A musical space dedicated to world music and the finest representatives of cultural performances.
Yalda Yazdani
Yalda Yazdani is an ethnomusicologist and curator. She was born in Iran. Currently she is working as a research fellow and also completing her PhD studies at University of Siegen in Germany. In 2020 she was selected to receive a full scholarship from House of Young Talents Academy to work on her PhD project by focusing on Women’s music in post-revolutionary Iran. In 2021 she was the winner of the DAAD award (German Academic Exchange Service) which is the world’s largest funding organisation for the international exchange of students and researchers. Since 2009 she has been undertaking various fieldwork research about female vocal songs and music in different regions of Iran. From 2015 she has been organising various intercultural projects, documentaries, music workshops and concerts across Iran and Europe with the aim of creating collaboration bridges between European and Middle-Eastern musicians and artists. In 2017 and 2018 she founded and curated the festivals „Female Voice of Iran“ and in 2021 the festival „Female Voice of Afghanistan“ in collaboration with Contemporary Opera Berlin. In the current times she has been collaborating with different documentary productions focusing mainly on music and the potential it offers to cross cultural borders. Her primary goal is to find ways to improve the situation of Middle-Eastern women musicians both in their home countries as well as internationally. The last cooperations have been with the documentary projects „Saz, The Key of Trust“ (Arte, 2018), „The Female Voice of Iran“ (Zeitgenössische Oper Berlin, 2020) and „Life After Life, The Female Voice of Afghanistan“ (CrossGeneration Media 2022).
El Mizan
MAGH-ROCK (ROCK FROM MAGHREB) -1 OCT 2023 - ONO LOKAL 20:00 - 22:30 Uhr
In North-African Darija, El Mizan means the groove, the balance, that shaking thing. The band was formed according to crossed trajectories in 2018. First, Anouar Kaddour Chérif (mandola, vocals) freshly arrived from Algeria met the guitar player and composer Romain Luder through the Geneva music scene. The Swiss and Moroccan multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Sami Grar joined in right after, and the band settled in Lausanne, at the heart of alternative migratory routes. Then, the clarinetist Damien Converset and his East-Asian and Balkan skills poped in, as if to affirm a transversal artistic fraternity. Finally, the powerful polyrhythms of the Egyptian drummer living in Paris Samuel Boutros completed the band’s set up.
El Mizan draws from its great cultural mix of North-African sounds, exulting with a Maghreblon rock, punctuated by ballads with elegant vocal harmonies, intoned in Darija, this great dialect of the Maghreb region. It is an immense energy that this unique cultural assemblage sends out: hymns to freedom, to the melancholy of exile, odes to the wisdom of the elders and to the exalted dreams of new generations. Live, the space turns into a night of musical fervor where popular memories arise, made of heady rhythms with jazz, rock or chââbi sounds, where ranges mingle do not care about borders and build bridges between the East and the West. The first EP „Nirani“ was released in 2019, when the band foamed and set the stages of French-speaking Switzerland in fever, like just before other groove warriors. the Tuaregs of Tinariwen. In 2023, El Nizan released Harba, literally escape, that of too tight shackles and generally everything that limits the horizon.
The L.P Horbo means evasion in Arabic. The album expresses a deep desire to escape, to get out of oneself, to get off the ground. The different compositions dig tunnels between the vulnerability of men and their forces, their wisdom and their madness. Authentic and intimate texts in a hybrid Arabic that relates as much to current tragedies as to ancestral celebrations. A world of contradictory images embodied in a tender and powerful eclectic music.
Anouar Kaddour Chérif: Mandole, voix. Sami Grar: Basse électrique, voix. Romain Luder: Guitare électrique Samuel Boutros : Batterie.
Damien Converset: Clarinette, Lausanne
WebSite: elmizan.bandcamp.com
Sel Et Poivre Dj
Porok Karpo
Cicek Taksi
