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After a few concerts/screenings improvised as a duo in Cairo and Beirut, as well as for the Rencontres d'Arles, the Lille photography center and the Belgian magazine Halogénure, Dargent and Oberland have teamed up with mavericks Elieh and Halal for a puzzling cross-border manifesto. The first sonic moves of this eclectic quartet, made in a bunker studio somewhere between Paris and Berlin, urgently took the form of a quest, that of a neo-folklore for troubled times, a music seeping with many kinds of atavism and experimenting in all directions. A fertile no-man's-land where trance and contemplation, jazz and electronica, acoustics and electricity would merge in a stimulating mystical magma. From the possible emergence of a Babelian language to the shared desire to rediscover music as a ceremonial act, this encounter took place over three days of improvised sound bacchanalia, the phases of which were all recorded by Benoit Bel (Zombie Zombie, Thurston Moore Group, Oiseaux-Tempête). A hallucinated and generous testimony, SIHR is a synergy of many different worlds and many different possibilities, the sonic vision of a present conjugated in a hybrid tense and exalted by too many tangos danced. Multi-instrumentalist and photographer, Frédéric D. Oberland has been leading the Oiseaux-Tempête collective for over ten years, lying somewhere between avant-rock and free jazz, repetitive music and electronics. Founding member of the bands FOUDRE! and Le Réveil des Tropiques, he's also performing solo and composing soundtracks for cinema and installation art. Electric guitarist, oud player, composer and photographer, Grégory Dargent cultivates his musical schizophrenia and identity through improvised music, trance music, jazz, hijacked maqam, repetitive music, pop, electro-acoustic installations and French chanson. Tony Elieh is one of the pioneers of experimental music in Lebanon. A founding member of the first post-rock group of post-war Lebanon, The Scrambled Eggs, he has since developed his unique electric bass skills in various groups and styles of music including collaborating with in groups such as Karkhana, Calamita, and Wormholes Electric. Darbuka player Wassim Halal can be found with Polyphème playing and co-composing popular-contemporary music with Gamelan Puspawarna, or next to the French bagpiper Erwan Keravec, with performers and drawers Benjamin Efrati and Diego Verastegui, with Gregory Dargent and Anil Eraslan in H, or composing pieces for ensembles.
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