Faradina Afiffi Photo Credit Faradina Afiffi
Review by Simon Jenner, January 20th 2025
Violist and vocalist Faradena Afifi and composer/pianist Steve Beresford first came to attention with a short CD Flash of Blue: rooted in folk-inflected compositions and arrangements with a haunting one of ‘Scarborough Fair’, it proved far more. As beguiling compositions like ‘Kingfisher’ (hence Flash of Blue) ‘Dusk’ and ’Night’ proved, Afifi and Beresford – when collaborating – are musicians pitched in that ground between folk and modernism. Michael Finnissy comes to mind, but here, with Afifi’s own compositional voice more folk-inflected, Flash of Blue remained on the edge of experimental folk.
Bee Reiki steps over: though not to Finnissy’s new complexity, or not quite. Now the ‘Bee Reiki Trio’ of Beresford (piano, electronics and toys), Paul Khimasia Morgan (guitar body and electronics ) and Afifi’s (viola, violin, drumkit and voice) make their full-length debut CD on Discus Records: recorded in a single day in November 2022 in his East London studio by Syd Kemp. The effect is almost unrecognizable from Flash of Blue: but for Afifi’s voice and viola.
This is hallucinatory music. It gathers in intensity yet continually unfolds, heavier with the weight of where it’s been. A 54-minute sequence of eight apparently improvisatory sections ending in a vocal paean, it shimmers with release from some long immersion.
It’s easy to suggest with the opening’s audible door-shutting (a kind of hello), the ambient sound-worlds created by say Bang On a Can All-Stars back in the 1990s. Or John Zorn. This kind of sonance, allowing extraneous sounds to stray into the mix, gives it an openness you can hear on those sampler moments beloved of Radio 3’s New Music Show. There’s more art here though, and repeated listening only confirms this.
There’s a narrative in those eight titles too, but it’s distracting to break up the relation of sound and music. A twangling of tune-up, and Afifi’s first vocalese shoots straight out of ambience into a haunting. And then the electronics of (I think) Beresford and Afifi’s treated voice. Which soon mutates into a rhythmic chant, her long line swapped for a series of shorter then melismatically stretched vocals over electronic keyboard. If you know Meredith Monk’s solo vocals, Afifi’s is kin to it: the wry flash of wit that jolts to elegy. And Bee Reiki is something Monk would love to have written.
If there’s analogies here, it’s because you might know some. New sounds need aural signposts. And this writer’s immersed more in contemporary classical than world music: it’s just one way in. So occasionally it’s like something out of Giles Swayne’s Cry – a 1978 piece using African and other musics to invoke creation of the world in a British a Cappella-line-up. But not 28 singers and electronics, just one remarkable singer. Anyway Afifi soon swaps out for her viola: even here the sonic impact is unsettling: long notes give way to plucked distracted then rhythmic banjo-effects. At this point I can’t tell if Affi’s taken up her fiddle.
Bee Reiki. Photo Credit Discus Records
A renowned new-music pianist, Beresford, who’s collaborated with musicians like Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Han Bennink and John Zorn on keyboard, is also a formidable author on contemporary music. Best known for improv and jazz, he’s composed for films and TV, and being a York University graduate (and former Westminster University lecturer) steeped in the new.
He acts here as a living cantus firmus, rising to audibility with piano chords half-way through (Track 4: 25 minutes in, around a bee flexing its wings!), and suggests much of the pulse. The ranging voices in Afifi – viola and voice – and Morgan’s guitar/contact mic swarm around it. They create a literal buzz-cloud of micro-tonals, shift registers and instruments slightly through the eight tracks. Morgan intrigues since he’s to an extent self-effacing (so difficult to write about) but it’s his sonic bounds the reach of Bee Reiki is pitched in.
And… it’s about a bee. It’s worth quoting but don’t be put off by the cuteness: “The trio initially met on Zoom as a result of Lockdown and from those beginnings decided they wanted to record an album together. On the day of recording and before going into the studio, Faradena was outside doing her T’ai Chi warm up and noticed a large white-tailed bumblebee lying in a puddle. After moving the bee out of the water, she did some Reiki on it to amazing results…the bee flew off in joyful spirals into the blue sky!” See what I mean about Monk.
This intersectional approach – different musics, ambient envelopes – has been around for over 30 years. The difference here is the line-up of musical skills spanning classical and world music. To take Afifi first, as the most identifiable: it’s the haunting way Afifi approaches singing and instrumentation. The influence of Monk’s extended vocal techniques is pervasive in contemporary music: though Afifi and Monk seem kindred, sisters under the singing. Monk’s Jewish heritage edged with ritual has a parallel.
Afifi’s Afghani-British: she too approaches singing with a sense of dual heritage. There’s little bar samples coming out of one heritage since say Veronica Doubleday’s Three Women of Herat, and musicians who’ve made it out: those not being hounded by UK authorities. I make no apology for dragging politics in since Afifi’s site references Afghan women’s plight and our shame.
So Afifi’s voice invokes at a distance another world, far removed from her folk-inflected singing of only a year or so earlier. This (mainly) vocalese lends the music something sacramental, traditional, timeless and futuristic too. Several times Afifi’s multiple-tracked.
Faradina Afiffi Photo Credit Faradina Afiffi
Afifi’s viola-playing strongly recalls the way Garth Knox in his Seven Violas (at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in 2001) evoked a world of violas by literally playing seven of them, hanging them up as he passed, striking one suspended as it twirled whilst promenading with another tucked under his chin played a second later: occasionally the simultaneous sounds of three violas shuddered through the hall, struck with two bows in half a second.
The world of the violas when essayed this way seems sonically the most open of all the stringed instruments. With Afifi liminal scutterings at the edge of the bridge (ponticello) also recall the best-known contemporary Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino. Since Sciarrino, there’s been a tradition of string ensembles playing at the sonic edge, often ponticello. These are familiar affects. The mix here shows Afifi essaying such effects (close-up, distant) in a new way.
These sounds too invoke everything from the oud to the viol and bass viol. Afifi plays the violin too, as a fiddle, and drumkit, which lays down a loose lariat of bass-lines too disruptive and fragmented to count as pulse.
That’s left to Beresford – as far as anyone can make out – who corrals Afifi on the one hand, and Morgan with guitar and mic sonics on the other. Morgan seems here a player who lays down a magic carpet for others. His guitar and mic-ing serrate and snatch at Afifi’s contribution, sharpening it. But it seems his instrumentation blends with the electronics to a degree that it’s like fine fairy dust in the atmosphere.
At one point whilst he does this and Afifi vocalises in a wayward coloratura that edges on the humorous, Beresford sneaks in with a sampler noise like an organ: to be precise those spectral reaches of 20th century French organ: Langlais, Messiaen and particularly Alain, that kind of sound. It’s momentary and the whole drops off the cliff and we get – birdsong. Not Messiaen’s notated filter, but the real sample.
Faradina Afiffi Photo Credit Faradina Afiffi
Faradina Afiffi Photo Credit Faradina Afiffi
Improvisatory, and spurred on by a natural world incident this may be (really no pun intended), but there’s nothing improv about the bird. This is crafted work, where an improvisation flourishes over an agreed fiction: there’s a battery of possibilities laid down, like a jazz standard wrought from bird-song. There’s also audible use of hands around drumming, a bit Anna Meredith and Clapping Music, but again this is approximate.
You get the feeling too Beresford must know that distant late 1960s world of Cornelius Cardew: The Great Learning featured untrained musicians; this trio is anything but, though there’s a similar feel with Beresford and Morgan here. What you get is music wisely unlearning itself, to renew.
There’s a fantastic moment on the third track where Beresford launches into a distinct Finnissy-like piano solo, complex, roving, maximalist, straight out of and different to say Finnissy’s Country Music. In the fourth track we get something surprising: Afifi’s long violin cadenza suddenly accompanied by Beresford’s piano: a brief classical line-up before the whole grunge of double-and-triple-stopping is engulfed by Morgan’s sonics over the piano too. The next switches to drumkit and electronics – the sound-worlds shift distinctly on each track. Afifi surprises again towards the sixth that Morgan inhabits, by entering on the lowest notes of the viola like a double-bass; and tam-tam sounds.
After a string-rich yet eventually percussive, electronically-twangling seventh, Afifi’s vocals in the eighth must be allowed to sing for itself. That’s after a jagged drone-like folkish viola and Tibetan-bowl echo from Beresford’s electronic palate. They’re the first time words enter in Afifi’s hushed mezzo with its characterful burr; and summoning a fleck of folk. It’s a benediction on all natural things.
A haunting collaboration between three exceptional musicians, this shows what happens when they share their disciplines: yet fine-tune it to rare distinction. Tonally, aesthetically this is breakthrough stuff, taking other musics that never jammed together: and making them new.
Where will this trio go, or its soloists? Beresford and Afifi seem established as a duo; hopefully Morgan will collaborate with them further. Afifi too works with other collectives like THe Noisy Women Present. Oddly one piece that comes to mind is Monk performing John Cage’s The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Summers of 1942; late one night in the pin-point acoustic of St Paul’s Hall, at the 1989 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. With Cage present. Like that early piece, there’s a feel of something huge here, stretching pinions, starting out.
You can access a disc via Discus Records or Faradena Afifi’s own website. http://www.faradenamusic.co.uk
Faradina Afiffi Photo Credit Faradina Afiffi
Steve Beresford Photo Credit Steve Beresford