Moment is a Kurdish experimental, free improvisation Duo by Khabat Abas and Hardi Kurda. The duo focuses on a moment where sounds emerge through interacting, reflecting, reacting and interrupting each other. Hardi and Khabat want to share their experience of sound making with audience, to experience a world of sounds and noises from East to West.
Across three sets recorded at an event celebrating the launch of their recent record 'Broken Resonance' at Cafe OTO in September 2021, Khabat Abas and Hardi Kurda blur the boundaries between acoustic and electronic sounds in a deeply intuitive interplay by turns restless and reflective. Set 3 introduces chance elements into the mix, inviting audience members to trigger components of Kurda's interactive radio antennas setup, which the duo then react to in turn, creating an evolving soundworld seemingly untethered to any one particular source.
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Recorded by Paul Skinner at Cafe OTO on 19.9.21
Mixed and mastered by Oliver Barrett
Cover photo by Rolf Killius
Available as 320k MP3 or 24bit FLAC
Tracklisting
1. Set 1 - 16.06
2. Set 2 - 13.39
3. Set 3 - 18.22
Hardi Kurda is Composer, sound artist, improviser, researcher, and curator. Hardi’s works and performances involve suggestive, unusual sounds, unexpected moments, and noises that reflect his listening experiences to radio noises during his illegal journey to Europe. Therefore, the artist uses, among others, the radio to explore spectrum frequency as sound material and interact with the audience. Besides composing classical acoustic and electronic music, Hardi develops pieces in which music interacts with different art forms in new art spaces to create new listening experiences using found scores, a new listening medium he develops.
He performed at the Sonorities festival Belfast, the Borderline festival Athens, the Crater project Santa Cruz de La Palma, the Soundings Conference ADK Berlin, IKLECTIK Art Lab (2022), Café OTO London (2021), Nomos Museum Gdansk (2021), Irtijal festival Beirut (2019).
He composed “24/7 Everywhere” for the Listening Biennial Slemani, part of the Global Listening Biennial collaboration with SPACE21, where he is part of the curator collective and the radio Middle East PhoNographic Morning (2021). He became the fifth scholarship holder of the Radio Art Residency in Halle, Germany, where he created two experimental radio performances based on his illegal journey to Europe that revolved around illegality and the construction of legality. The radio programmes broadcasted on Radio Corax, Shift FM, Deutschland funk Hörspielmagazin, generation FM, and the live performance on Gallery Blech (2020). He develops the project on illegality in collaboration with Melos Collective in Vilnius (2022). The Magnified Face, the found score of the Kurdish carpet, is a telepathic performance during the symposium on the John Heartfield found footage ADK Berlin (2020). He received the residency programme from the Swedish Artist grant committee to compose the piece The Latest News for Ensemble Recherche Freiburg (2019), Between Me and the Others performed at the Berliner Festspiele Maerz Musik by Adapter ensemble (2013), Open Ensemble sound installation presented at the Sound Place exhibition (2015), Game Piece for Zurna at the Showroom London (2010).
He received awards and commissions from AFAC, the Arab fund for art and culture (2022), Brent Council London (2021), the Society for Swedish Composers (2019), the Department of Public Art in Gothenburg (2018), the Swedish Art Council (2018), the Goethe Institute (2017), and Västra Götaland Region culture prize (2015).
Hardi is a founder and curator of the SPACE21 projects for sound art and experimental music in the Kurdistan Region in Iraq. Since 2017 he has organised festivals, workshops, artistic research, publications, and the label. www.space21.info
Hardi is co-founder of Duo Moment with Khabat Abas, and they released albums “Broken Resonance” on Space21 Label and “Illegal Performance” (2021). His solo album Radiola Springs (2022).
Hardi is a visiting lecturer at The University of Winchester teaching Interaction Design, focusing on questioning the role of artistic practice in a social environment by creating another perspective on listening to sound.
Website: www.hardikurda.com
Khabat Abas is a cellist, improviser, artist, and composer from Kurdistan who likes to transgress. She experiments with the cello structurally and musically, improvising, composing, creating sound installations and diverse cellos including her shell-case cello (made from a shell dropped on Kurdistan), and using her own body. She is inspired in part by the silenced stories of women, which she makes audible through her compositions, using diverse materials to protest against oppression rooted in social and political systems. She questions what is out of bounds, raising the possibilities of sounds that contrast with traditional musical values and cannot be controlled or commodified.
Abas has performed with numerous ensembles, including the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra, Sulaymaniyah string orchestra, Gothenburg Academic Symphony Orchestra, the Non-Ensemble for experimental music, London Improvisers Orchestra and ONe_Orchestra New. She has collaborated with curators, artists and musicians in Kurdistan-Iraq, Sweden, Germany, and the UK. Abas’s recent piece for electro-acoustic cello was performed in Slemani-Kurdistan as a part of the Global Listening Biennial 2021. She also performed at the Space21 festival in Kurdistan-Iraq in 2021, the Winter sound festival in Canterbury 2022 and the Borderline Festival Athens 2022, and she participated in the (Abandoned Space) project, a collaboration between the Sonorities festival in Belfast and Space21 festival in Kurdistan. Her compositions have been played as part of Klangwerkstatt Festival for New Music in Berlin, the Space21 festival in Kurdistan, and new jazz festival in London. She is co-founder, with Hardi Kurda, of Duo Moment; they have released two albums: Broken Resonance on the Space21 Label, and Illegal Performance, recorded at Café Oto 2021. She has been awarded grants from Salam culture house in Iraqi Kurdistan, the Swedish art council community, and Stim Forward Fund in Sweden.
