(photo above by Tony Elieh)

Sharif Sehnaoui is a free improvising guitarist. He plays both electric and acoustic guitars, focusing on expanding the intrinsic possibilities of these instruments without the use of effects or electronics. He now resides in Beirut, his hometown, after more than a decade in Paris, where he started his career as an improviser in 1998, playing at Instants Chavirés as a member of several orchestras. He has played in many clubs and festivals worldwide such as Soundfield (Chicago), Moers, Konfrontationen (Nickelsdorf), Météo Music Festival (Mulhouse), CTM and Maerzmusik (Berlin), and FEST (Tunis).

In Lebanon, he actively contributed to the emergence of an unprecedented experimental music scene. Along with Mazen Kerbaj he created “Irtijal” (www.irtijal.org) in 2000, a yearly international festival that is the oldest improvised and new music festival in the Arab world. “Irtijal” celebrated its XVth anniversary in 2015.

He runs two record labels: “Al Maslakh” (www.almaslakh.org) devoted to “publish the un-publishable” on the Lebanese musical scene. And “Annihaya” (www.annihaya.com), focusing on sampling, recycling and the displacement of various aspects of popular culture.

His groups and projects include the “A” Trio (with Kerbaj and Raed Yassin), “Wormholes” an audio-visual performance with Kerbaj drawing live on a glass table, and Karkhana (www.karkhana-music.com), a Middle-Eastern based super-group combining musicians from Beirut, Cairo and Istanbul.
Over the years he has collaborated with musicians including Michael Zerang, Paed Conca, Thierry Madiot, and Fabrizio Sperato name but a few.

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DEAFBEEF is the audiovisual project of artist/engineer Tyler de Witt. Fed up with bloated software and expensive hardware, I adopt an ascetic approach to digital art. Using only a cheap laptop and a C compiler, I write programs to scrawl numbers directly into the digital recording medium, later to be interpreted as sound and images.
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“The most original compositional voice to emerge from Ireland in the past 20 years” (Irish Times) and “wild girl of Darmstadt” (Frankfurter Rundschau), composer and performer Jennifer Walshe was born in Dublin. Her music has been commissioned, broadcast and performed all over the world. She has been the recipient of fellowships and prizes from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York, the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm, the Internationales Musikinstitut, Darmstadt and Akademie Schloss Solitude among others. Walshe has written a large number of operas and theatrical works, including XXX_LIVE_NUDE_GIRLS!!! an opera for Barbie dolls, and TIME TIME TIME, with the philosopher Timothy Morton, which the Wire described as “a sprawling opus that spans the history of the planet… like Robert Ashley meets Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life”. Her visual work has been exhibited in the Chelsea Art Museum, New York, Project Arts Centre, Dublin and the ICA, London.

Event location:

http://twitch.tv/highzerofoundation

The Red Room is a volunteer-run space in Baltimore dedicated to mind-expanding experimental culture, headquartered at Normals Books and Records.