ICTUS INVITES, the return, in our Studio on the Rosas/PARTS/Ictus shared site on Avenue Van Volxem.
Special edition: triple bill!!
    

episode 1: Younes Zarhoni

     
POLYPHONIC WAVES OF SOULFUL MADRIGALS
The power of duality is an inscrutable thing: we’re endlessly fascinated by the interplay between light and darkness, East and West, voice and silence, our senses tingling from the compelling synergies that thrive in perceived opposites. Drawing from an urbane Antwerpian upbringing and a Moroccan family lineage, the Brussels-based multidisciplinary artist Younes Zarhoni, embraces these very dualities in all of his projects, exploring those murky areas of contrast and bringing all their ambiguous energy to crystal clear focus.

A longtime staple of the local electronic music scene with his hypnotic techno outings as YZ, Zarhoni’s latest focus is on the compositional power of pure harmony and silence: namely, his polyphonic renditions of medieval mystic poetry, sung in multiple voices and left to solemnly radiate beyond their given spatial grounds. Stripped of all instrumental accompaniments, what you get is Gregorian chant meets Boyz 2 Men, articulated by the lyrical ineffability of Arabic tongues and finding their rhythm in the silences that act as the juncture between observation and anticipation.

These sparse stanzas tread under an elusive referential threshold, conjuring visions of architecture and archaism, madrigals and MTV, the sacred and the profane ~ seemingly disparate elements that seamlessly fold themselves into the radicality of the compositions. Zarhoni oversteps the margins of categorization to deliver an immersive story of song, flowing freely and sustaining the arc of the narrative long after it has ebbed into silence.
      
Check Younes Zarhoni's music
Kraak
Bandcamp
Soundcloud
    

episode 2: Three Voices

    
Maris Pajuste performs Thee Voices by Morton Feldman (extended excerpts from the piece) in a superb and totally refined version, whiter and more cottony than a snowy morning.

It was composed in 1982, not long after the death of the painter Philip Guston. (...) Three Voices seems an immediate and spontaneous act of remembrance, both of Guston (from whom Feldman was estranged at the time of the artist’s death) and also of another friend, the poet Frank O’Hara, who died in 1966. One of Feldman’s starting points seems to have been the symbolism of having one live voice shadowed by the two “dead” ones captured on tape, and a sense of keening and loss pervades the entire piece as the entwined voices repeat phrases with constantly shifting emphases, until they freeze into exquisite dissonances before setting off in another direction with another gently varied phrase.
(Andrew Clements, The Guardian, 2017)
    

episode 3: Marlies Debacker and Salim(a) Javaid

Improvised music for prepared piano (Marlies) and saxophone (Salim·a). One unique sound of post-post-free-music, by turns plaintive or compulsive, where the multiphonics of the saxophone and the inharmonic sounds of the prepared piano merge into a indefinable meta-instrument. "The music casts a curious and melancholy eye on the shadows of the past - reverberation, decay, resonance - and allows them to become musical material”, the musicians wrote.

Their last duo CD Convolution (2024, Impakt records) was nominated for the ‘Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik’.
Check their music
On Bandcamp