Raed Yassin (Two Day Residency) with John Tilbury, Eddie Prevost , Ute Wassremann, Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga and Ute Kanngiesser
No Longer Available
Raed Yassin's residency at Cafe Oto is in partnership with Delfina Foundation
SCHEDULE
WED 5 MARCH
Eddie Prévost / percussion
John Tilbury / piano
Raed Yassin / double bass
THU 6 MARCH
First set: Ute Wassermann sings "The Raed Yassin CookSongBook"
Second set: String trio with
Ute Kanngiesser / cello
Dimitra Lazaridou - Chatzigoga / zither
Raed Yassin / double bass
Third set: Raed Yassin solo Turntables
RAED YASSIN
Raed Yassin is a ground-breaking figure in the experimental music scene of his native Lebanon and the Middle-Eastern region on the whole. An aficionado of popular Arab culture both musically and on-screen, a large part of his discography revolves around sonically and conceptually deconstructing this wealth of collective memory. His solo projects include electro acoustic compositions, electronics, Arabic turntablism, as well as spending the past decade developing a highly individualistic extended technique on double bass, that explores the performative capacities of the instrument to boot.
In the year 2001, he became one of the founders of the "Irtijal" (literally "unhinged") festival in Beirut, which has since transformed into the largest fostering ground for experimental music across the region. In 2009, he started the "Annihaya" record label along with Sharif Sehnaoui and Hatem Imam, which focuses on the recycling of popular musical cultures.
Raed has collaborated with numerous other musicians across Europe, the US, Japan and the Middle-East, spanning a diverse range of genres with each encounter. Free jazz, improv, post-rock, folk, avant garde are some of the few examples of the styles he has tackled with artists such as Alan Bishop, Gert-jan Prins, Eddie Prévost, Axel Dorner, Morphosis, Toshimaru Nakamura, Takumi Seino, and his oldest collaboration "A Trio" with Sharif Sehnaoui and Mazen Kerbaj. His recent duo project "PRAED" with Swiss clarinet and bass player Paed Conca has fused Egyptian Shaabi music with free jazz and psychedelic rock.
"He has that quality of utter concentration which makes you hang on his every move. What that move may be is always in doubt, because Yassin doesn’t play his double-bass so much as subject it to investigation. He balances Tibetan singing bowls in its crevices, and sets them ringing so the bass becomes a resonating chamber. He threads metal bars between the strings and agitates them rhythmically, creating a kind of thrumming which evokes wind through trees, or perhaps some ancient ritual." - Ivan Hewett, The Telegraph (review of Raed Yassin's 2011 OTO residency)
EDDIE PRÉVOST / percussion
Eddie Prévost (1942) Percussionist Prévost began as a jazz drummer before branching out into entirely improvised music. He was a co-founder of the group AMM, and remains its only constant member. In 1965, along with tenor saxophonist Lou Gare, bassist Lawrence Sheaff and guitarist Keith Rowe, Prévost made a radical break with jazz, a music that had inspired these English musicians but couldn’t accommodate their rapidly expanding aesthetic concerns. Their dedicated inquiry into the terms of spontaneous creativity led them to reinvent music as a dialogue with the world beyond the limits of conventional musical discourse. They formed AMM, soon to be joined by distinguished composer Cornelius Cardew, an improvisation ensemble that has exerted influence internationally across a wide range of kinds of music, from contemporary composition to psychedelic rock, ambient soundscapes and industrial noise. During the late 1960s AMM occasionally played on the same bill as Pink Floyd. In 1968 American composer Christian Wolff spent his year in London as a member of AMM.
In addition to making music Prévost lectures, writes, edits and publishes. His writings about the aesthetic priority of improvisation have appeared in numerous arts and music magazines and mention worth is his books No Sound is Innocent, Minute Particulars and The First Concert (pub. 2011). And, for the past 14 years Prévost has convened a weekly workshop devoted to the development of improvisational aptitudes in which over 400 musicians have taken part. He shares many concerts and a number of CDs with workshop alumni.
JOHN TILBURY / piano
British pianist John Tilbury is renowned for his remarkable touch and in constant demand as an interpreter of piano pieces by composers such as Morton Feldman and John Cage. During the 1960s, Tibury was closely associated with the composer Cornelius Cardew, whose music he has interpreted and recorded and a member of the Scratch Orchestra. He is also an incredible improvisor, most famously as a member of legendary British group AMM.
UTE WASSERMANN SINGS "THE RAED YASSIN COOKSONGBOOK"
Raed Yassin's CookSongBook, preformed by Ute Wassermann, is a new work commissioned by Op. 50, a new commissioning body/publishing platform that facilitates and promotes crossovers between sound art, music and art. Cooksongbook is produced in association with Delfina Foundation.
Ute Wassermann is known as a vocal soloist and composer/performer for her extraordinary, many-voiced and extreme vocal sound-language, which she has brought into experimental/contemporary music in diverse ways. In her solo pieces she transforms herself into diverse vocal characters using techniques to “mask” her voice with birdcall-whistles, palate whistles or resonant objects, speaker objects and special microphones. A particular interest is the development of compositions and sound installations for spaces with unusual acoustic qualities.
She has performed in the area of contemporary and experimental music in festivals in Europe, Australia and Asia. As an integral part of the Berlin and London experimental music scenes she performs regulary with Phil Minton, John Russel, Thomas Lehn and Martin Blume, Aleks Kolkowski, Els Vandeweyer, Michael Vorfeld, Richard Barrett, Birgit Ulher and others and is a member of the Berlin-based composer/performer ensemble “Les Femmes Savantes”. She has given premieres of works composed for her voice, for example by Richard Barrett, Henning Christiansen, Hans-Joachim Hespos, Matthias Kaul, Michael Maierhof, Michael Finnissy, Cathy van Eck, Simon Steen-Andersen, Andrew Noble.
Ute Kanngiesser is a German cellist based in London. Classically trained as a child, she turned to improvisation and experimental music while practicing physical theatre and dance in Berlin. Her strongest associations are with musicians around Eddie Prevost's workshop such as Jennifer Allum, Seymour Wright, Grundik Kasyanksy, Ross Lambert and Sebastian Lexer. She has also worked with AMM, John Butcher, Angharad Davies, Steve Beresford, Paul Abbott, Terry Day, Roger Turner, Lol Coxhill and Guillaume Viltard.
"Ute Kanngiesser's playing is marked by her intense exploration of the timbral possibilities of the cello and her immaculate sense of placement, and a strong, if at times oblique, rhythmic sensibility (...)" - Muddy Ditch
Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga (b. 1981, Thessaloniki, Greece) is a musician and a linguist based in London. She is active in experimental and improvised music since 2006. She plays the zither, a string instrument, and uses ebows and objects on its resonance box to produce sustained or granulated sounds. Her approach focuses on the interplay between spontaneity and elaborate techniques.
Her first solo album 'stroke by stroke' was released in 2011 on Organized Music from Thessaloniki. Recently, she released ‘Workshop concert’ on Matchless Recordings with Jennifer Allum, Ute Kanngieser, Grundik Kasyansky, Eddie Prévost and Daichi Yoshikawa and 'Accidents of matter or of Space' on suppedaneum that includes realizations of Sarah Hughes' composition (can never exceed unity) performed with Rhodri Davies, Patrick Farmer, Jane Dickson and Neil Davidson. In the last few months, she has performed with Grundik Kasyansky and Daichi Yoshikawa at the OTO Project Space and with Phil Durrant at GVart and she toured in Sweden with Angharad Davies, Axel Dörner and Henrik Olsson.
Raed Yassin is currently in residence with Delfina Foundation and is participating in their The Politics of Food programme. Artists, writers and thinkers from all over the world have come together to unpack issues around agri-business, environment, food sovereignty and waste through exhibition, debate, dinners and workshops.
Founded by renowned arts patron Delfina Entrecanales CBE in 2007, Delfina Foundation is an independent, non-profit foundation dedicated to facilitating artistic exchange and developing creative practice through residencies, partnerships and public programming, with a special focus on international collaborations with the greater Middle East & North Africa.
