IN BETWEEN SPACES: Rahma Quartet & Nancy Mounir w/ Avîan Quartet "Nozhet El Nofous"

IN BETWEEN SPACES is an event series and platform for music, sounds and sound art from Africa, the Arab world and Europe, their social contexts, transcultural issues and artistic collaborations. Held since 2019, the focus on 'Mediterranean Crossings' and 'Indie Idiosyncrasies' was followed by the thematic strand 'Complex Collaborations', which will come to a provisional conclusion this winter with a fourth edition.

On three evenings in November 2022, different collaborations between musicians from different regions of Africa, the African diaspora and Europe will be presented: Exciting musical hybrids between poetic South African jazz, punk noise, radical minimalist improvisations, transcultural experimentation and North African-influenced trance rock.

The third evening then brings particularly fine intermediate tones to the stage, which also refer to Egyptian-North African roots at their core. The evening opens with the radically minimalist improvisational compositions of the Rahma Quartet. The vocalist Rasha Ragab, the Argentine woodwind player Lucio Capece , the sound object artist Christoph Nikolaus (stone harp) and Werner Dafeldecker on double bass interpret texts and poetry of medieval Sufi mystics with great restraint. The composer Nancy Mounir has spent years studying archive material of the three outstanding Egyptian singers, composers and music pioneers Fatma Serry, Hatma Sabry and Mounira El Mahdeya. In her project "Nozhet El Nofous", which will celebrate its European premiere in November, she re-stages and rewrites old shellac recordings of these musicians for a chamber ensemble and the Avian Quartet from Cologne.

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An event by ZAM Zentrum für Aktuelle Musik e.V. in cooperation with the European Centre for Jazz and Contemporary Music Stadtgarten Cologne.