8 p.m. ET Friday, September 20, 2024
Listening to the Materials – Leila Abdul-Rauf / Zekkereya in Concert
Purchase Tickets for In-person Attendance | Purchase Tickets for Livestream
Museum Members: $10
Student/Senior: $12
General Public: $15
Livestream: $5
There are materials that re-tell our stories in the distortion field of the diaspora. This concert brings together the work of Leila Abdul-Rauf (San Francisco) and Zekkereya (Detroit); multi-instrumentalist composers who combine brass, electronics, and other sound manipulations to create immersive, ambient works that bridge seen and unseen worlds. This concert is framed by a community project work by Ebti, the Arab.AMP artist-in-residence at AANM. Ebti’s Things and stuff compiles a “storybook of objects” which likewise gives voice to the tales we carry.
Leila Abdul-Rauf is a composer and multi-instrumentalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a main songwriter, guitarist, vocalist, lyricist and co-founder of extreme metal band Vastum and electronic ambient trio Ionophore. As an ambient solo artist using voice, trumpet and synthesizer as primary instruments, Leila has released four full-length albums under her name, and has collaborated with countless others. She performed at Hopscotch Music Festival in 2016, the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival reception in 2018, Northwest Terror Fest in 2022, and has toured nationally and internationally. Leila is also an academic at heart, having received a Master’s degree in Audiology and Speech Sciences from Purdue University in 2001, with a focus on psycholinguistics and child language research. Combining electronics, acoustic instruments, voice and field recordings, Leila’s songs are not so much composed as captured from dreams. Evoking haunting and desolate places, a private world is exposed, where time and space are distilled down to what remains of distant memories and hidden emotions, melded into a symphony of ethereal melancholy. leilaabdulrauf.bandcamp.com
Zekkereya is a trombonist, composer, and visual artist currently based in Detroit Michigan. They have been a member of the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra for over a decade. They have worked with artists such as Moor Mother, Angel Bat Dawid, Jaimie Branch, Amir El Saffar, George Lewis, Wendell Harrison, Yvette Janinie Jackson, Tyshawn Sorey, and more. As a visual artist, they trained in traditional 2D animation techniques at CalArts and have screened their animations internationally. zekkereyaa.bandcamp.com
This event is part of The Sounds We Keep, curated by Leyya Mona Tawil. The Sounds We Keep is a performance series by AANM guest curator Leyya Mona Tawil, Director of Arab.AMP. Experimenting with themes inherent to our diaspora, the artists in this series use sound, voice, composition and movement in an attempt to create a record of our journey and invoke our future. Each program brings together Arab American artists from separate regions of the U.S. This tuning of diasporic forms through music and performance reveals the complexity of our cultural references through the instruments, the approaches and conversations that ensue.
For questions, e-mail Fatima Al-Rasool at [email protected]
Made possible in part by
