Name: Arooj Aftab
Start: 2022-02-22T20:00:00-08:00
End: 2022-02-22T23:00:00-08:00
Location: Gray Area

Arooj Aftab

Concerts and events with your new favorite bands at venues all across the Bay.Championing independent music and culture since 1993.

NOISE POP PRESENTS

Noise Pop Festival 2022 presents Arooj Aftab at Gray Area with Ouri and Maria BC

Gray Area

Ouri

Maria BC

This show is 21+. Proof of COVID-19 Vaccination required for entry.Seating is first-come, first-served. For ADA inquiries, please email info@noisepop.com.AROOJ AFTABChampioned by NPR, who praised her composition as one of the “Greatest Songs By 21st Century Women+,” and The New York Times, who celebrated her work as one of the “Best Classical Music Tracks of 2018,” Aftab’s liminal sound floats between classical minimalism and new age, Sufi devotional poetry and electronic trance, jazz structures and states of pure being. On Vulture Prince, the composer’s remarkable voice, backed by a team of renowned musicians, transports listeners to worlds once known.“Vulture Prince is about revisiting places I’ve called mine,” says Aftab, “places that don’t necessarily exist anymore. It’s about people, friendships, relationships—some relationships that were unexpectedly short term, and how to deal with that.”While writing Vulture Prince Aftab lost her younger brother, Maher, and she dedicates this album to his memory—a signal of emergence from loss and grief. “E quindi uscimmo a revider la stelle,” as Dante says at last, out of the inferno, “and thence we came forth to see again the stars.”Acting as a second chapter to Aftab’s 2015 debut, Bird Under Water, Vulture Prince opens with a new composition of “Baghon Main,” a track from her first album. The lead song, along with the avian album titles, ties the two records together. “The Tower of Silence comes to mind,” says Aftab, “the Parsi funeral structure where their beloved deceased are left to be consumed by vultures, thus returning to the cycle of life. These sort of shapeshifting elements, the burning desire to embody and lead this mystic ancestral power, growth as a person and musician, all led to Vulture Prince.”Of course, Aftab’s signature songwriting style also led to Vulture Prince. The composer has an uncanny ability to make music with layers upon layers of instrumentation, yet somehow it all feels very light, uncluttered, minimal on the ears. Aftab’s music then mirrors her voice, ethereal yet heavy—like a cloud crossed with a boulder.Distinguished Musicians Help Realize RecordA graduate of Berklee College of Music, the composer channels artists from Terry Riley to Abida Parveen, and has played venues from Lincoln Center to (Le) Poisson Rouge to the Museum of Modern Art. In 2020, Aftab composed music for the Academy Award-shortlisted film Bittu and sang on Residente’s Latin Grammy Award-winning single “Antes Que El Mundo Se Acabe.” On Vulture Prince, she is backed by an all-star cast, including Badi Assad, Maeve Gilchrist, Jamey Haddad, Kenji Herbert, Shazhad Ismaily, Juliette Jones, Petros Klampanis, Nadje Noordhuis, Gyan Riley, and Darian Donovan Thomas.So here is Vulture Prince—beautiful, powerful, dusky, and, above all, thoughtful. Included on the new album are singles, “Mohabbat” and “Last Night,” an old Rumi poem Aftab often sings live, but has never before released. Tucked subtly into Vulture Prince is “Saans Lo,” a song with words penned by the composer’s late friend Annie Ali Khan, who gently advises us to breathe—to move on. After seven minutes, “Saans Lo” fades into a washed-out drone before opening up into the colorful jazz-oriented closer, “Suroor”—a dynamic new world of possibilitiesAbout OuriOuri grew up in France, in a family of mixed french and afro-carribean descent. She began playing the harp and piano at 5, but at 7 she found unity in the cello. A self proclaimed introvert who’d rather dash off on her own than feel disconnected in the wrong crowd- she arrives in Montreal at the age of 16 to pursue a degree in composition.Montreal’s rave scene is where her artistry began to take shape - establishing herself in the community as a producer, DJ, and composer. Lending her skills to various collaborations, she strengthened her sense of self, but also her affinity for transforming sonically into any genre, playing any role.In 2018 she was invited to MISM x Boiler Room’s Montreal show, signed to Ghosty (international) &amp; Make it Rain Records (Canada) for the release of her EP ‘We Share Our Blood’ and was asked to make official remixes for the likes of Tokimonsta. Her growing notoriety let her support Jacques Greene, Yves Tumour &amp; Kllo live in concert. Evolving beyond her affirmed DJ persona, she breaks out of the underground to come up for air - where she collaborates with folk artist Helena Deland. They merge in a dimension of their own, and Hildegard is born. Now in her debut album, she shatters the oftentimes submissive and distant approach to ambient sound to finally take up space and connect to her own experience.Ouri explores the intricate formation of shape in Frame of a Fauna. The intangible is held and the unseen is sung as it inspects the framework of the body- how emotional hardship can imprint, and in turn deform the skeleton. If the bones are the container that stands the test of what is being contained- What is the residue of happening? And where does it go? She notices the way time can rupture a rib cage, pull out the collar bones, or make a fist out of fingers.She takes her knowledge of big orchestral sound, and creates her own fusion, puncturing the classical with industrial abrasions and electronic nuance. Ballads and drum samples take melodies out of the middle ground. She finds home in the new hybrid- but first she must stretch the old structure to make a clearing. The album begins in a bedroom in London, and hops to Berlin where she witnessed her sister give birth - and sees its completion a year later after a sudden trip to Brazil, where she said her last goodbye to her mother.The cycle of birth, death, and constant rebirth sends her transcending through the creation of this album, as she explores what lies inside thelining of the big dharma wheel: trauma, control and vulnerability. She starts outside and builds as she ascends inward, which is how she transforms the universal, into a personal space, not for the lost, but rather for those who are in suspension. She sculpts chaos with layers of texture, only to ask you to find her voice within it, “Hold on, hear it out and chase me” she sings. Sound fills to the brim, cello meets synth, becomes lush and ethereal, only for her feather light voice to slither in with ferocity. You weed through the sound to meet her in her sincerity. In this way we are listening twice- for what she wants to say, and what she wants to feel- which are not always the same.She invites you to be comfortable in the lucid, to be sensual without the sexual, in the possibility of communicating what you may not yet know. She edits lyrics to Ossature in a final revision to include hope in her perspective, and records GRIP in record time in a sweeping fit of grief in honor of her mother. Conscious not to define herself within any one structure, but to cascade her own spectrum of sound- in Frame of a Fauna Ouri shows us everything she can do, while what comes next is everything she will.

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Arooj Aftab

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