Seba Kayan – carpet concert

Double concert - with Aïta Mon Amour

Seba Kayan is a DJ and artist from Vienna. In her musical spectrum, techno meets Anatolian sounds. She doesn’t aim to create a binary vision of an occidental vs. oriental world, but rather seeks to embody both cultures, intertwining them to establish a connection with her own identity.

In her music series Carpet Concert she combines various patterns, forms and approaches with live musicians to create an experimental carpet. Alongside many other genres, her performance also incorporates the historical, orally transmitted Kurdish tradition of Dengbêj. Influenced by the Dengbêj songs of her grandmother Gare, who passed on this highly respected musical form of storytelling and oral history to her, Seba Kayan integrates them into her live sets as a hybrid form of storytelling. The mission is simple: to highlight a distorted and stereotypical image of the so-called "Orient" and celebrate a new narrative beyond the perceptions of popular one-dimensional Orientalist ideas.

Seba Kayan – live electronics
Guest musicians – Sakina Teyna (vocals), Aron Hollinger (guitar)

On this evening, Seba Kayan and Aïta Mon Amour share the stage. Continuing their traditions in a contemporary context is a deep need for both of them and their progressive approaches are a worthy continuation.  

Artist statement:
“My practice is a forensic exploration into music archives and their emancipatory potential: an artistic and political quest to restore and reconfigure fragmented identities. From the samples and intuitions, I craft diasporic landscapes of cross-cultural histories, using sound as a critical tool to restore the stolen memories and imagine collective futures. The sonic tapestries influenced by my own Kurdish heritage wave together archival stories and hybrid genres of Orientalfuturistic Electro, Techno and Acid. By questioning the eurocentric framework of electronic music and the boundaries that divide the Western from the “Oriental”, I explore the politics of listening through diasporic identities and their polyphonic histories.”
Seba Kayan

www.sebakayan.com
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