houaïda

2018

The digital content distribution of the Berlin artist houaïda obeys the laws of scarcity. Her Soundcloud page announces “Nothing to hear here”; YouTube delivers zero official results; likewise, nothing but radio silence on Spotify and Apple Music. Only one single channel attests to the bustling activity of the producer, composer, performer, and physics graduate: a Facebook profile announces houaïda’s diverse collaborations as a curator of the series home_A Transonic Journey at the Gorki Theater, a member of the performance group Talking Straight, a live musician alongside TSF alumna Allie, and a part of Holly Herndon’s hyper-holistic vocal ensemble. In all of these various contexts, houaïda is concerned with the dissolution of rigid structures in sound and performance, the disentanglement of music from categorization, and the creation of hybrid, amorphous, and transformative expressive forms. In support of this, houaïda sings in a fictitious language of her own making, called “Eurab,” and delves with this beguiling, never-to-be-deciphered vocabulary into the mystical, erratic depths of pop, RnB, and noise. In its moments of comprehensibility, houaida’s sound recalls RnB avant-gardists like FKA Twigs or Kelela, but she only evades attempts at classification in the very next moment, bound for a post-global utopia of multifarious tonal colors.