GHAZI BARAKAT and Guests — Orient Brut

Performance
Presented by Yellow Solo at R50
Ritterstrasse 50, 10969 Berlin
(Club room in the basement of the residential  building)

March 9, Saturday
Door opens: 8 pm
Starts: 8:30 pm
Free admission

Ghazi Barakat (electric wind instrument, rauschpfeife, electronics), Philipp Selalmazidis (trumpet) and Leon Baumgartl (turntables) are currently working on an album inspired by the historical period known as the Arab Cold War under the Sultanate of Oman. Between 1963 and 1976, a group calling itself the Dhofar Liberation Formation occupied Dhofar province to establish an independent state founded on Pan-Arab Marxist ideology. 

The musical work is based on an album of songs performed by the children of this revolution. Barakat and Selalmazidis improvise on different variations of a belly dance beat and arabesques, which are deconstructed and reconstructed through electronic manipulation, while Baumgartl weaves vocal excerpts from the above mentioned record into the soundscape.

German-Palestinian sound artist, composer, and interpreter Ghazi Barakat has worked in various music fields, from indie (as Boy from Brazil or with Stereo Total) to experimental electronics (as Pharaoh Chromium, where he releases with the label and collective Grautag). 
Barakat’s work as Pharoah Chromium, also published as albums, folds together music concréte from various sources, ranging from readings of Jean Genet (“Jean Genet – Quatre Heures à Chatila”, 2019) to news reports of violent conflicts in the Middle-East (“Gaza”, 2015). Such material meets blistering guembri and rauschpfeife to create hypnotic and sci-fi collages. 
Previously Barakat went under the pseudonym Boy From Brazil, inspired by the anti-nazi film directed by Franklin J. Schaffner in 1978, which embraced a postmodernist and rock’n’roll leaning aesthetic.
In 2019 Barakat collaborated with guitarist Paul LaBrecque to produce “Terminal Desert” for Karlrecords. The album contains two longform improvisations influenced by psychedelia and krautrock, considering the dystopian symptoms in our current climate such as contamination, pollution, and desolation.

www.pharoahchromium.bandcamp.com

Philipp Selalmazidis is a trumpeter in the Berlin music scene who has developed his own scale principle, in which he equates minor keys with major keys by mirroring them, thus making the listener part of the transformation. Selalmazidis captivates and leads the audience into a magical musical world. In 2017 he founded the experimental musicians’ community “An Unusual Connection” and his motivation and working methods have taken a new direction. He is not concerned with social structures imposed from the outside, but with the personal inner world in search of liberation and development.

Leon Baumgartl is a Berlin based electronic musician and audio-visual artist and member of the audio-visual collective “Katalog”.

Special thanks to Péter Barta, András Körtvélyesi, Nicholas Bussmann, Maya Schweizer, Clemens von Wedemeyer and to the residents of Ritterstrasse 50.