Kamilya is a musician committed to daring music expression. Since 2000 she has focused her music work and research on finding new spaces for her voice and oud. She has done this through developing her compositions and interpretations, musically and textually, solo or collectively to try and find logic, or sense to how her music resonates in our contemporary context.

Overview

For 20 years Kamilya was part of Sabreen, the East-Jerusalem group that helped introduce a form of politically committed music (“Multazimeh”) alongside contemporaries like Sheikh Imam in Egypt and Marcel Khalife in Lebanon. They released 4 influential albums, often coinciding with and capturing the collective mood during intense socio-political moments: the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the Sabra and Shatila massacres; the moment just before the First Intifada…These releases fused eastern and Western instrumentation (oud, kawal, buzuq, and qanun/ guitar, violin, cello…), while incorporating the revolutionary poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, Samih al-Qasim, Hussein Barghouti, and Fadwa Touqan.

Since the early 2000’s, Kamilya has focused on solo performances of revolutionary Arabic poetry, which she often commissions and then sets to music. English translations of the songs will be available at the performance.

Context

In thinking about Kamilya’s solo performances, we are reminded of Hamish Henderson’s notion of the carrying stream, or his friend Ailean Dòmhnallach thinking in relation to folk traditions: not something that has been categorised, sanitised and fixed in time by a dominant culture. Instead, the surface of the stream changes in relation to the contemporary moment, while deeper currents persist underneath in an eddying movement that maybe even resists linear ideas of what can be considered the past, or the present. Kamilya’s music is moved by a similar Palestinian stream. Her father was an instrument builder, and her music is rooted in old material practices. At the same time, she responds to the ever tightening restrictions (physical, mental, political) around the Palestinian people right now by finding space in melody and—singing a way out or through the injustice of contemporary colonial relations.

The Wire wrote about how Kamilya creates “the space to imagine an alternative sonic future”; but to be honest, we wouldn’t limit things to the purely musical.

The music programme at Episode 12 has emerged as a collaboration with the UK’s best experimental music festival, Counterflows.