Tuning, Bias, and the Wild Beyond

A conversation between Khyam Allami and Nora Akawi on tonality, music, bio-politics, education, experimentation and improvisation produced by Radio Alhara, commissioned for Glossary of Common Knowledge 2021’s seminar on the theme of Subjectivization, co-organized by HDK-Valand Academy – Arts and Design, University of Gothenburg, L’Internationale Online and Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana. The partners engage a fluid network of listening sites – Radio Alhara in Betlehem, Bridge Radio in Copenhagen and Radio Student in Ljubljana where provocations on the relations between essentialism and subjectivization may be positioned and disseminated, thereby offering widened greater accessibility and geographical reverberance.

Khyam Allami is an Iraqi-British multi-instrumentalist musician, composer, researcher and founder of Nawa Recordings. Primarily an Oud player, his artistic research focuses on the development of contemporary and experimental practice based on the fundamentals of Arabic music, with a focus on tuning and microtonality.

Nora Akawi is a Palestinian architect living in New York. Through research, curatorial, and pedagogical practices, her work lies at the intersection of urban and environmental justice, collective memory, and architecture—drawing from migration and border studies, mapping practices and archive theory.

Broadcast at L'Internationale Online Screening Program from 10 May to 10 August 2021, as part of the Glossary of Common Knowledge Seminar at HDK-Valand in Gothenburg, May 10 til May 12, 2021.

For a full recording of an Apotome Concert by Khyam Allami go here.