Our GRRLS TO THE FRONT Collaboration with Vermont Women’s Fund and The Stone Church continues with a Musical Performance and Artist Talk by Nadah El Shazly, a producer, vocalist and sound artist from Cairo, Egypt. Opening support by Eve Essex on alto saxophone, piccolo, voice and electronics.

Nadah El Shazly is a producer, vocalist and sound artist from Cairo, Egypt. Her music combines expressive 19th century musical concepts from her homeland with contemporary, borderless forays into electronic and improvisational idioms. She has toured the world extensively, featuring at festivals including Le Guess Who?, REWIRE, Irtijal, and FIMAV, among many others. Her debut album, Ahwar, landed at #12 on The Wire’s ‘Best Albums of 2017’. Beyond her own music, El Shazly is an inspired collaborator, working closely with like-minded Egyptian musicians Maurice Louca and Sam Shalabi (Land of Kush). Recently, she’s been making brain-scrambling, beat-driven music as Pollution Opera, a newly minted duo with irreverent Welsh sound artist Elvin Brandhi. El Shazly has also spent time on-screen, starring in the feature length film About Her (2020) and appearing in the Netflix original series Love, Life & Everything In Between (2022). Currently, she is wrapping production on a pair of film scores and preparing to release her sophomore album, due in spring of 2024.

Eve Essex is a multi-instrumentalist and composer based in Brooklyn, NY. Primarily a woodwind player, she employs a wide instrumentation including saxophone, flutes, and voice, supported with live processing, beds of synthesizers, drum machine, and other sounds. Operating between songwriting, composition, and instrumental improvisation, her work slides easily from structured electronic pop to open-ended melodic explorations. Her practice has spanned media and genres over time– from installation and performance art to the prog, jazz, electronic, and electroacoustic ideas explored with collaborative ensembles Das Audit, Hesper, and HEVM. Placing emphasis on live execution, her recordings and performances are characterized by both ardent focus and spirited unpredictability.

Essex’s debut solo album, Here Appear, was jointly released by Soap Library (cassette) and Sky Walking (LP) in 2018. Other recordings have appeared on compilations by PAN, Sky Walking, Untergang Institut, and Wild Flesh Productions. Select solo performances include Artists Space, e-flux Bar Laika, Fridman Gallery, ISSUE Project Room, KAJE, Outpost Artists Resources, Safe Gallery, and Wendy’s Subway in New York; Rhizome, Washington D.C., Meakusma Festival, Eupen, Belgium; the PUFFERS Festival, Providence, RI; and ACUD Macht Neu, Berlin, Germany. Her collaborations Das Audit and Essex Olivares have both presented commissioned performances for SculptureCenter, New York. As a guest instrumentalist she has recently contributed to works by The God In Hackney, Peter Gordon & Love of Life Orchestra, James K, Kevin Kenkel, Liturgy, Colin Self, and Peter Zummo.

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