Simsara Music in 2023

A year of events & activities in Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Latvia, Italy, Sweden, UK and Germany.

New musical collaboration /  Algeria & Egypt

أول حفل موسيقي لنا في الجزائر: في مارس 2023 قدمنا أمسية من الموسيقى البديلة من ثلاثة أجزاء في قلبها عمل موسيقي جديد لي الملحن والموسيقي المصري موريس لوقا بالتعاون مع الموسيقيين الجزائريين صليحة ولد موسى، صفيان فرندي، نائل قهوجي، سيد علي بوزار، غازي محمد زكرياء، أكرم خالف و بحر بن سالم. « مدن شقيقة » هو مشروع المنتجة الموسيقية المصرية الجزائرية سارة المنياوي ، من خلال وكالة إدارة الفنانين والإنتاج الإبداعي سمسارة للموسيقى.


شكر خاص لمكتب رياض الفتح و قاعة ابن زيدون على التعاون في استضافة هذا العرض الحي. بدعم من الصندوق العربي للثقافة والفنون (آفاق).

Nancy Mounir's Nozhet El Nofous

Following the release of her critically acclaimed debut record, Nozhet El Nofous, we booked and produced live performances for Nancy Mounir's immersive audio-visual rendition of her project six years in the making:


  • Le Guess Who? Festival in Utrecht
  • Beirut & Beyond International Music Festival
  • Clandestino Festival Malmo
  • Jazzfest Berlin
  • Riga White Nights

Elephantine is a band born out of one of our special projects, Sister Cities in Stockholm, where we worked with Maurice Louca on bringing together a band of musicians from Sweden, Italy, Turkey and Egypt to produce a new album Elephantine in 2019. Fast forward four years later, the band is still together touring and performing, and releasing a brand new record titled Moonshine.


South African musician and cultural worker Asher Gamedze wrote a beautiful piece about Moonshine and Maurice Louca, in the excerpts below, which you can read in full here.

Tarkeeza music management workshops & events

Through our capacity building programme Tarkeeza, we delivered a series of workshops in Cairo, London and Riyadh:


  • Rawabet Art Space Cairo
  • Arab Women Artists Now (AWAN) Festival London
  • XP Music Futures Riyadh
  • Syn Summit Egypt
  • Rise Up summit


Our workshops included:


  • Introduction to Music Industry with Sarah El Miniawy (Simsara Music)
  • Fundraising for Music with May Mostafa (Simsara Music)
  • Live Event Production with Mram Abdelmaqsoud (D-Caf Festival)
  • Technical riders for bands with Nazli Reda (Nazli's Noise)
  • Panels & talks on music and artist management


Solћ

Developed for EMPAC’s 68-channel ambisonic system and installed in the reverberant Concert Hall, the music gives untold voices a near-physical presence, taking listeners on a compositional journey through a landscape suspended outside time that opens onto other dimensions of space. Solћ (reconciliation), Nancy Mounir weaves a rich tapestry of texture, sound, and color using the threads of archival sources, ambient noises, field recordings, and her own score recorded in an old church in Cairo, Egypt. 


Mounir immerses herself in her archival material to the point of being possessed by it. She listens with a musical ear for what is not audible in audio, tunes in to what may have gone missing over generations, and channels this loss into a new composition that she performs with an ensemble of seven musicians. Her sources are geographically dispersed and chronologically distant, yet she draws on the commonality and harmony she hears in their depths.


A lone woman sings in Xhosa while playing a musical bow called an Uhadi; an Indigenous tribe from New Guinea performs funerary rites; a prayer sounds from a church in Bulgaria; from Morocco, the collective practice of Ahwash; from Egypt, rituals that seek reconciliation with the spirits of ancestors.

مريم صالح، بغني

BAGHANNY

As we continue to work with Maryam Saleh on developing her next major body of work, a full album of songs she is penning and composing herself entirely for the first time, we worked with her on release a single with Syrian producer Hello Psychaleppo by way of keeping her in the hearts and minds of her fans and listeners until the full album release in 2025.


Listen to Baghanny on your streaming platform of choice here.

Baskot Lel Baltageyya live at Le Guess Who?

Baskot Lel Baltageyya (meaning ‘cookies for thugs’) is a Cairo-based project headed by musician Adham Zidan and poet Anwar Dabbour. From the start, Zidan has resisted the idea of it being pinned down as any one thing - for him, it can be a band, an entirely new genre, or simply a consumable. In their phantasmagoric live shows, Baskot Lel Baltageyya’s psychedelic grooves, as heard on this year’s self-titled LP, also take on new shapes. Those astute enough will locate in the band’s off-kilter tracks a sense of humor distinctively Egyptian; one in which, when life becomes absurd, culture follows suit, and aims to be more nonsensical than reality.

Share by: