Ennovate Dance House

Happy New Year! Let’s hope it’ll be peaceful and prosperous for us all, bringing many new joys and adventures along the way.

This year will see, among others, the release of my album Earth Variations – finally! (it’s hard to let go as I keep enjoying inhabiting its sensuous possible world, from improbable musics to possible musics, exploring its dynamic and immersive territories between music, environment, geography, soundscape and abstract art). The release has been delayed until March-April though: I’ve been unable to work on it properly during the holidays (a lack of quiet space), I cannot afford to finance its mastering at the moment (after ten albums, my personal well has run dry) – but also because of one beautiful, serendipitous discovery over the holidays.

I had asked a dear friend of mine to provide a spoken word part in her native Urdu (beautiful language!) for the remaining unfinished piece, and when we finally sat down at this luminous Belle Époque/1920s’ café to discuss the piece, she asked if I preferred the poem she’d chosen to be spoken or sung. I was confused: “can you sing?” I’d known this loveliest human being for two years, and it was only now that she told me she’s also a trained singer in Indian and Pakistani classical music! (I’d been looking for such a singer for a while now, but without funding it’s difficult to find the collaborators you need). To me, she’d always been just one of the most brilliant anthropologists, architects and visual artists out there – yet here she was, beginning to sing these romantic classical Pakistani songs softly into my ear in the most enchanting voice over our candlelit coffee table. If there’s a celestial version of us all, it’s certainly through singing. Above us, the old Parisian street lamps, a crescent Moon and five planets of the solar system shone brightly; at one end of the street, the grand Opéra house appeared majestic and dreamy in its evening lighting, at the other, the Louvre Museum continued to glow gently. This was probably Midnight in Paris, and I was accompanying Paul Gauguin, Claude Debussy and others in their quest for faraway places: yet it was just Saadia and me at a crowded Belle Époque/1920s’ café, envisioning our future performances and recordings in Paris together. The faraway had been explored (and exploited, unfortunately), now it was all about the complex, multicultural hybrid future ahead of us to discover and cultivate – and it is bright as far as culture is concerned.

We’ll be recording vocals on few more tracks to see how her voice might work on this album. There’s a sense of a journey toward home, a circle closing: the biggest musical influence on the album has been the late American trumpeter and composer Jon Hassell, who in turn studied Indian classical singing with Pandit Pran Nath, transforming that singing technique into his trumpet playing and thus discovering his unique sound, combined with electronics and novel rhythms…

Have a great start of the year X

PS. A couple of official photos of the performances at the 2022 Prince Claus Impact Awards Ceremony in Amsterdam last month (received them recently). Photography: Frank van Beek.

Greetings from Amsterdam! I’ve been back in my old hometown for the 2022 Prince Claus Awards for arts, culture and social progress, as I had the honour of being one of the advisors for the awards jury this year again.

It’s such a privilege to be able to encounter so much talent, creativity and passion from all over the world within such limited time and space. The awards ceremony with its surrounding networking events is one of those cultural incubators where new possible geographies and becomings are being formed: “the dawn of the world” (after Deleuze) created by people coming together, and through listening, curiosity and care, attempting to find a common ground, a novel space, between each other as well as between existing borders, territories and divisions. There’s a sense of new hopeful futurality in the air. Yet it’s not all plain-sailing toward some utopia, more like a chaotic and colourful navigation through the present.

The awards ceremony itself at the Royal Palace was gorgeous, with King Willem-Alexander and Queen Máxima as well as Princess Beatrix, Princess Laurentien and Prince Constantijn in the audience. Also witnessed a heartwarming vocal performance by South African singer Amarafleur (chills running down my spine), futuristically primitive/indigenously futuristic hip-hop by Senegalese duo DEFMAA MAADEF (Mamy Victory and Defa), and one of the most exhilarating dance performances ever by Nigerian dancer and choreographer Sunday Obiajulu Ozegbe and his dance group Ennovate Dance House: their insanely inventive and energising choreography, inspired by the city of Lagos, was accompanied by a soundtrack fusing Lagos soundscapes with electronic music, and I literally had to hold back my tears and idiotic smile as it took me back to Emeka Ogboh and my wide-eyed experiments (LOS-HEL: Possible Cities) all those years ago. Inspiring conversations and encounters at the reception, dinner and the afterparty afterwards (met also this lovely opera singer from Fiji, into Finnish classical music and married to the French ambassador to Italy – turns out we are neighbours in Paris! I told him that as a kid I wrote a fictional adventure story based entirely on my imagined idea of Fiji; he’s yet to ruin that image). A tender, colourful, wonderful evening.

You can read more about the recipients and the awards at www.princeclausfund.org.

A couple of notes from the event:

“Untranslatable.” French-Senegalese film director and screenwriter Alain Gomis, one of the recipients of this year’s Prince Claus Impact Awards, kept referring to the untranslatable qualities as those that make you ‘you’, and the reason why we need diversity of voices, narratives and perspectives to make that untranslatable somewhat understandable. When Gomis received the main prize for best film at the 23rd pan-African film festival (Fespaco) in Burkina Faso in 2013, I was in the audience listening to him but he spoke in French, with an overdubbed and shortened English translation echoing around the Stade du 4 Août stadium, and many things became untranslatable in that hot Ouagadougou night. I love the idea very much.

“A banker is originally a catalyst who enables ideas to come into being, and who ensures that wealth is distributed equally among the society.” Carlo Rizzo, the director of the Dubai Collection and an ex-banker, sitting next to me at the dinner table. He left his job as a banker, because he couldn’t help the society the way he’d imagined – imagine a world where the banks still served their original purpose?