Crackle. a beat Sounds that sound threatening in their reduction. And then Abdullah Miniawy begins to sing in Arabic, with a voice that goes through marrow and bone. One does not have to understand the language to feel the anguish of tormented souls. “Preachers Never Said One True Thing” is the name of the piece with which the trio Carl Gari and the Egyptian singer, poet, trumpet player and artist Miniawy opened a performance at Haus der Kunst in 2021, which can be viewed online.
The Munich trio, consisting of Till Funke, Jonas Yamer and Jonas Friedlich, has been working together with Abdullah Miniawy for eight years. With the help of bass, guitar, synthesizer, laptop, echo, reverb and all sorts of other effects, Carl Gari create idiosyncratic carpets of sound that tell stories in their arranged interweaving. Sometimes tightly woven from sounds, sometimes so flat and brittle that you would fall if you set foot on this carpet and realized that the abyss is underneath.
The poems and texts by Miniawy, which deal with the social and political reality in Egypt, are also about heights of fall. Thus “The Act Of Falling From The 8th Floor” is a poem of his set to music, in which the lyrical self observes the free fall from the eighth floor, which can be seen in the neighborhood of a broken country. Miniawy’s singing is inspired, among other things, by Sufi chants and the tradition of the spoken word.
When his often elegiac songs meet the eclectic tones of Carl Gari, touching pieces are created that almost seem filmic in their composition, they seem so multidimensional. This impression is also created by the fact that the instruments are heavily alienated, in some places the sounds sound like industrial noises, the screeching or clattering of machines. In other places, on the other hand, fragmentary sounds rise up like mementos from the subconscious or sound like the setting of a nightmare.
Carl Gari and Abdullah Miniawy succeed in creating a musically exceptional project that leaves an impression even after listening. On Saturday evening the four musicians will play live at Import Export.
Carl Gari and Abdullah Miniawy, Saturday, August 26th, Import Export, Schwere-Reiter-Strasse 2h, import-export.cc