

SIHR
post-anything quartet
After a few concerts/screenings improvised as a duo in Cairo and Beirut, as well as for the Rencontres d’Arles, the Lille photography center and the Belgian magazine Halogénure, Dargent and Oberland have teamed up with mavericks Elieh and Halal for a puzzling cross-border manifesto. The first sonic moves of this eclectic quartet, made in a bunker studio somewhere between Paris and Berlin, urgently took the form of a quest, that of a neo-folklore for troubled times, a music seeping with many kinds of atavism and experimenting in all directions. A fertile no-man’s-land where trance and contemplation, jazz and electronica, acoustics and electricity would merge in a stimulating mystical magma.
From the possible emergence of a Babelian language to the shared desire to rediscover music as a ceremonial act, this encounter took place over three days of improvised sound bacchanalia, the phases of which were all recorded by Benoit Bel (Zombie Zombie, Thurston Moore Group, Oiseaux-Tempête).
A hallucinated and generous testimony, SIHR is a synergy of many different worlds and many different possibilities, the sonic vision of a present conjugated in a hybrid tense and exalted by too many tangos danced on the glowing ashes of our days.

Released on label Sub Rosa
Distribution Kuroneko
Recorded by Benoit Bel (assisted by Didier Houbre) at Downtown Studio april 2022
Edit byFrédéric D. Oberland at Magnum Diva octobre 2023
Mix & master (digital) by Benoit Bel en janvier 2024
Master vinyle et laquer byFrançois Terrazzoni
Photos byr Frédéric D. Oberland & Grégory Dargent
Graphisme by Mountain
Grégory Dargent: oud, guitare électrique, synthé analogique, métaux
Frédéric D. Oberland: synthé modulaire, buchla, boite à rythmes, sax alto, guitare électrique, voix
Tony Elieh: basse électrique, synthé
Wassim Halal: darbuka, bendirs, percussions, effets.

