Apotome Artist Takeover – Deena Abdelwahed

26th Jan 2021 26th Jan 2021 20:30 21:00

Deena Abdelwahed

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  • Khyam Allami

    IQ/UK

    Khyam Allami is an Iraqi-British multi-instrumentalist musician, composer, researcher and founder of Nawa Recordings. Primarily an Oud player, his artistic research focuses on the development of contemporary and experimental practice based on the fundamentals of Arabic music, with a focus on tuning and microtonality.

  • De Grandi

    FR

    With four EPs under his belt, De Grandi is emerging as an enfant terrible of the Francophone club scene, catching attention beyond borders with a contrast of calm and chaotic sounds.

    • Photo: Fethy Hawas

    Deena Abdelwahed takes over the Apotome generative microtonal music environment. The new work is created and performed in a single take using Apotome from her home studios in Toulouse.

    Apotome is a browser-based transcultural generative music system focused on using microtonal tuning systems and their subsets (scales/modes). Resulting from artist and scholar Khyam Allami's current PhD research and his in-depth collaboration with Counterpoint, the creative studio run by Tero Parviainen and Samuel Diggins, the application is an effort to highlight the cultural asymmetries and biases inherent in modern music-making tools, alongside their interconnected web of musical, educational, cultural, social, and political ramifications.

    For her creation, Deena Abdelwahed aimed to stay true to the existing Arabic scales and explore what these would sound like when she incorporates her personal music techniques and synths into Apotome. She gathered a list of her favorite old-time Arabic songs as inspiration, matching these with the four Arabic scales available in the software: Nahawand (G), Bayati (A), Sikah (E) and Huzam (E). Abdelwahed quickly realised that it's not enough to simply use these scales, however, and dove into programming Apotome, with Khyam Allami's help, in order to achieve the tonalities and improvisations she was aiming for, or as the artist puts it: »to sound as Arab as possible.«

    Deena Abdelwahed's takeover was shot together with Katarina Radić using iPhones. Edit: Best Films Forever.

    Supported by the DAAD Arts & Media Programme.