For the last day of the festival, we turn back to the National Museum of Contemporary Art for a movie screening: “Shindy Music / Muzică de petrecere” (75’, 2017), by
Andrei Nicolae Teodorescu.
A lecture & workshop on the musical instrument Kanun / Qanun will follow, hosted by
Yael Lavie (ISR). The evening at MNAC will conclude with an artist talk presented by
Red Bull Music, with
Iancu Dumitrescu and hosted by
Octav Avramescu (Sâmbăta Sonoră/Unearthing the music).
The night and the whole festival will conclude at
Control Club with a series of three concerts:
Nadah El Shazly from Cairo, Egypt; Ata Ebtekar aka
Sote’s new a/v project
Sacred Horror In Design and Turkish clarinet virtuoso
Cüneyt Sepetçi's closing concert. An after-party is programmed in the small room with The Attic Soundsystem (Stutz, D. Rusu) and surprise guests.
Starting out singing Misfits covers in a local punk band, then moving onto producing her own electronic tracks and making a name for herself in Cairo’s underground scene,
Nadah El Shazly’s backstory is not that unusual. Her debut album, released on Nawa Records in November 2017, on the other hand, is an entirely unexpected story. Two years in the making,
Ahwar (Arabic for marshlands) is an otherworldly record, not unlike an abstract mythological story-tale. Composed, written and produced by El Shazly herself in collaboration with
The Dwarfs of East Agouza’s
Maurice Louca and
Sam Shalabi on co-composition and arrangement duties, the album was crafted across two continents, between Canada and Egypt, and features the crème of Montreal’s contemporary-classical and improvised music scene, most of whom are members of Shalabi’s own Land of Kush ensemble. Imagine the worlds of Nico, Björk and Annette Peacock with the Arabic language as their mother tongue, re-approached through acoustic avant-jazz harmony and re-constructed with a dash of Kamilya Jubran’s modern styling of Arabic maqam and you may be somewhere close.
For
Sacred Horror in Design, commissioned by
CTM Festival, Iranian artist Ata Ebtekar aka
Sote collaborates with celebrated audiovisual composer
Tarik Barri (Monolake, Thom Yorke, Nicolas Jaar) and performers
Arash Bolouri (santoor) and
Behrouz Pashaei (setar) on a project merging electronics with traditional acoustic instruments for a "Persian techno apocalypse." The project takes on the paradoxical task of preserving the beauty of tradition while bending and morphing existing patterns into unique shapes that may eventually become another form of folklore in the future. Nano particles build micro structures, which in turn construct macro networks in a mega system for a magical, textural multi-timbral environment.
Tarik Barri’s video work is based on very detailed high definition renderings and textures, that are 100% generated live and allows him to respond to the dynamics of the sounds as an independent voice. The aesthetic of the video is loosely based on the heritage of Persian geometric patterns in architecture, graphic art and decoration, mutated and contrasted by granular and acidic visual noise. This way Barri’s visuals mirror the dialogue and quarrel between tradition and distressed contemporary sentience that is also at the core of the music.
Istanbul’s traditionally informed clarinet virtuoso
Cüneyt Sepetçi is on an intense trip into modern Turkish wedding and party music. The foundations go deep into Turkey and the surrounding regions’ history, which each generation innovates and develops. These days, no wedding or circumcision party is complete without the sound of the micro-tonal keyboard. A new addition, these Turkish keyboardists can play between notes, and supply banging club rhythms in a wide variety of time signatures. At home one may see Sepetçi playing for change on Istiklal Caddesi, the famous Turkish walking street at the center of the city. Or one may see him on one of the TV stations, playing Anatolian songs in his inimitable style.
Festival passes can be bought from
here and tickets for the event on September 20 at the Anglican Church (100 tickets only) can be found
here. Check out the festival website
here and RSVP
here.