Monday 14 March 2022, 8pm
A pleasure to welcome back Duo Moment, the project of Kurdistan-Iraq experimental, free-improvisation duo Khabat Abas and Hardi Kurda, this time joined by the great soprano, composer and improvising vocalist, Alya Al-Sultani.
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.
website: https://space21.bandcamp.com/
Hardi Kurda is a sound artist, improviser, and founder of SPACE21, a sound art and experimental music platform in Slemani, and the Archive Khanah, an interactive sound archive project using the philosophy of computer gaming technology. Currently, he is a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths College, the University of London. He explores radio noises that may have been considered illegal, abandoned, unheard, invisible, broken, distorted, untold, forgotten, or simply noises from nowhere, without a place or destination. He developed the notion of "The Found Score" an instrument as a listening medium, using everyday materials to reimagine listening experiences through engaging other senses based on his listening experience in a crisis when he immigrated illegally to Europe. www.hardikurda.com
Khabat Abas is an experimental cellist, improviser, and composer from Iraqi Kurdistan. She moves freely between artistic discipline and possibilities. Her works are inspired by a broad collection of methods, including noise, improvisation, and narrative storytelling as individual approaches. Therefore, she searches for unheard sounds or undiscovered spaces. Khabat is probably best known for her adapted cello and improvisational work exploring extended techniques, through which she started developing pieces that respond to the objects that are surrounding her or to her childhood memories. In her practice, she raises questions about what is out of bounds, raising the possibilities of sounds that cannot be controlled – in contrast to traditional musical values.
Alya Al-Sultani is a vocalist and composer based in London, UK. Her first musical experiences were Iraqi folk songs sung by her great grandmother and radio broadcasts of Um Kolthum, Abdel-Halim and Fairouz which she listened to with her family while drinking sweet black tea infused with cardamom. After leaving Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, her family settled in Tottenham, North London where she began to discover the incredible new sounds of the 80s and music from the Caribbean.
Her musical education was entirely classically-focussed, on piano and voice. She learned the importance of technique, tradition, theory, respecting fellow musicians and respecting the music. But she did not learn freedom and it is this she has sought for the last decade. The pursuit of freedom in music is driven by her aesthetic, her immigrant experience and her Eastern feminism.
Apart from working on her own projects, Alya enjoys debuting new music for contemporary composers and experimenting with opera, including the integration of improvisation techniques, microtonal ideas and Eastern influences.
