Irtijal 12: xiith international festival of experimental music

For the 12th consecutive year, Irtijal brings you music from the fringe and allows you to discover other dimensions in music. Founded in 2000 by Mazen Kerbaj and Sharif Sehnaoui to promote contemporary and experimental practices in music, Irtijal is today the oldest music festival in Beirut. It is organized by mill, a non-profit association that aims to assist projects that do not fit into the Lebanese musical mainstreams despite their undeniable artistic value.

Esteban Algora solo (Spain)
Esteban Algora: accordion
Esteban Algora has done extensive work for the development of a contemporary repertoire for the accordion, promoting the creation of new literature for it through experimentation with its unexplored sonic potentialities, from aural fragmentation to melodious instrumentation. Algora has premiered about forty pieces written by composers such as: José Manuel López López, José Mª Sánchez Verdú, Alberto Posadas, Eduardo Polonio and many others.
Esteban Algora’s concert was made possible by kind support from Instituto Cervantes.

Alessandra Rombola solo (Italy)
Alessandra Rombola: flutes
Alessandra Rombolá is a musician involved in different aspects of music-making. A classically trained musician, her main interest is in experimental music: new “notated” music by contemporary composers, graphic scores, sound installations, or her own free improvised music. Her new solo project, continuum, a concert-performance in which improvisation and notated works coexist in a single musical gesture.

Mural (Austria/Norway)
Jim Denley: flutes Kim Myhr: guitar Ingar Zach: percussion
Mural first performed live in 2007 in Madrid, and have made concerts around the world since. The trio has two critically acclaimed records: nectars of emergence in 2010 “a haunting world of breathtaking timbral beauty …an extraordinary creation”- the wire magazine and live at the Rothko chapel in 2011 “you are in a strange universe, full of surprise and wonder. It is as sweet as it is dark.” – Free jazz mural captures both a heavy gravity as well as a touching lightness, like an ever-changing dance within the tension of opposites.

Mahmoud Refat (Egypt)
Mahmoud Refat: electronics
Mahmoud Refat is one of Egypt’s most captivating electronic musicians, having developed a  singular artistic sensibility and widely contributing to the enhancement of the Cairo music scene by running the 100copies music label and 100live yearly music festival. This concert is part of the beirut-cairo-tunis triangular exchange sponsored by afac.

Shazzula v/s Osman Arabi (Belgium/Lebanon)
Shazzula: vocals, synthesizer Osman Arabi: guitar, electronics
screening of Shazzula’s film Black Mass Rising the evening ends with one of the festival’s most adventurous concert, matching Tripoli’s Osman Arabi’s entrancing sound with Shazzula’s unclassifiable music to accompany the latter’s new movie: black mass rising a dark and powerful journey into the untold realms of our imagination.