Detroit-Beirut based artist and musician Joe Namy aka
El Iqaa explores his Lebanese identity through sound, archive and the word. For this Saturday's
Free Lab Radio Show we journey with him on a two album mix, involving some very short snippets of sound that are an audible connection between his magpie-style practice of picking up sounds around him, and his digital work as a music producer. Catch it on air from 11pm-midnight, details below. Namy's audio work is interesting to us because in his hands, the music plundered becomes a tool for a sonic exploration, ResonanceFM being the representative home of sonic exploration in the UK. WE met Namy at Art Dubai, and interviewed him for our radio project
Eavesdropper/ Falgoosh, but tonight the words are only embedded within the sounds.
So how does Namy present these explorations? As
El Iqaa, Joe Namy works with
sampled sounds, documentary / music videos and photography to
investigate aspects of identity, memory, power and currents encoded in
music. He says his ideas '
often revolve around the space between two technics
turntables' - between fading and amplifying. Namy has
produced two albums under the moniker
El Iqaa, '
Detroit Beirut' (2007) and
'
Circulate'
نشر(2011. Namy explores these issues through quotes and cuts from specific definitive
samples
(ranging from Abdel Halim Hafez to Pierre Boulez, Amiri Baraka to Trisha
Donnelly
+ much more). The splices in these albums are mixed with original recorded sounds to
create a dialogue between the past and the future, in hopes of trying to
make sense of the present, and grapple with issues around language and
translation, memory, movement, electricity ( as an energy resource) and appropriation.
Namy also hosts a sporadically frequent radio
program
Electric Kahraba on
artonair.org. You can check more of his sounds and other exploratory projects, often exploring the musical history of his
roots, at
www.olivetones.com
To listen tune into 104.4FM on your transistor dial if you're one of London's millions of inhabitants, or listen online
www.resonancefm.com
