22 March 2012

SHARJAH: The day after “Revisiting Tarab” made its world premiere in Sharjah, a member of the New York-based trio Anti-Pop Consortium reported that someone in the audience had complained of a shattered molar.

“It was during KK Null’s set,” he explained.

KK Null (aka Japanese experimental musician Kazuyuki Kishino) had indeed made a vibrant intervention during “Revisiting Tarab” – the five-hour and 30-minute-long sonic journey devised by Lebanese sound artist Tarek Atoui in collaboration with 22 other international musicians.

What happened?

KK Null arrived at the old town’s Calligraphy Square in a wheelchair and a baseball cap and was escorted to the stage with nothing more obtrusive in his lap than a laptop computer and an accessory or two. During his 10- to 15-minute set, this otherwise reserved-looking man then set the seats in the outdoor venue vibrating, pulling sounds out of his laptop that were by turns abrasive, lyrical and urgent, but always very, very loud.

The volume compelled cautious audience members to stuff index fingers in their ears, while the desperate lyricism set them bobbing their heads in devout headbanger deference.

“The guy’s tooth,” the New Yorker grimaced like a man grinding his teeth, then, eyes widening, gestured explosively with his hands, “it just shattered – from the music.”

“Revisiting Tarab” was the world premiere of this version of Atoui’s project. It marked the conclusion of the Sharjah Art Foundation’s March Meeting 2012 – a three-day symposium on arts and culture, the foundation’s sixth. As the name suggests, though, the Sharjah show restaged an earlier performance.

Originally commissioned for Performa, New York City’s visual arts and performance biennial and produced by Sharjah Art Foundation, “Visiting Tarab” was a 17-artist performance that had its world premiere in New York on Nov. 5, 2011. The Sharjah upgrade saw the original artists augmented by a cluster of musicians specializing in classical Arabic forms.

The performances were the fruit of a research project that saw several international artists spend some time with the AMAR Foundation archive. Founded by Lebanese collector Kamal Kassar, AMAR (Arab Music Archiving and Research) is devoted to preserving rare music from the Arab Renaissance. Comprised of some 5,500 discs and more than 6,500 hours of tape recordings, including 78-rpm shellac discs dating 1903-1950, the archive is considered the world’s largest collection of Arabic classical music.

In a Beirut interview last autumn, Atoui characterized the fieldwork as giving “carte blanche to these musicians to revisit the collection ... according to their techniques and previous work.

“What I find exciting is revisiting classical Arabic music as a form,” he continued, “to revisit tarab as performance, as it relates to these notions of ecstasy, trance and enchantment that happened in these old music salons.

“The idea is to recreate a performance that is as long as these sessions but where these notions of trance and enchantment and the relations between the performer and the audience are revisited in relation to today’s societies and today’s changes.”

Atoui’s project stretches the boundaries of conventional notions of tarab – a trance-like state evoked in certain varieties of Middle Eastern classical music, which world music enthusiasts are fond of comparing to flamenco music’s relationship with “duende.”

“Revisiting Tarab” was staged Monday between 8:15 p.m. and 2 a.m., give or take. Though there were no screaming guitar-riff-and-drum-solo heroics, the sheer scale of the event made it a spectacle.

The better part of one end of the rectangular square was turned over to a stage of eight to 10 meters in length, arrayed with the performers’ various apparatus – everything from Atoui’s motion-sensor sound-generating machines to Zeena Parkins’ harp.

Experimental musicians were strongly represented. A battery of percussionists – Susie Ibarra, Roberto Rodriguez, Lukas Ligeti and Uriel Barthelemi – were complemented by an array of electronic musicians working in various genres – Takuro Mizuta Lippit (aka DJ Sniff), Raed Yassin and Ikue Mori, KK Null, Anti-Pop Consortium and Atoui himself.

These were augmented on stage by a smattering of singular figures – sax-and-guitar virtuoso Eliot Sharp, electronics and sax-player John Butcher, Robert Lowe (on electronics and vocals), Zeena Parkins on harp, Sara Parkins on violin and dub pioneer Raz Mesinai.

“Revisiting Tarab” departed from the New York prototype in as much as the ensemble included a cluster of artists specializing in classical Arabic forms, and so are tarab habitués. Beirutis would be familiar with the work of Egyptian oud maestro Mustapha Said, nye virtuoso Mohammad Antar, qanun player Ghassan Sahhab and Joss Turnbull on Arabic percussion.

Over the course of this long and intense Tuesday evening, these figures mounted the stage to perform in ensemble, in duos, trios and solo. Whether the results satisfied a purist’s specifications for tarab or not, the outcomes were at times strenuously intense (a-la KK Null and the audience member’s exploding tooth), at others lyrical – at least for those with an ear for experimental music.

With so many conventions of popular music performance thrown out the window, the audience dynamics around “Revisiting Tarab” departed from the norm as much as the performance itself.

Organizers had set up a few rows of straight-backed chairs but most of the audience was reclined on the beanbag chairs and cushions that had been cast about on carpets laid out on the ground – and observers veered from attentiveness to conversation depending on how they felt about a given set.

Adding to the summer rock concert aspect were the pair of shwarma rolls sizzling at the back of he square. Among the queues of people devouring the stuff were clusters of men who, based on their Punjabi dress – and, in some cases, puzzlement at the performance – were not Sharjah Biennial regulars.

The ensemble was on the whole nicely integrated, with most of the players taking two turns on stage as soloists, or else for duo and trio work. This loose-limbed structure broke down at the very end of the program, when New York dub artist and DJ extraordinaire Raz Mesinai and Anti-Pop Consortium came to the stage to perform what was essentially a separate set, first separately then together.

Continuity was also maintained among most of the 37 distinct “movements” of the piece, until a (probably unavoidable) lull fell between end of Zeena and Sara Parkins and Ikue Mori’s second set and the arrival of Japanese electro-master KK Null.

Naturally the show had highlights, in addition to the single set of KK Null. Eliot Sharp was as well-received for his sax work as he was for his electric guitar. Uriel Barthelemi’s much-loved eardrum-rattling drum solos were, this particular evening, off-set by moments of surprising (if passing) subtlety. John Butcher’s electronically enhanced tenor sax squawkings were appreciated for their self-evident sense of humor.

There were also moments of lyricism, arising from the small-ensemble work. Some of these arose during moments when trios clustered in intimate ensemble – as when Joss’ frame drum and Rodriquiez’s cajon came together to accompany Antar’s nye, and the violin-harp-electronics ensemble of the Parkins sisters and Ikue Mori (which consistently held the audience rapt).

Copyright The Daily Star 2012.