© Laurent Orseau
Solo
Farida Amadou is a self taught bass player based in Brussels, Belgium. The electric bass is her main instrument since 2011. In 2013, she has started to play a lot of different musical genres, including blues, jazz and hip-hop. Soon Farida started to dive into improvisation music, and got rapidly identified by local musicians. After a year (2017) as bass player in belgian punk band Cocaine Piss, in 2019 Farida decided to focus on her solo improvisation practice and collaborations with musicians like Thurston Moore, Peter Brötzmann, Terrie Ex, Andy Moor, Pat Thomas, Julien Desprez among other occasional featuring such as Jerusalem in My Heart and Moor Mother.
© Juliane Schütz
Duo w*/ Julien Desprez
Belgian-French bass & guitar virtuosos Farida Amadou & Julien Desprez do not just speak the same mother tongue, they also share the language of creative music. At the same time, their versatile artistic backgrounds couldn’t be more different, reaching from hip hop & punk to avant-garde jazz & improvised music. However, once on stage, they perform as if they’d be a duo for years. After their first spontaneous encounter in 2019, it quickly became clear that this high quality noise outfit has to be continued. Et voilà! Get ready for a hyper-dynamic overkill for nine strings and a hotplate of effect pedals, distilled to a beautiful wall of sound, somewhere between industrial, free form improvisation & drone. Enjoy the sonic experience live when Amadou’s crunchy bass lines and pulsing noise patterns fuse with the stochastically shrieking fireworks of the guitar to a sheer listening pleasure. Amadou/Desprez are not your everyday-freejazzers, they play music for the 21st century. - text by Louis Rastig
© Niclas Weber
Duo w*/ Moor Mother
Belgian-Nigerien bassist and improv composer Farida Amadou met American spoken word poet and activist Camae Ayewa (a.k.a. Moor Mother) at the Monheim Triennial Festival. They immediately decided to work together.
Amadou is an autodidact who impressed the members of Cocaine Piss during her improv sessions and was promptly permitted to join the punk band. Afterwards, she again focused on her own sound: electro-acoustic free sounds. Solo, she has also been support act for the likes of Thurston Moore.
Moor Mother gained international recognition for her poetry and powerful spoken word intermezzos and is not only politically aware in her lyrics. She also initiated the likes of artists protest "Musicians Against Police Brutality" following the murder of George Floyd, which was also where the renowned free jazz combo Irreversible Entanglements came into being.