Duo Moment - Khabat Abas (solo) and Hardi Kurda (solo) + Jo Kelly (bass) + Robin Foster (rummaging) and Matt Davis (trumpet)

Duo Moment is an experimental, free-improvisational duo by Hardi Kurda and Khabat Abas. The duo focuses on the moment when sounds emerge through interaction, reflection, reaction, and interruption. Hardi and Khabat aim to share their experience of sound-making with the audience and to explore a world of sounds and noises from East to West.

Khabat Abas is an experimental cellist, improviser, and composer from Iraqi Kurdistan. She moves freely between artistic discipline and possibilities. Her works are inspired by a broad collection of methods, including noise, improvisation, and narrative storytelling as individual approaches. Therefore, she searches for unheard sounds or undiscovered spaces. Khabat is probably best known for her adapted cello and improvisational work exploring extended techniques, through which she started developing pieces that respond to the objects that are surrounding her or to her childhood memories. In her practice, she raises questions about what is out of bounds, raising the possibilities of sounds that cannot be controlled – in contrast to traditional musical values.

www.khabatabas.com

Dr. Hardi Kurda is a sound artist, improviser, and researcher with a PhD in Music from Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the founder of SPACE21, a platform for sound art and experimental music in Slemani, and Archive Khanah, an interactive sound archive project inspired by the philosophy of computer gaming, featuring coloured cassettes and recorded sounds from Kurdistan and Iraq.

Hardi's work explores radio noise and sonic traces often considered illegal, abandoned, unheard, invisible, broken, distorted, or forgotten — sounds without a place or destination. He developed the concept of “The Found Score”, which is an Urgent Listening method that navigates attention toward non-auditory senses. His listening’s approach rooted in his personal experience of migration and crisis during an illegal journey to Europe.

Jo Kelly is a Bristol-based musician and game designer who coaxes an extraordinary range of sound from their instrument, from rough-hewn viscera to fleet-footed filigree - spleen sublimated to the sublime.

Robin Foster is an artist and performer from Bristol, UK. His current work is centred around Rummaging, an intense, physical performance practice he developed with Henry Collins in 2014 that uses scavenged objects to create acoustic noise.

Taking a cue from Jane Bennett’s Vital Materialism, his work is site-specific in nature, exploring our relationship with the things that we surround ourself with and the musicality inherent within them, the rhythm of the universe. https://robinfoster.net

Matt Davis is a Bristol based musician and artist. He regularly collaborates with, amongst others, Phil Minton, Luigi Marino and Matthew Grigg.

Regular groups include Nodosus (with Angharad Davies, Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga, Dominic Lash and John Butcher) and a trio with Rachel Musson and Mark Sanders. www.f-i-e-l-d.co.uk