‘Akhi (2016)

‘Akhi, for 12 voices and electronics, is a piece commissioned within the Tenso workshop for choir and electronics, organized by Tenso, the European network for professional chamber choirs and the Sibelius Academy. It was premiered in Helsinki on 26th August 2016 by Helsinki Chamber Choir with James Wood as conductor and Josué Moreno as electronic musician, within the Tenso Days Helsinki festival.

The homonymous poem by Mikhail Nu'aymah deals with his own experience of the WWI, and it has been the multidimensional starting point of the piece: not only it gives the structural and semantic definition of the piece, but also the timbrical treatment, since the diversity of the arabic phonology is the generative idea of the sonic material. The electronics are used, on the one hand, as a spatialization tool with a loudspeaker system of 8.1, and as a continuous background created by the live mix of 8 pre- recorded tracks. Some of them were crackling textures to be blended with the choir and create an illusion of simultaneous continuity and discontinuity, and other tracks were instances of the recording of the original poem by a native speaker, thus causing a representation of the language although it was unintelligible.