Tuesday 27 August 2024, 7.30pm
Belgian experimental label KRAAK hits the left-sided road with three musical cohorts from its recent roster: Younes Zarhoni’s transfixing polyphonic chants, Maria Bertel & Nina Garcia’s blaring guitar-meets-trombone distentions, and Firmaet Forvoksen’s brooding outsidercore improvisations. A traveling caravan of wildly different - and sometimes dissonant - acts, for a glimpse into a multifarious, ever-surprising discography almost 30 years strong.
Antwerp native Younes Zarhoni has been consistently performing and making music for just about a decade now. His latest foray into transfixion-by-music is a study in quadraphonic vocals that is sculptural in scope and monastic in vibe. Austere incantations in Arabic are layered polyphonically, punctuated by silences that lean into the roaming rumination of these canticles. The result is blissful mindmelt, sonic immersions of a most contemplative order for closed eyes and wide open ears. His self-titled debut on KRAAK, out August 20, is a sparse, reflective condensation of this practice, with Zarhoni’s vocals weaving solemn melodic tapestries, the poetic mysticism of these verses punctuating empty space and settling like desert dust.
Instagram / Soundcloud / Website
Younes Zarhoni s/t on Bandcamp
Interview from KRAAK Fest 2023
Longtime sound explorers Nina Garcia and Maria Bertel collide in a fever dream come true. Nina’s guitar-based excursions as Mariachi push the limits of audible experience to the brink, using movement and modulation to sculpt inventive noise formations; Maria, both in her solo activities and in collaborations with multiple figures in the larger improv world (Johns Lunds, the aforementioned Jooklos, the many talents of the Selvhenter ensemble), uses the trombone to blare out distorted drones for an explosive sensory overload. As a duo, textures and rhythms come alive through burning amp bulbs, guitar and trombone reacting and refracting, a powerful complementarity slicing through roaring blasts. Their album KNÆKKET SMIL came out this February, a co-release by No Lagos Musique, Otomatik Muziek and KRAAK.
Instagram Maria + Nina
Knækket Smil on Bandcamp
Knækket Smil review on Salt Peanuts
The Norwegian duo of longtime friends Gaute Granli (one half of Rump State whose most recent solo output was released on Feeding Tube) and Thore Warland (of Staer/Golden Oriole and innumerable other musical constellations) has existed in multiple informal iterations before finally manifesting as Firmaet Forvoksen. Their 2022 debut album Undone Shal is an unfurling tapestry of erratic guitar pickings, muffled percussive conjurings, barging synths, and moans that are part lamentation, part incantation. In their current live setup, altered percussions, wayward synths and evoke a liminal space of certain psychedelia, taking the listener to areas which are unsettling, luminous and unshakably affecting.
Instagram Gaute / Bandcamp
Undone Shal on Bandcamp
Undone Shal review on The Sound Projector
