Sound installation, three remoulded brass instruments, surface transducers, media player, plastic chairs, 12′ loop, 2022

“Arizona Club” works with the idea of music as a space of transference and refuge, a way of re-narrating the notion of belonging. The installation is made of out-of-date brass instruments discarded from various music schools. These instruments, likely played by multiple generations of kids, were remoulded into three new brass objects each containing different parts of the original musical instruments. A composed soundtrack is then played through a set of vibrating plates attached to each of the instruments. The electronic sounds merge with the natural resonances of the objects, distorting each other’s sonic presence while simultaneously resulting in a syncretic and organic sonic environment with harmonic influences from both Armenian and Ethiopian musics.

“Arba Lijoch, forty children. Orphans (from destroyed Armenian villages of Vaspurakan, Karin, Zeytun, Sis), marching band, slow arrival through Palestine to Adis Ababa, 1924. Royal invitation to become the Imperial Marching Band of Ras Tafari, Emperor Selassie. An “angelic choir” as he says. The national anthem of Ethiopia, composed by a refugee. 

Then later. Boys growing older, first musical schools, other marching bands, military bands, police bands, court bands. On after-hours a scene of nightlife emerges, clubs, jazz records, breathing heavily, breathing alive. Mahmoud Ahmed, Alemayehu Eshete and Tilahun Gessesse frequent the venues, study the brass, start playing the songs, diatonic, hypnotic, heat infused. A genre appears, others call it Ethio-jazz, from refugees to marching bands to slow warm sound of metal trembling with air.”