Electric Umbrella #28
**WORM is the Ultimate Playground so long live free music, long live the Electric Umbrella! **
Back after a summer break with some amazing performers:
Palestinian multi-instrumentalist Dirar Kalash and Turkish drummer/composer Mehmet Ali Şimayli will play together for the first time as a duo in Electric Umbrella, playing electronics, drums, and other instruments. Joining them will be the local(!) noise duo of Taiwanese sound artist Tzu Ni & and South Korean musician/artist Jiyoung Wi, playing electronics, noise and violin. And for the 3rd act, they will play all together as a quartet.
Dirar Kalash & Mehmet Ali Şimayli
(Electronics, drums, and other instruments)
Dirar Kalash is a Palestinian musician and sound artist whose work spans a wide range of musical and sonic practices within a variety of instrumental, compositional and improvisational contexts. He is mostly known for his politically driven soundscape / electro-acoustic project "The Sonic Front", and the compositions "we can’t breathe (for eric garner, george floyd, and frantz fanon)" and "by any means necessary (for Malcolm X)"
Watch a mini-documentary on Dirar "Where Language Fails us" made by filmmaker Sami El-Enany that delves into the politics of listening, sound as survival and what answers music might offer us when our humanity is in question.
Mehmet Ali Simayli (Istanbul, Türkiye) is an individual working in the intersectional fields of composition, improvisation, research, and drumming, spanning between interpretational and experimental contexts. Mehmet’s work, mainly involving sounding things, blends electro-acoustic, multimedia, and contemporary composition and improvisation around musical and non-musical concepts. He seeks acoustic and electronic apparatuses to open up loopholes that move freely through detail, and a traditionless take on current era. Simayli lives in Basel, Switzerland since 2021.
Listen to the album "Portrait and a Dream" that Mehmet made with a large ensemble in 2022.
Tzu Ni & Jiyoung Wi
(electronics, noise, violin)
Tzu Ni is a Taiwanese artist currently based in the Netherlands. She believes in the flexibility of human bodies and views the intersection of technology and humanity as a sweet spot, seeking the balance between institutional and non-institutional contexts. Her practice explores the entangled relationship between sound, gender, and space, often through multichannel sonic installations, field recordings, and text‑based narratives that emerge from subconscious memory. Working at the intersection of embodied listening and spatial poetics, she constructs environments where sound becomes a medium of intimacy, resistance, and relational knowledge.
See a snippet from an amazing performance by Tzu Ni HERE! She calls it a "Max/MSP no input 4ch noise journey".
Jiyoung Wi is a musician and fiction writer based in The Hague and Seoul. Her multidisciplinary practice explores narrative possibilities in non-image-based mediums. She has developed a series of ‘sound fiction’ works focusing on the tentative reciprocity between sound and text. As an improviser, she engages in acoustic phenomena as an arena where she dramatizes time perception. Within her untrained, risk-taking gestures, her self-punitive contemplation confronts the thresholds of sonic possessed rituals.
Listen to some tracks from her album "Accept all Cookies" HERE!
