During 2024 I co-developed a project with improviser and composer Melisa Yıldırım. It was an experiment in collaborative composition, combining my field recordings, audio processing and some of my instruments – oud, saxophone – with her instrument, the Anatolian kamancha. Our interest was in how listening together and working with Read more…
Composing music with water, and for water, in a time of exteme climate crisis. This has occupied me in multiple projects in the last year. Playing with the Life of the Sea is a project I began early in 2023. I was deeply grateful that Tom Kieckhefer and Ocean Conservation Research Read more…
Participation and Playfulness in Museums: Engaging Visitors in Climate Action
For a long time the oud was disparaged in Iran, even though the Sassanian empire was fundamental to its development centuries ago. One key to its twentieth-century revival was the musician Mansur Nariman. I recently recorded some of his short pieces.
I was booked to play oud in Roxanna Panufnik’s opera Dalia, the story (libretto by Jessica Duchen) of a refugee in the UK, who finds her way into the hearts of local people through hr passion for cricket. The opera explores the kindness but also the hypocrisy of English society, Read more…
I was fortunate to have an artist residency to develop music within Olympias Music Foundation’s Migrant Voices project. The spontaneously-formed band in which I co-created music was called “Soap of My Heart”. Migrant Voices was the premiere performance of 4 new musical works, created during a week-long artist residency with Read more…
A lockdown event: a lovingly-selected programme emphasising the beauty in hidden voices and stories of women, taking listeners on a journey from Afghanistan to Sicily with stops in Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Greece.
Creative Migrations with the Oud: Technology, Memory and Musical Storytelling.
We were thrilled that Beyond Mode was featured in the SOAS Concert Series 2019-2020.
In the series Dal local al globale I presented a lecture-recital in Cremona in the beautiful Dipartimento di Musicologia e Beni Culturali, leading the audience on a journey through modal music practices of the Arab, Ottoman and Persian traditions.