instruments, field recordings, and electronic sounds. The suave melodies of a club in Kaunas, the clamor of Kurdistan’s markets, the howls of cheap synths and noise machines, the jibe of the now gone Beirut harbor, and the laughs of tribes in the Atlas mountains are some of the sounds that they collect. Get tickets.
Jad Atoui is a Beirut-based sound artist and improviser. He composes and performs electronicand electro-acoustic music and has worked with musicians like John Zorn, Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Anderson, Chuck Bettis, and Anthony Sahyoun. During his formative years in New York, Atoui found interest in the New York avant-garde scene. He began working closely with NYC downtown musicians and learning improvised music techniques, while also working at the Stone and the Guggenheim Museum. In 2015, Atoui spearheaded the “Biosonics” project in collaboration with scientist Ivan Marazzi where they used bio-sonification of behaviors as compositional tools. The project was later published in John Zorn’s Arcana Book Vol. XVIII and premiered at National Sawdust as part of The Stone’s commissioning series.
Tarek Atoui is an artist and composer born in Beirut. His work stems from performance and looks into how sound can be perceived with sensory organs other than the ear, how sound acts as a catalyst for human interaction, and how it relates to social, historical, and spatial parameters. The point of departure for his works is usually extensive anthropological, ethnological, musicological, or technical research, which results in the realization of instruments, listening rooms, performances, or workshops.
CDJs are Instruments: Basel Abbas and chukwumaa, and conversation with Gavilán Rayna Russom
Thursday, September 29, 7:30pm
CDJs are Instruments is a music event featuring experimental DJ sets by Basel Abbas and chukwumaa, followed by a talk and Q&A with the artists led by Gavilán Rayna Russom. CDJs are Instruments stems from a conversation Basel Abbas, chukwumaa, and the curator Sanna Almajedi had about the need for more spaces for DJs to experiment with their equipment to an in-person audience outside of a club and dance setting. The conversation touched on Japanese listening bars, CDJs as samplers, turntablism, and music in art spaces. This event will be part of an ongoing series where DJs are invited to explore their style and push the boundaries of their instrument. Get tickets.
Basel Abbas works mostly with artist Ruanne Abou-Rahme. Their practice is engaged in the intersections between performativity, political imaginaries, the body, and virtuality. Across their works, they probe a contemporary landscape marked by a seemingly perpetual crisis and an endless “present,” one that is shaped by a politics of desire and disaster. Often reflecting on ideas of non-linearity in the form of returns, amnesia, and deja vu, and in the process unfolding the slippages between actuality and projection (fiction, myth, wish), what is, and what could be. Largely, their approach has been one of sampling materials both existing and self-authored in the form of sound, image, text, and objects, and recasting them into altogether new “scripts.” The result is a practice that investigates the political, visceral, and material possibilities of sound, image, text, and site, taking on the form of multimedia installations and live sound/image performances.
chukwumaa (aka lawd knows) is an artist, musician, and DJ born in Lagos, Nigeria and raised in Prince George’s County, Maryland. His work includes soft sculptures, performances, and other media experiments about liminal characters, Igbo trickster myths, and non-linear narratives. He has performed and exhibited at MoMA PS1, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Deli Gallery, and The Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College. In 2018, chukwumaa toured live electronic music performances across North America and Europe, both as supporting DJ for MHYSA and as one half of SCRAAATCH with E. Jane.
Gavilán Rayna Russom’s visionary artistic career reverberates expansively at the multiple intersections between experimental and dance-floor sounds. Rayna’s creative arc began when she was still in high school—DJing dance parties and distributing home-produced drone and noise tapes—and has carried her through a long-standing relationship with New York’s DFA Records and critically acclaimed releases for LIES, Nation, Curle, LuxRec and Ecstatic Recordings, as well as the founding of her own label Voluminous Arts.
e-flux music is curated by Sanna Almajedi.