Rouzbeh Rashidi, founder of The Experimental Film Society visits the ResonanceFM studios from Ireland to discuss his influences, his own films with titles such as ‘Bipedality’ and working various forms – even toy Barbie cameras! Rouzbeh was taking part in London’s The Underground Film Festival.
This show was originally broadcast on 13th Dec 2010.
11pm Saturday – a special one hour mix for Resonance104.4fm: “After This” by Mutamassik, made on 2 turntables, a CD walkman for original tracks, and a broken mixer. Featuring tracks from the upcoming 2012, vinyl-only release “Rekkez” on ini.itu records.
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“After revolutions, what do you put in place?I completely lost the illusion that metropolis like New York, London and Tokyo are the ultimate hubs of activity, power points on maps, the epicenters of life. The irony and truth is that their very breath depends on an enormous, rhizomatic, artificial life-support system that trucks,ships, flies in provisions from all kinds of unfashionable places to sustain it’s millions. A city cannot produce enough food for even a fraction of its population. If people do not eat, they die…
The Jameel Prize is awarded to artist Rachid Koraïchi. We discuss the history and aims of the Jameel prize with one of its curators Salma Tuqan, and the winning work with Koraïchi himself (via a translator).
Sufi-born Koraïchi is influenced by an interest in life’s signs – real and imaginary, and his work contains glyphs and ciphers drawn from other cultures, mainly Arabic calligraphic scripts. Koraïchi’s sculptures and installations explore a wide range of media such as ceramics, textiles, various metals and paint on silk, paper and canvas. His winning works were large cloth hangings, hung around the Jameel Gallery inside the V&A museum, where this interview took place.
Composer-singer Hamed Nikpay speaks from USA about writing music, leaving Iran for the US in his 20s and what he’s currently listening to on his Ipod.
The interview comes prior to his collaboration with dancer and choreographer Shahrokh Moshkin Ghalam, London 2012. Both Nikpay and Ghalam have experimented extensively with forms of juerga and toque from Flamenco interwoven into Persian classical forms and both are highly passionate in their delivery, so it makes perfect sense for them to work together on stage, Nikpay providing the music, Moshkin Ghalam the dance.
Back from the Brink – An Audio Portrait
Kouroush Yaghmaie brought psyche music to Iran. He lived his music from his teens to adulthood until banned from singing, he was forced to produce children’s songs under a pseudonym for 19 years. His new album ‘Back from the Brink’ comes as a double CD and book, the extensive and detailed text by Kouroush Yaghmaie himself. In it Yaghmaie describes how he used his guitar to sound like a sitar, how his fellow musicians fell out of performing and heartbreakingly, lost the gift of music. Six Pillars has created a bespoke audio piece with a voice narrating over the songs the words of the man who for so long could not speak out. First broadcast in May 2012.
Trollstepper by Fari Hip teen American programmers, chat room trolls and producers vent their feelings in this new genre blend of rap, lo-fi game tunes and dark step. Dubstep’s offshoot Trollstep is the first generation of internet babies growing up. “Teehn Bwitches 12yr old wicca on H learning spells on youtube.”
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Acid Drops - 2005
Still: political activist and entomologist Shahin Nawai in 'Shallow Water, Deep Skin'
Nooshin Farhid, video artist, whose solo show Shallow Water, Deep Skin is now running at East London’s The Agency Gallery discusses her work and process with us back in 2008. Over the years Farhid has co-curated a number of exhibitions including “Use this Kind of Sky” and has exhibited the world over gathering together a considerable body of work and lengthy resumé.
Farhid’s videos employ different subjects and scenarios that thread together with a connecting sense of agitation and grit. We discuss her interests and how Fahid’s ideas form which interestingly harks back to her own experiences as an immigrant settling in the UK. The unwillingness to settle for what is on offer, something that is evident in all her work, reflects Farhid’s views on the current state of society, politics and ideology. Though not overtly political, (for this inevitably enables privileged authority to manipulate the artist into the cul de sac of irrelevance), her work picks away at those daily familiar stabilising forces within the space of the everyday and also within contemporary art itself.
Farhid’s work, eclectic and conceptually nomadic, uses the camera as a notebook collecting fragments of random events and chance meetings that collectively question the incessant drive towards normality and conformity. Farhid appropriates other ‘dumbing’ forms of popular media: soaps, reality TV, Bollywood, MTV, raw material welded together in fragments, each one activating and qualifying its predecessor. This process produces a contemporary surreal space that re-presents the familiar in that which is astonishing and invites the viewer to reconsider. In her most recent work Shallow Water, Deep Skin, featuring political activist and entomologist Shahin Nawai in ‘Shallow Water, Deep Skin’ Farhid reaches the apex of her observations of the human disconnect by melding together the swarming world of nature and human kinds’ own busy, teeming concerns.
Most of all, Farhid turns out to be a quirky and humorous talent, who works as both artist and curator, resident and outsider. This interview was first broadcast from the ResonanceFM studios in 2008.
Ebi is one of Iran’s most foremost pop singers from the 70s, although his music has been banned there for many years. Listening to his unique, warm baritone voice, to his stirring ballads, it’s amazing to think that over 40 years ago Ebi was already a well-established star with fans all over the world.
Ebi left Iran two years before the ’79 Islamic Revolution after recording six hit albums, and continued to work in the US. Later, he recorded another 13 albums and is still performing at sold-out concerts at prestigious venues around the world including the Sydney Opera House and Washington DC’s Kennedy Center.
In 2010 Ebi played his only UK concert for years at the Royal Albert Hall to help support the fight against Multiple Sclerosis (MS). We recorded an interview with the man himself while he was in London. The song below, Tasmim, critiques the Iranian elections of 2009. The video features two glass bowls, one filled with worms the other cockroaches as a suggestive metaphor.
Fari Bradley discusses shamanism, ‘beast visions’, social change and social cleansing with prolific artist Marcus Coates. Coates consulted with locals and developers alike to devise a shamanic intervention into the regeneration of Elephant & Castle and its Heygate Estate.
Coates’ interactions with the amazing array of characters around the Elephant and Castle culminated in a vision-ritual performance with 16 piece disco-Prog group Chrome Hoof at the iconic Coronet theatre.
The subsequent documentary film Vision Quest: A Ritual for Elephant & Castle was screened in an empty shopping unit in the centre, long-since marked for demolition along with the estates and areas around them. “I asked them how would you represent this place in terms of an animal? […] The council were amazing actually, the way they co-operated with the process […] You don’t actually see this in the film, but afterwards I asked them to envisage in a very personal way what their personal vision was, ’cause you have corporate vision and these scripted visions but I wanted them to invest in their own personal vision of what the Elephant could be. ” said Coates “.”
An interview with the great electro-Pharaoh West Coast Pioneer. After an hour of his early 80s and 90s releases, we launch into an in-depth interview to discuss the rise of feminism, spirituality of music and the future for Egyptian Empire Records, his own label, reputed to be the first Afro-American record label. Tracks like Freak-a-holic, influenced by Kraftwerk, made Egyptian Lover one of the most notable producers and DJs of his time. Still performing with his 808 and decks, Egyptian Lover visits the UK for a one-off gig. Follow Free Lab Radio’s blog or more regular posts on Facebook
