ECLAT 9

Raed Yassin: The Absent Now (2020) ^WP /45′

Raed Yassin, Turntables

With recordings of solo improvisations by Ingrid Schmoliner, Mazen Kerbaj, Ute Wassermann,
C Spencer Yeh, Okkyung Lee, Rhodri Davies and many more.

For over two decades the Beirut musician and visual artist Raed Yassin has belonged to a global community of free improvisation musicians. This world, which already existed long before the world wide web, holds a core promise: that in every city, wherever your journey takes you, you will meet colleagues with whom you can make music together. If the sound is born in exactly this moment of making music together without any stylistic definition, a sense of magic and fate arises, because they are unrepeatable moments. It is the most democratic musical encounter, in which nothing is predetermined, in which respect for one another is in the foreground and everyone shares the risk of success or failure. »The Absent Now« transports this momentary encounter into a virtual time–and into a virtual space in which Raed Yassin makes his colleagues known to each other »live«, so to speak, when he mixes the sounds of their solo improvisations on the turntables. The work attempts to reflect the spirit of this global artist community and expands it to imagined and idealistic encounters.

With solo improvisations by Ingrid Schmoliner, Mazen Kerbaj, Ute Wassermann, C Spencer Yeh, Okkyung Lee, Rhodri Davies and many more.