CHRISTINE SEHNAOUI & MAGDA MAYAS

The musical expression conceived by the duet of the Berlin pianist Magda Mayas and the Lebanese saxophone player Christina Sehnoui inhabits the inherent blank spot of contemporary music (which still remains to be defined through differential categories of institutional versus non-institutional levels), since their respective background – Mayas having obtained a certain level of institutional education and Sehnaoui being a autodidact – evades the aforementioned distinction. The improvisatory gap thus inhabited by the duet gives rise to a contemporary milieu of today’s creative work in the arena of creative music(s), which uses subtle eavesdropping and attentive gestures in order to subject personal experience to the sound, thus guiding the sound articulation into an exploratory harmony of expanded playing techniques. The latter subsequently meld together with different aesthetics and blurred traditions, openly flirting with the inheritance of prepared piano in the contemporary classical music of the former century, on the one hand, and electronic music, on the other. The duet fluidly brings together intensity and inventiveness, sharpness and softness, in its consistent walk on the edge of deconstructed musical language, grounding itself in the arena of noise, smacks, cracks, extended tones in the high registers of a lithe saxophone performance, percussive play, and extended sounds within harmonic intertwinements, which act as interventions into the very entrails of the piano. Luka Zagoričnik

Before and after the concert, Abstract Truth (Slovenia) will warm up the floor with a DJ set.

Organization: City of Women; In collaboration with: Menza pri koritu