Syrian Cassette Archives

Syrian Cassette Archives is an initiative aiming to preserve, share and research sounds and stories from the cassette era (1970s-2000s) in Syria. The collection of tapes presents a wide-ranging overview of musical styles from Syriaʼs many communities, including Syrian Arabs, Assyrians, Kurds and Armenians, as well as Iraqis displaced by sanctions and wars throughout the 1990s-2000s. The archive is home to tape recordings of live concerts, studio albums, soloists, classical, religious, patriotic and childrenʼs music, with a special focus on the regional dabke and shaabi folk-pop music, performed and recorded at weddings, parties and festivities.

Yamen Mekdad

Yamen Mekdad is a music researcher, collector, DJ and radio host based in London. His interests in field recording, archiving, radio and grassroots organising have led him to found Sawt of the Earth and Makkam, two London-based collectives. He is a frequent contributor to a number of radio stations, including Root Radio and Balamii Radio, and was a producer of DanDana podcasts on SOAS Radio. Yamen is currently co-producer/curator of the Syrian Cassette Archives, a web based platform that preserves the Syrian cassette era as well as curating and producing SACF’s (Syrian Arts and Culture Festival) music programme. Yamen has performed and collaborated with various artists/art institutions both in the UK and internationally.

Mark Gergis

Mark Gergis is a London-based Iraqi-American producer, musician and audio-visual archivist known for his global music releases on the Sublime Frequencies label, among others. Since the early 2000s, his cultural research and output has focused on regional folk-pop music from the Middle East and Southeast Asia, as well as musical outputs of diaspora Asian communities in the US during the mid-to-late 20th century. Mark introduced the music of Syrian singer Omar Souleyman and his group to western stages in 2007, and worked closely with legendary Turkish musician Erkin Koray on major reissues of his early work. His acclaimed two-hour audio-document, I Remember Syria (2003) was reissued in 2015, with proceeds going toward Syrian relief charities. Mark's projects have received support from AFAC, UK Arts Council, Sound and Music, Hauptstadtkulturfonds and MACBA. In 2018, Mark founded Syrian Cassette Archives, an initiative to restore, preserve, catalog and share his collection of Syrian media from what can be called Syria’s cassette era (1970s-2010). Mark's post-production, archival and audio mastering work continues for record labels such as Ostinato Records, Akuphone, Discrepant and 2182 Recordings, among others.

Vincent Moon

Vincent Moon’s “live cinéma” is a performance improvising with live-edited images, music on stage and in the films screened, and a research towards new forms of ceremonies. Each performance is a unique combination of films and music, based on the recordings of his own Collection Petites Planètes, partly in collaboration with writer and explorer Priscilla Telmon. All the performances are site-specific and sometimes involve local musicians and participants, leading to a new film being created on the spot every time.

Vincent Moon is an independent french filmmaker and radical sound explorer. He was the main director of the Blogotheque’s Take Away Shows, a web-based project recording field work music videos of indie rock related musicians as well as some notable mainstream artists. For the past ten years, Vincent Moon has been traveling around the globe with a camera in his backpack, documenting local folklores, sacred music, trance ceremonies and experimental music, for his label Collection Petites Planètes, always releasing the material (more than 1000 films so far) under open source licences on internet.

Paul Cheneour

Paul Cheneour: flautist/composer, trained at the Guildhall School of Music London under the late Professor Rainer Schuelein. For 50 years since then has played, composed, taught, and run workshops and masterclasses including CMSP prison work and Skyros, in England, Europe, Mexico, and Greece. He has 58 albums to his credit published by Northstar music UK, 5 major films, including EMMA award winning ‘6th Happiness’ and ‘Hideous Kinky’. Best Foreign film winner in 2007 ‘In The Place of the Dead’ videos and documentaries including BBC 2's Egyptian Journeys, The City & The City, The Widow & The Serpent.

From 2000-2005 he lived on the Mexico/ USA border, co-founded 7Changes and Inner Silence and was a regular featured soloist at the Bebop jazz club Monterrey. Paul was voted No: 72 in "The world’s best jazz flautists of all time” by www.digitaldreamdoor.com readers in 2005.

Since returning to UK projects include: The Zen Bicycle Band, AEONA Flutes, The Paradiso Flute & Strings quartets - performing at 11 Downing Street for the Treasury music society. The cross channel Transmettre/Transmit art installation. DVD film ‘The Painter and the Musician’ with artist Joanna Jones. Sufi-Baul-Fusion, ‘whereness’, Free Range Orchestra, Black Salt, CZW Trio, Dragonfly, Night Mist, A Moment in Time & A Priori -Drink Only, from the Fountain of Light Lossenham visiting artist ’21-’22.

For more information visit Web pages: www.cheneour.com – www.redgoldmusic.com & www.facebook.com/paulcheneour
e-mail cheneour@hotmail.com

Lara Baksu

Born in Istanbul, Lara Baksu is an artist based in London.
She uses poetry and text as the catalyst of her work using performance, moving image and sound.
Baksu uses diaristic methods to build her artistic language.
Over the past year she has been doing sonic rituals incorporating poetry for radio shows
based in London, Paris and Budapest.
Recently she has been using her practice to explore her witch identity and focusing on
the relationship between art and the occult.
She has performed in places including IKLECTIK, Amersham Arms, Jupiter Woods, Avalon Cafe and San Mei Gallery.