{"id":40159,"date":"2015-04-14T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-04-14T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beirut.com\/40159\/irtijal-marks-fifteen-years-of-experimental-music-in-beirut"},"modified":"2023-08-11T04:03:51","modified_gmt":"2023-08-11T04:03:51","slug":"irtijal-marks-fifteen-years-of-experimental-music-in-beirut","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beirut.com\/en\/40159\/irtijal-marks-fifteen-years-of-experimental-music-in-beirut\/","title":{"rendered":"Irtijal Marks Fifteen Years of Experimental Music in Beirut"},"content":{"rendered":"This year marked the 15th edition of IRTIJAL, Beirut’s much-loved and anticipated Festival of Experimental Music. With a hardcore fanbase and a mystique that’s drawn the attention of art lovers and academics alike\u2014seriously, here’s a thesis<\/a> and a book<\/a> that delve into the festival and its key figures\u2014Beirut.com sat down with IRTIJAL’s co-founder and managing director, Sharif Sehnaoui<\/a>, to get an insider’s view of its improbable success and longevity over the past decade and a half.



“When we created the festival back in 2001<\/a>, we were 23.. 24.. 25 years old. Of course, today, 15 years later, we\u2019re still young, but not that young,\u201d Sehnaoui laughed. \u201cThe team is still more or less the same. Yet the changes have been enormous, but also gradual, reflecting the changes in our own lives. Our idea of the festival has changed, our relation to the audience, and to the general music and art field here in Lebanon, has very much changed. Our selves, as artists\u2014our practice has also evolved.\u201d

As a \u201cmusician-led festival with a familial feeling,\u201d it is very tempting to describe IRTIJAL with musical metaphors. One image in particular, that of an ad-hoc jazz band jamming on an unfamiliar stage, seems particularly apt for picturing how the festival found a place for itself in Beirut’s music scene.

\u201cInitially, we just wanted to make a Free Improvised Music festival<\/a>,\u201d Sehnaoui recalled. \u201cThat was the plan back in 1999. As soon as we started, however, we saw that it\u2019s a bit pointless to just do a FIM festival, similar to some festivals we saw in Europe. There, you have festivals specialized in contemporary music, festivals specialized in world music, in rock, so you can make a specialty festival. But here in Lebanon, everything needs to be built. So very quickly we saw that it\u2019s pointless to have such a reduced scope, and since the first edition, we were already trying to get anything creative from the Lebanese scene, even if they\u2019re not in our idiom of Free Improvisation. But of course, at the time, we didn\u2019t know the scene very well, and discovered more and more of it over the years.\u201d

This constant searching, which Sehnaoui described as the essence of what an artist does, was driven in this instance by a desire to carve out a space where new languages and identities can be formed. \u201cThe specificity of IRTIJAL,\u201d Sehnaoui explained, \u201cis to promote, assist and feature people who are involved in something that has a strong experimental or research component\u2014people who want to take a risk, who want to try new ideas, even in old styles, people that try to change a style profoundly.\u201d

Yet, defining just what it is that makes something new, let alone profoundly different, is no easy task, so IRTIJAL’s definition of what \u201cfits\u201d has also developed over time: \u201cWe are always asking questions to ourselves, to see what could fit. What is \u2018experimental? I don\u2019t really have answers,\u201d Sehnaoui admitted.

\u201cBut also, through the development of the [local and regional music] scene, I discover new ways to define it. To give an example, in the last four years, we\u2019ve had something hard to define, experimentations coming from traditional music\u2014from \u2018tarab,\u2019 from \u2018maqam,\u2019 from popular Arabic music\u2014all of which are suddenly going in a totally new direction. These things\u2014I don\u2019t know if they existed before, but I was not aware of them, so suddenly, I\u2019m surprised. This is for me now a priority: to find projects that take the Arabic music tradition and move it forward.\u201d<\/big>


(Image: Revolutionary Birds at IRTIJAL\u201915)

This year, IRTIJAL’s new priority was made loud and clear from the very first night. Despite being billed as a mainly Swiss-themed edition\u2014a theme that’s been in the works for two years, and was co-curated by Sehnaoui and Paed Conca<\/a>\u2014IRTIJAL’15 gave the honor of the opening concert<\/a> to two, boundary-pushing, Arabic acts: the Asil Ensemble, who played a sprawling piece called \u201cAutism,\u201d and Revolutionary Birds, a special, IRTIJAL-exclusive production that brought together the haunting, Sufi vocals of Mounir Troudi with the piercing, Breton bagpipes of Erwan Keravec.

Yet the sense of surprise that gives form to IRTIJAL’s take on the “unclassifiable” was not reserved solely for Arabic traditions. Indeed, IRTIJAL\u201915 was at its best when performers took any familiar vernacular\u2014a style, a sound, a set-up, whether traditionally ‘classical’ or classically ‘avant-garde’\u2014and made it strange, stretching its expressive possibilities to the outer limits. One particularly striking example of this was Swiss drummer Julian Sartorius, who performed at Yukunkun on April 5. Playing solo on a standard drum kit, with a few bells and gizmos thrown in, Sartorius captivated the audience with a set that deconstructed the breakbeat to produce a sound that was at times ambient, at times industrial\u2014conjuring flashes of Autechre and Aphex Twin with shamanic mastery of his instrument.