Aida Nadeem
(born in 1965 in Baghdad, Iraq). Denmark composer, musician, singer & a performer. At the age of twelve she began her studies of the bassoon at the prestigious Academy for Music and Ballet in Baghdad. Accordingly, her repertoire consisted of both classical and avant-garde music, while Arabic music remained an integral part of her sound world, as a natural element of everyday life. At the time, the primary sources of inspiration for her were composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Arthur Honegger. Later she gained employment with Iraq's symphony orchestra. Aida Nadeem moved to Denmark in 1991 and enrolled at the Royal Danish Academy of Music. The sources of inspiration included the work of artists as diverse as Bill Laswell, Nina Hagen, Transglobal Underground and Talvin Singh. The ingredients of her music were experimental electronic beats, oriental sound surfaces and most especially, a new and powerful vocal expression, with Arabic and Turkmen as the lyrical and language-related context. Through this project, she gained international recognition and participation at important European music festivals like Womad, Cambridge, Glastonbury & Roskilde. Out of Baghdad served for a many-faceted collaboration with artists from many different parts of the world and specifically with Aki Nawaz, The jungle Orchestra, The Angel Brothers & the controversial Lebanese poet Jumana Hadad.
Selected recordings: CD Out of Baghdad, 2005; CD Beyond Destruction, 2013; Live Out Loud, 2010; The track Baghdad Al Salaam: which was exclusively written for Amnesty International/ Spain 2009. The short Film, music by her: A space Exodu, 2008, The short film: Nation Estate, 2013.
Contacts: www.aidanadeem.com | www.myspace.com/aidanadeem/
Alexandra Zarandrea Nilsson
(born 1979), is a Swedish composer and trumpeter who composes film and theatre music as well as sound art. She studied at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm and graduated with a Bachelor Degree in 2008. Nilsson also studied in the Master program in film scoring, a new education Royal College of Music and DI (the Dramatic Institute), and graduated in 2010. As a musician she has played in many different styles such as Big Band, salsa, folk music, EAM and as a composer she has written music for various short films. Nilsson has great interest in sounds and live electronics. She was nominated for the Unheard Film Festival in Amsterdam in 2009 for her piece Cookies - save me, a piece for only trumpet along with analog effects. She lived and studied in Havana, Cuba in 2002-2004 where she studied trumpet, timbale and arranging at Instituto Superior de Arte, Habana Cuba. In Cuba she directed and wrote for a 13-piece salsa band. Nilsson also traveled in Mexico and filmed, recorded sounds and folklore. Her plans are to continue this work in other Latin American countries. In her works for big bands she is inspired by composers such as Don Ellis, Gil Evans and Frank Zappa.
Selected works: Cookies - save me, for trumpet.
Awards, selection: 2008 SKAP (Swedish Composers of Popular Music)
Bojana Nikolić
(born in Belgrade, 15th September 1984), ethnomusicologist, singer, composer. She finished her Master’s Degree at the Ethnomusicology Department of the Faculty of Music Arts in Belgrade and has been for many years actively engaged in the field of researching vocal techniques from the whole of the Balkans regions, especially Serbian and Bulgarian styles. She performed over 200 concerts at home and abroad (America, Canada, Mexico, Luxemburg, Belgium, Netherland, France, Hungary, China, India, Italy etc), and collaborated with numerous musicians and world music ensembles, such as: ''Sanja Ilic & Balkanika'' (Serbia), Teodosi Spassov (Bulgaria), Palya Bea (Hungary), ''Hazari'' (Serbia) etc. She founded her own world music group in december 2008, with which she perform the music of the Balkans. On the group’s repertory there are songs from all areas of Serbia - Vojvodina, Sumadija, Kosovo and Metohija, Western and Eastern Serbia as well as the songs from the areas of the former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Greece and Romania. In 2010 she became a part of new international group ''Taram'' with: Tuur Florizoon (Belgium), Mohammed Antar (Egypt), Bogusz Wekka (Poland), Mihaly Gyorgy (Hungary) and Oriol Gonzales (Spain). She arranged many traditional folk melodies and for her last album she composed the song “Moja zemlja” which is inspired by traditional music from the Balkans.
Recordings: S kolena na kolen; Balkan concept; Trojanac; Serbian ethno sound I & II; Biber; Carski dru.
Contact: www.bojananikolic.rs
