In Between Spaces: Klubnacht

INDIE IDIOSYNCRACIES: Zuli | INSIN | Muqata´a | Deena Abdelwahed

European enthusiasm for pop music and club sounds from the Middle East has been unbroken for several years. Under the title "IN BETWEEN SPACES: INDIE IDIOSYNCRACIES", musician and curator Thomas Gläßer organizes a music and discourse event lasting several days in dialogue with the Egyptian-Algerian producer and music manager Sarah El Miniaway, which takes a closer look at the idiosyncratic hybridizations between Arab and Western music that have emerged in recent decades in the alternative music scenes of many Arab cities. The festival sets three highlights in the Stadtgarten concert hall and the newly opened club "Jaki", the converted Studio 672 in the Stadtgarten, which above all illuminate the musical phenomena themselves.

Another spot in the series illuminates current electronic club music, which has become a kind of Esperanto sound of the urban-digital sphere and western nightlife, and at the same time local influences and semantic charges. The Egyptian electronics engineer Ahmed El Ghazoly aka Zuli combines his involvement in the Cairo electronics scene with an international musical reference system in which locality hardly plays a role anymore. Producer Muqata´a is a key activist of the Palestinian hiphop scene and Tunisian musician Deena Abdelwahed, who lives in France, builds excitingly bulky bridges between the spheres of experimental music and pop, which otherwise hardly touch each other in Tunisian reception.

Concept & Curation: Thomas Gläßer in dialogue with Sarah El Miniawy
Organizer: ZAM Center for Contemporary Music e.V.
Cooperation partners: Academy of the Arts of the World and European Centre for Jazz and Contemporary Music in the Stadtgarten

In Between Spaces: Indie Idiosyncracies is part of the event series Global Diffusion - Musical Statements Cologne, supported by the city of Cologne, as well as of the thematic line Hybrid Transactions of the Akademie der Künste der Welt.