Whoa! What a way to start the morning: Tarek’s performing his “UN-DRUM” series: “This is a crossing between contemporary music, electronic music, but also electro-acoustic music and noise music,” he says.
Behind the console, fingers fiddling with dials, blare of traffic, arms flaring out to catch the air above his theremins, warping noise and backbeat bass, bare lanky feet stepping out, returning to focus on his laptop for seconds before he busts out another move, hair swinging, and recorded voices of men and women in Mandarin, yelling Mao Zhu Xi Wan Shui…
He’s finished. We applaud, wildly. Oh wait, he isn’t finished: there’s a second movement. He mops his forehead with a white towel, and launches back in.
After the second round of applause, he stops.
Tarek: I am sorry. I did in the speaker. Like Jimi Hendrix. I buy you a new one.
It’s the second time this has happened, we discover. The last time round was in Sweden, also with KS. It’s a curse, I tell you.
Tarek: I asked Keng Sen to ask to speak to you this way because I use sound and I speak through sound. And second because the best way to see what I do is to hear what i do and talk about it. if I show you a video it’s not the same.
He opens the floor for questions.
Chath: I think you’re amazing.
Tarek: That’s not a question.
Chath: But i’ve never seen anything like it.
The work is 60% composed, 40% improvised, and he breaks down the whole narrative for the Cambodians: how improv was vitally improtant in the art and music of the ’60s, as it was a reaciton to break out of the stodgy structured forms of classical music and early contemporary music
Tarek: And I am starting to go back to form again. Now we are linking back to new forms of writing that use both form and improvisation. So it’s very much form and very much improvised.
It’s a really good presentation. He leaves pauses in all the right places for the translators, explains the three steps of his composition: 1) recording, 2) music and performance, 3) software and hardware engineering (“These 3 elements form a triangle and I can go from one corner to another”), and his physical tools of a) distance, b) faders, c) pressure, plus the 40 machines inside his software, and no absolute control, so he’s forced into randomness:
Tarek: I have many accidents happening, really a lot. And what I like about this is I don’t have 100% control of it. In other works I have computer starts to play all the sounds. And I try and make a composition out of it. When I dont know the reaction for the computer I have to be very attentive. And I like it because it’s going back to a point of hyper-attention.
And then there’s the background to the piece – he explains why he used audio excerpts from Cultural Revolution trials of musicians, composers and opera stars in China; how that period parallels not only the Khmer Rouge but also the Nasserist era of pan-Arabism (and here he explains the difference between Arabs and Muslims), how entire communal memories were erased for the sake of sectarian interests in the years that followed, and a Chinese text helps to negotiate the fact that he’s refusing to take sides in the local sectarian: neither Hezbollah nor Muslim Brothers.
And the personal background: it’s based on a personal experience when he was arrested and tortured in a war for three days in 2006. (“It’s okay,” he says with utter nonchalance.)
Tarek: And during this experience I got beaten on my ear and now I don’t hear very well with this one (points to left ear). So I can play very loud. And it’s very nice, because the speaker blew up. The speaker next to this ear.
As proud as he is of the machines, however, he wants to make sure the kids know that they’re not everything. They can bring in their audio archive clips on the 10th and he’ll show them how it’s done.
Don’t think it’s just me, he says. You can do this yourself.
FCP 09/10 
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