emirates man
apr/may 2015
| CULTURE | MUSIC “Why do we want to make music? Because for me 50
that’s why I try and produce different types of art. Some concepts might fit better with photography than they do with music, or painting rather than film. We should listen to the idea and collaborate with others to produce better ways of making art. I don’t mind if electronic music remains small in the Arab world, because to get bigger or to become regular is not the mission. It’s more about what we want to say, what interests us and who we are.” Writing in the UK’s The Guardian last year, John
Doran noted that it was easy for western critics to ignore the Arab avant garde, given the fact that most have never acknowledged it in the first place. Yet Shams Asma, which means both ‘Asma’s Sun’ and ‘highest sun’ in Arabic, is a counter balance of sorts to such notions, although she admits the history of experimental music in the Arab world is uncertain and certainly undocumented. “We don’t know when experimental music started
Her creative process relies on live recordings and a
handmade style of production, rarely using music-making software and only relying on basic editing at the end of each recording. “I record all sounds I want to use and if it includes text as well I play it live in my room around the recorder,” she says. “Sometimes I put sounds far away and others close, so I can get the layers I want exactly the way they should be present in the space. The idea is to criticise and analyse language, culture, stereotypes, images and audio that have affected who we are.” “I began with field-recordings and trying to think and
write about music and sound,” she says. “I was already making visual art via photography and experimental films, but working on sound and image is an integrated process. It is connected. At first I tried to let other musicians make sounds for me but it was very musical. It wasn’t as open as I wanted it to be. It wasn’t undefined or unstructured music, so I started making it myself. I began to use the term ‘experimental’ because the music I was making was an experience of the unknown. The audience can’t exactly get the rhythm, or never catch it, and that works well connecting the visual side and the conceptual side to music and making it more like artwork.” The first time we met, Ghanem was at the Dubai
International Film Festival (DIFF) for the GCC premiere of Suspended Time, a collection of short films by nine Palestinian filmmakers, of which Ghanem was one. Although she grew up in Damascus, she later moved to Ramallah, and then to Toulouse, where she earned a scholarship for a master’s degree in visual arts at the École supérieure des Beaux-Arts. It’s there she currently lives, popping back to the Middle East occasionally for performances at venues such as Yukunkun in Beirut, where she appeared alongside video artist Ayman Nahle and DJ Tash Hochar last month. Although music is a passion, she delves into other forms of art, most notably film and photography, often combining all three in her live performances.
“Palestine is full of influences that make one think about the meaning of sound itself”
in the Arab world,” she admits. “Maybe when John Cage was expressing and analysing everything about music and sounds, also others like Howard Skempton, or my favourite Cornelius Cardew and his amazing musical piece with The Scratch Orchestra, The Great Learning. [But] I received an email from a Lebanese friend that said: ‘Asma, I discovered an Arab electronic musician from the 40s! His name is Halim El-Dabh.’ So it’s not just what art, history and art history includes, but also what it excludes.” During a
villa party at DIFF, Ghanem talks to Emirates Man about the acoustics of war. We’re on a balcony with others overlooking Al Qasr and the Madinat Jumeirah, the sounds of war and their interpretation in music diametrically opposed to the view before us. It was in Ramallah, she says, that her music first began to bloom, criticising the construction in Palestinian cities and focusing on questions that arise around the audio-visual transformation of ugly, yet alluring, independent, yet occupied cities. “Palestine is full of influences that make one think
about the meaning of sound itself,” she once wrote in Reorient magazine. “Sound in Palestine is affected by instantaneous elements. During the Intifada, the sonic experience was terrifying. A tank moving on a street would produce the feeling of an earthquake. The sounds made by these instruments of war relied on momentary experiences, which gave a feeling of unpredictability as to what would happen next. Being in Palestine is similar to experimental sound production, as the latter is not independent, but rather unstable, broken, disturbing, and cacophonous, not unlike the sounds of war.”
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