The first solo album of the French saxophonist, flutist and visual artist Sakina Abdou is the culmination of a path initiated more than twenty years ago on various aesthetic paths and in different contexts and artistic experiments, of a sound research started in 2021 around the solo saxophone, and of a tour in the United States in the fall of 2022.
Sakina Abdou has expressed herself in many contexts, in musical fields both broad and eclectic. With this solo album, she invites herself within, focus and anchors herself for the first time in her own language, where she summons the many influences which have nurtured her. Through "homemade" recording, naked, raw, without effects or tricks, we meet her on her own, at home. Grab a chair or settle on the floor next to her, on the edge of the bell, almost touching, and find yourself captured in a sound recording quite close, almost macroscopic. You can follow her and walk along, through the musical arc built from collected moments. You will feel the solitude of the musician in the room and the ghostly presence of a few guests, mute witnesses of the recording process.
In this living snapshot, you can sit next to her to live through her 43 minutes of music. You will follow the story she's telling to herself, quite privately, a story infused with raw humanity, simple and moving. 43 minutes of musical playing, of renewed dynamics, of comparing and contrasting the pieces, with a technique precisely on the edge of control, which reveals the tension of a formal frame, as well as its breakaways and releases.
A disc to listen to and live.
Goodbye Ground is an album almost handmade, recorded by Sakina Abdou in several "passings", through a recording system set in a dedicated room in her home, for two months.
Designed as a triptych, the disc is structured in three parts.
The first one, "The Day I Became a Floor", sets, lays out and establishes a musical architecture eminently horizontal, with stretched outlines thinning out in a temporality where you can settle in and that eventually you can almost imagine as permanent.
The second track strikes down, cracks, grinds and wipes out the previous one. "Goodbye Ground". The central and title piece, it acts as a revolution, an overthrow. It marks and delimits a watershed; acts like a prism and carries out a diffraction on the elements of language to atomize them into 5 monad pieces, which then fit into the "Planting Chairs" suite. One can then imagine the latter to be perpetuated and developed indefinitely.
This musical arc can be thought and read both forward and backward, in a before and after forever irreconcilable.
Sakina Abdou (born in 1984 in Lille) is a French saxophonist, flautist and plastic artist. She studied the flute (early and contemporary music) and the saxophone (classical/contemporary/jazz) at the Music Academy of Lille and Roubaix. She graduated from the Fine Arts School of Tourcoing and Valenciennes (DNAP, DNSEP) and also has a State Diploma of Music Teacher. Since 1998, she has been a member of various music bands in Lille's area. In parallel to her studies, she has explored free improvisation, experimental and contemporary music within various entities: La Pieuvre orchestra, led by
Olivier Benoit, part of the collective of musicians Muzzix, the band Vazytouille, part of the collective of musicians Zoone Libre, Le Miroir et le Marteau led by rock drummer
Guigou Chenevier, the free rock quintet Eliogabal or the TOC & The Compulsive Brass Band.
Since 2014, she has collaborated with the
Dedalus ensemble to reinterpret the work of american minimalist composers like Philip Glass or
Moondog and has also played with Organik Orkeztra led by the pianist Jeremy Ternoy from Lille and the Basque singer Kristof Hiriart. In 2012, she co-founded Bi-Ki?, a duet with fellow saxophonist Jean-Baptiste Rubin. With a wish to explore acoustic as well as amplified sounds, they teamed up with
Jean-Luc Guionnet to record their first album in 2016. They also collaborate with Simon Henocq during residencies where their work culminates in restitutions that are part live concert, part sound installation, part art performance.
Crossing over many styles, Sakina Abdou is a member of the improvisation trio Abdou Dang Orins and Julien Tortora's sextet Phuisis ( whose creations revolve around French philosopher
Charles Fourier's work). She also took part in film screenings with live music, with Jean-Baptiste Rubin ("Le Bonheur") and Ivan Cruz ("Ciné-concert de papier"). She is also involved in other orchestral projects such as Le Grand Orchestre de Muzzix, Ritual with Organik Orkeztra, the Red Desert Orchestra led by Eve Risser, and Hoketus & Slow Movement (Dedalus/ Muzzix). Her musical activity has led her to collaborate with many artists including Satoko Fujii,
Kasper T. Toeplitz,
Art Zoyd, Raymond Boni, Michael Pisaro,
Anthony Pateras, Tom Johnson...
