Sonic manifesto by a post-anything quartet featuring multi-instrumentalists from the Mediterranean inland Sea / new folklore for a devastated planet, including members of
Oiseaux-Tempête, H, Karkhana, Polyphème.
After a few concerts/screenings improvised as a duo in Cairo and Beirut, as well as for the Rencontres d'Arles, the Lille photography center and the Belgian magazine Halogénure, Dargent and Oberland have teamed up with mavericks Elieh and Halal for a puzzling cross-border manifesto. The first sonic moves of this eclectic quartet, made in a bunker studio somewhere between Paris and Berlin, urgently took the form of a quest, that of a neo-folklore for troubled times, a music seeping with many kinds of atavism and experimenting in all directions. A fertile no-man's-land where trance and contemplation, jazz and electronica, acoustics and electricity would merge in a stimulating mystical magma. From the possible emergence of a Babelian language to the shared desire to rediscover music as a ceremonial act, this encounter took place over three days of improvised sound bacchanalia, the phases of which were all recorded by Benoit Bel (Zombie Zombie, Thurston Moore Group, Oiseaux-Tempête). A hallucinated and generous testimony, SIHR is a synergy of many different worlds and many different possibilities, the sonic vision of a present conjugated in a hybrid tense and exalted by too many tangos danced on the glowing ashes of our days.
Featuring Frédéric D. Oberland (modular, buchla & drum synths, alto saxophone, electric guitar, voice),
Grégory Dargent (electric oud & guitar, analog synths, bells),
Tony Elieh (electric bass & cellphone synths),
Wassim Halal (bendir, darbuka, bells & augmented percussion).
Electric guitarist, oud player, composer and photographer, Grégory Dargent cultivates his musical schizophrenia and identity through improvised music, trance music, jazz, hijacked maqam, repetitive music, pop, electro-acoustic installations and French chanson. From L'Hijâz'Car to Babx, from Berber singer Houria Aïchi to Rachid Taha, from Trio H to Sirventés enragés, from music for images to contemporary choreography, from the most acoustic of ouds to the most nuclear of guitars, he conducts, accompanies, composes, deciphers, questions, delves, makes mistakes, bounces back, arranges, orchestrates and tirelessly shares his creative passions.
Tony Elieh is one of the pioneers of rock and experimental music in Lebanon. A founding member of the first post-rock group of post-war Lebanon, The Scrambled Eggs, he has since developed his unique electric bass skills in various groups and styles of music including collaborating with in groups such as Karkhana, Calamita and Wormholes Electric. Relocated in Berlin in recent years, he has performed a solo set of heavily processed bass generated sounds.
Is Wassim Halal only a darbuka player. He plays and composes with Polyphème, Gamelan Puspawarna, Erwan Keravec, Bey.Ler.Bey trio (w/ Laurent Clouet & Florian Demonsant), Benjamin Efrati and Diego Verastegui, Gregory Dargent and Anil Eraslan in H.
Self-taught multi-instrumentalist & photographer, Frédéric D. Oberland (born 1978) finds himself at the crossroads of image and sound, favoring a synesthetic approach. He articulates different modes of narration, combining the raw character of the documentary form with the transfigured reality of myth and poetry, allowing him to question notions such as the sacred, the monstrous, the fraternity, while at the same time returning to the political news of the present. Attentive to the pulse of the body, his work is willingly itinerant, modulating between the ripples of dreams, watching the points of incandescence and the bursts of electricity that act as revelations of our presence in the world, here and now, its mystery and its violence. Oberland is the co-founder of bands such as
Oiseaux-Tempête, FOUDRE!, Le Réveil des Tropiques, FareWell Poetry and is co-curating the avant-garde label NAHAL Recordings. Collaborating with a wild range of talents including versatile musicians (Mondkopf, Irena Z. Tomazin, Grégory Dargent, Stéphane Pigneul, Christine Ott, Jerusalem In My Heart, Virus 2020, Charbel Haber, Sharif Sehnaoui, Aya Metwalli, Richard Knox, Gareth Davis, Gaspar Claus, Colin Johnco,
Bérangère Maximin), film and video makers (Ala Eddine Slim, Grégoire Couvert & Grégoire Orio, Camille Degeye, Augustin Gimel,
Ho Tzu Nyen, François-Xavier Drouet), photographers and visual artists (Gael Bonnefon, Fanny Béguély, Stéphane Charpentier & Temps Zéro, Malek Gnaoui, David Fathi), writers and poets (Christophe Manon, Mathilde Girard, G.W.Sok, Jayne Amara Ross, Hugues Jallon), his musical and visual contributions have been released on labels and publishing houses such as
Sub Rosa, IIKKI, Hallow Ground, ZamZamRec, Halogénure, Gizeh Records, Sun/Sun, Miasmah, Constellation Records, Flau, Tropical Stoemp, Music Fear Satan, Les Inaperçus, Ruptured, Gazzar(r)a/VoxxoV, Consouling Sounds, Home Normal…
