Semibreve 2024: Shida Shahabi + Kevin Richard Martin

Shida Shahabi
presents Living Circle

Main Room 9:30 PM 
 
Since her debut in 2018 with Homes, Shida Shahabi has stayed away from full-length albums, but has continued to produce an important and extensive body of work, especially for cinema. It wasn’t until her second album, Living Circle, was released last year that we were finally able to chart a fictitious but solid map of the very important place her music holds in our lives. At the same time, it may even have given us a new understanding of her detour into cinema, for perhaps it was the task of creating musical backdrops for other people’s stories that provided her with the appropriate grammar to compose the Living Circle, a stunning soundtrack to our own images. Born out of improvisation, but finished with the refined technique of an artisan, Living Circle is an expansive yet intimate work, full of dreamy little nooks and crannies where unexpected textures and surfaces create the perfect path for a journey without duration or defined geography from which we don’t want to return.

Kevin Richard Martin
presents Black
*world premiere

Main Room 11 PM
 
Amy Winehouse’s life and death made front page headlines and inspired countless homages from fans, admirers and observers worldwide. Few tributes, however, have had the artistic relevance of Kevin Richard Martin’s Black. The British musician, who also goes by the name of The Bug in numerous other projects and collaborations, doesn’t hide the fact that his admiration for Winehouse’s art came rather late. And yet the tragic conditions in which she lived and, above all, in which she died inspired him to create a sonic memorial capable of evoking the spirit of Back to Black and the artist’s enlightened passage through this world. Black a powerful treatise on tragedy and loss, lovelessness and helplessness in free fall, slow-motioned like a dark, ghostly dream. In his own words, KRM serves us an eerie cocktail of spectral jazz, shoegaze drone and dubbed-out ambient music, and at this edition of Semibreve we have the honour and the privilege of taking part in this intense ceremony before anyone else.