NOMADIC SIGNALS: Mirages / FRKTL & Tarkamt
Wednesday, September 22nd at 8pm ET, Leyya Tawil (ISSUE Project Room’s 2020 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow) presents “Mirages/ FRKTL & Tarkamt,” her fourth program in the NOMADIC SIGNALS series.
Mirages is a program of sonic and visual illusory spaces composed and performed by FRKTL, British-Egyptian artist Sarah Badr, and Tarkamt, Egyptian artist Cherif El Masri. FRKTL’s biomorphic hypervisual digital spaces are part of her immersive compositions built with voice, samples and generative rhythms. Drawing from the shadow strata, Tarkamt opens up rooms of harsh noise and operatic psychedelia. The double premiere will be followed by an artist talk hosted by Tawil. With Egypt as their intersection, FRKTL and Tarkamt will discuss their future digital forms, sound actions and rolling geographies.
NOMADIC SIGNALS is a vessel for sonic performance operating in what Tawil refers to as the “diasporic imaginary,” a description of how sounds change in the diaspora: how they tether to their environment, accumulate, synthesize, and adapt.
السَّمْت (Azimuth)
All visuals and immersive music by FRKTL
Brain in a Jar & Wormhole City I
Music by Tarkamt
Visuals by Islam Shabana
Conversation: Sarah Badr, Cherif El Masri, Leyya Mona Tawil
FRKTL is the solo experimental project of British-Egyptian interdisciplinary artist and classically trained multi-instrumentalist Sarah Badr. Fusing together live sampling and improvisation, vocal manipulation, field recordings and generative rhythms, she composes immersive explorations of sound that challenge preconceptions of musical traditions and geography. Over the last two years, Badr has been working with synthetic media inspired by natural scene topologies, exploring the association between form and place in new digital spaces. Previous commissions include work for the Center for Arts, Design & Social Research, Project Fracture, and the upcoming Coventry Biennial. FRKTL’s critically acclaimed sixth release and third full-length album, Excision After Love Collapses, marks nearly a decade of independent, self-published work. Resident at Hong Kong Community Radio, she presents a monthly show of genre-bending music from around the world. Badr currently lives and works in Riga.
Tarkamt AKA Cherif El-Masri is a UFO over the Western Sahara, occasionally Cairo, Sinai and Los Angeles. As a composer, improviser, performer, and multi-instrumentalist, El-Masri (b.1983, Cairo) has in recent years performed and collaborated with artists such as The Invisible Hands, Alvarius B., Nadah El-Shazly, Procession Towards the Unknown, Eyvind Kang and Jessika Kenney, as well as a slew of anonymous projects that shall not be disclosed here. He is a resident composer at EMS, Stockholm, and has befriended the Buchla 200 that lives there. His previous release under the Tarkamt alias was 2018’s “Live at the Necropolis”, a fearless amalgamation of hardcore synth punk, free jazz, noir psychedelia, and harsh electronic noise channeled into a transgressive space rock opera about journeying through the chthonic realms. The upcoming album is landing early 2022.
