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Hassan Khan: The Big One, 2009
The most recent work of the artist, musician and performer is a musical interpretation of socio-cultural contrasts and class distinctions. His concert “The Big One” is built on the intensive sounds and rhythms of the synthesizer-based music of New Wave Shaabi. Shaabi, literally speaking, has the meaning “of the people” and is the popular music style of the Cairo working class. Khan takes up these features and mixes them with subtly adapted sounds. The wide range of the culturally and instrumentally varying realizations, on the one hand, criticises the notions of high and low and, on the other hand, re-stages socio-cultural contrasts in a new and provocative way. Thus, this music is lively and wild, kitschy and disrespectful, sentimental and vigorous, melodic and dissonant at the same time. Hassan Khan interprets the composition “as the expression of an artistic hope, directed against the mentally debilitating excesses of that mainstream culture which varnishes their fears and desires for social grade-ups in each and every pop video clip or mobile phone advertisement.”
“The Big One” is, in itself, an im/possible community. On the one hand, it uses a popular, collectively produced musical format that thematises the historical roots and the class roots of its origin, uses and transforms them. On the other hand, it is mixed with a – superficially speaking – rather individualistic modern usage of sound turning tones into, so to speak, pure sounds.
http://www.hassankhan.com/
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im/possible community