NICA live: Ghazal Faghihi Solo + Debacker/Javaid/Coudoux/Faghihi

The concert, curated by NICA artist Marlies Debacker, features clarinetist Ghazal Faghihi. The Belgium-based musician will present her solo album Penumbra, recently released on Relative Pitch Records, as a solo set at the Christuskirche in Cologne. Fittingly, the album was also recorded in a church—the Sint-Pauluskerk in Ghent.

Faghihi’s fascination with historical instruments led her to specialize in the historical clarinet, while at the same time she has been intensively exploring ways to blend the acoustic character of her instrument with electronic soundscapes. In her solo project, she experiments with materials, objects, and electronics, using the clarinet as a source of vibration, resonance, and transformation. The instrument moves between acoustic sound and electronically mediated resonance, creating a fluid sonic environment in which the boundaries between timbres gradually dissolve.

In addition, a quartet assembled specifically for the evening will perform, consisting of Marlies Debacker on piano, Ghazal Faghihi on clarinet, and Debacker’s Cologne-based collaborators Salim(a) Javaid on saxophone and cellist Elisabeth Coudoux. The flow of the music is tailored to the subtle, long reverberation of the Christuskirche, which allows for a high degree of transparency in the soundscape and wistfully lingers on powerful musical outbursts. Musically speaking, the participating musicians straddle the line between classical and jazz, improvisation and new music, spontaneity and precision. They all perform in a wide variety of contexts—from chamber music to performance art to free jazz—and collaborate in ever-changing formations. While Javaid and Debacker regularly perform as a duo specializing in improvised music and, as two-thirds of the chamber music ensemble Trio Abstrakt, have earned an international reputation as leading musicians in the field of new music, Debacker performs with Coudoux in various established and ad hoc formations. In the interplay between these four musicians, the boundaries between interpretive approach and sonic aesthetics are blurred. Somewhere between free improvisation, conceptual music, new chamber music, and pseudo-electronic textures, a dark, timeless, and multi-layered sonic world unfolds.