Nadah El Shazly is a producer, vocalist and sound artist from Cairo, Egypt. Her music combines expressive 19th century musical concepts from her homeland with contemporary, borderless forays into electronic and improvisational idioms. She has toured the world extensively, featuring at festivals including Le Guess Who?, REWIRE, Irtijal, and FIMAV, among many others. Her debut album, Ahwar, landed at #12 on The Wire’s ‘Best Albums of 2017’. Beyond her own music, El Shazly is an inspired collaborator, working closely with like-minded Egyptian musicians Maurice Louca and Sam Shalabi (Land of Kush). Recently, she’s been making brain-scrambling, beat-driven music as Pollution Opera, a newly minted duo with irreverent Welsh sound artist Elvin Brandhi. El Shazly has also spent time on-screen, starring in the feature length film About Her (2020) and appearing in the Netflix original series Love, Life & Everything In Between (2022). Currently, she is wrapping production on a pair of film scores and preparing to release her sophomore album, due in spring of 2024.
BINT is a musician and interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn. Creating across visual, performance and sound art, BINT applies contemporary methods to the traditional multicultural technologies of her ancestries (Pakistani, Egyptian, American, etc). With a focus on inherited metaphysical tech, her practice investigates the perennial role of the artist-mystic as cultural preserver and liberation worker. As a musician, BINT turns to a palette of dissonance, distortion, long-form drones, sampling and noise to access corresponding emotional states in herself and listeners–most known for her unusual approach to processed harmonium and multilingual vocals, through analog synthesis, pedals and cassette tape. In 2019, BINT released Katabasis: Act I, an EP applying dark ambient power electronics and Arabic mother tongue to her classical Hindustani vocal training. She has shown work internationally, including a wide range of commissions and collaborations, ranging from Black Sabbath to Joan La Barbara, and from the Copro Gallery to Coachella Music and Arts Festival.
Camellia Boutros is a Palestinian-Lebanese American composer and multi-instrumentalist based in San Francisco. Having performed as a trumpet player with a diverse array of Bay Area world music projects, such as Mission Delirium, Alaturca Connection, Inspector Gadje, and Banda Sin Nombre, Camellia approaches the music she writes with a custom modified fretless 12-string electric guitar, enabling her to write and perform music using the quarter-tone Maqam system. Her music and lyrics defy genre definition, forming an experimental blend of rock, folk, Arab, jazz, and brass music, all of which can be found on her first solo album Refuge.
Arab.AMP is a platform for experimental live art, music, and ideas from the SWANA diaspora, the region, and our allied communities. Curated by Leyya Mona Tawil, Arab.AMP celebrates the plurality of voices operating in futurism, hybrid and transgressive forms. Rooted in Oakland-CA, and nomadic in nature; we partner with venues and festivals inter/nationally. We produce concerts, tours, artistic commissions, gatherings, and residencies for the communities we serve. Arab.AMP is a program of Dance Elixir 501c3.
BINT’s appearance is co-presented with Arab.AMP, a platform for experimental live art, music, and ideas from the SWANA diaspora, the region, and our allied communities.