James Ferraro, Deaf Kids, Nadah El Shazly and Dälek are a few of the artists confirmed at OUT.FEST in Barreiro
The OUT.FEST – Barreiro International Exploratory Music Festival is already scheduled to return between October 3rd and 5th, and in this year’s edition has names like James Ferraro, Deaf Kids, Nadah El Shazly, Dälek, and Gabriel Ferrandini with the Camerata musical do Barreiro
James Ferraro is an American musician, producer, vocalist and contemporary artist who has been credited as a pioneer of hypnagogic pop and vaporwave. His works, primarily studio albums, but also including poems and art installations, are known for exploring subjects such as hyperreality and consumer culture.
Ferraro began his career in the early 2000s as a member of the Californian noise duo The Skaters, after which he began recording solo work under his name and a wide variety of aliases. He released projects on labels such as Hippos in Tanks and New Age Tapes. Ferraro received wider recognition when his polarizing 2011 album Far Side Virtual was chosen as Album of the Year by The Wire.
A powerful and sonically diverse experimental rock band, Deaf Kids are a Brazilian group who channel heavy metal, noise rock, psychedelia, Latin and African music, and hardcore punk into a truly singular sound. Deaf Kids were formed in 2010 by guitarist Douglas Leal, a native of Volta Redonda in Rio de Janeiro, who originally conceived it as a one-man d-beat project. Recording on his own, Leal was prolific. In June 2011, Leal issued the first Deaf Kids release, a self-titled album, followed shortly by an EP titled 6 Heretic Anthems for the Deaf.
They received solid reviews for 2015’s Ao Longo dos Dias Um Tanto Danificado, and a tour of Europe was documented with the LP Live in Slovenija 2016. Enthusiastic blog posts about Deaf Kids and rave reviews for their 2016 cassette release Configuração do Lamento convinced Steve Von Till of Neurosis to check out their work, and he became an immediate fan. Von Till got in touch with the group and signed them to his Neurot Recordings label, reissuing Configuração do Lamento on vinyl and CD. Von Till also chose Deaf Kids to open Neurosis’ first show ever in Brazil, and their popularity helped them launch a headlining tour of South America.
Nadah El Shazly is an experimental Egyptian singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer. Her work both radically reinvents the popular music of her homeland from the early 20th century and explores new sonic and harmonic frontiers.
She took part in many projects on Egypt’s tight-knit but endlessly creative indie scene, where its musicians, regardless of genre, influenced one another. Shazaly began making a name for herself with her electronic productions. In late 2015 she began working on her debut album. She produced the date herself and enlisted keyboardist/guitarist Maurice Louca (of indie music supergroup Lekhfa) and Sam Shalabi, two-thirds of the Dwarfs of East Agouza (third member Alan Bishop did not appear on the recording). Working both in Egypt and Montreal (with engineer Thierry Amar of Godspeed You! Black Emperor) the album, comprised of five originals and a radically re-visioned cover of Sayyid Darwish’s 1940s pop standard “Ana ‘Ishiqt (I Once Loved),” the set was completed with a large cast of reed, woodwind, string, and percussion players. It was self-released as Ahwar in November of 2017, and received universal acclaim from the press; it also made numerous year-end best-of lists.
Dälek is an American experimental hip hop group formed in Newark, New Jersey in 1998. The group originated in the New Jersey DIY scene of the mid-1990s, based around a studio lineup of Dälek (Will Brooks), Oktopus (Alap Momin) and Joshua Booth. In December 2016, Ipecac Recordings announced that they had re-signed Dälek. Their most recent album, Endangered Philosophies, was released in August 2017. Spyros Stasis of PopMatters described it as an ‘enticing and alluring’ mix of ‘hip-hop, krautrock, noise and shoegaze’.Paul Simpson of AllMusic found it ‘equally abrasive and hypnotic’ and ‘bracing yet beautiful’.
Dälek’s music is dark, noisy and atmospheric, equally inspired by industrial music like Einstürzende Neubauten, the layered noise of My Bloody Valentine and the dense sound collages of Public Enemy. Their sound is often constructed through sampling and a musical base atypical of most hip hop, making it difficult for people to classify their sound. They have been described as trip hop, glitch hop, metal, shoegaze, and hip hop, as well as being criticized for their broad range of sound.
Drummer and increasingly an artist and composer in his own right, Gabriel Ferrandini became one of the great drummers and free jazz and improvisation musicians in Europe in just a few short years, sharing the stage with… practically everybody who matters, all by his own merit. He also started working on compositions created under his own baton, particularly during his residency at Galeria Zé dos Bois, which led to the formation of the trio Volúpia das Cinzas with Hernâni Faustino on the double bass and Pedro Sousa on the saxophone. The trio just released their debut album ‘Volúpias’ through Clean Feed. Following that, his recent staging of his first theatre play (!) at the Teatro Nacional Dona Maria II and his residency at Matadero de Madrid, where he presented a piece for percussion/drums and a wind ensemble, the next step is strings in Barreiro , where the city’s Camerata Musical will be working on a new project with this unrelenting luminary of the Portuguese musical landscape. This new piece is titled ‘Kimbo Slice’ (after the bahamian-american boxer), presented as a rendition of Sinatra’s ‘Only the Lonely’. Vocals under the wing of the new gutter poet, Miguel Abras.