Backrooms X Czarnagora: Transient Narrations – Concert with Yes Indeed and Ruhail Qaisar

Transient Narrations
Yes Indeed and Ruhail Qaisar
​15 October, 9pm

Dealing with memory can be cumbersome. Be it remembering itself or writing down the fleeting images and moods. How does one formulate it and how can one notify it in such a way that it can be unequivocally revived later without misdirecting the associations? Does it make any difference if one expands the described space of experiences and handed-down memories by including new associative spaces? And are there differences in storing experience and remembering bad and good moments? Perhaps it can be healing to record them. Perhaps a free improvised approach, a transient narration, is the most appropriate form of a description for these moments.

Music duo Yes Indeed takes on diary-like, epic dialectics with spontaneous wit and emotional samples, using cheeky sounds, some of which they create analogue, to create experimental pieces of music that they describe themselves as “fuggy and soaring, deliciously out of place”. The duo consists of Laurie Tompkins and Otto Willberg. Tompkins is a composer, runs the music label Slip and has released CDs on Entr'acte, 33-33 and Hyperdelia this year. Willberg is a bassist, plays in groups with Ashley Paul & Charles Hayward and has released an LP with his band Historically Fucked under the label Upset The Rhythm.

Ruhail Qaisar explores the confines of memory, intergenerational trauma and the operational swarm of the unconscious by incorporating vernacular poetic gestures and improvisation into his compositions. Qaisar is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist and producer from Ladakh, India. His work focuses on sound art and experimental filmmaking. Since 2016, he has been performing across India under his former name Sister and with his death metal band Vajravarah.

The event is a collaboration between Backrooms and the internationally operating label Czarnagora, which makes an important contribution to Zurich's small underground music scene.

Venue: Kunsthalle Zürich, basement
Limmatstrasse 270, 8005 Zurich

Image: Rafał Skoczek, 2022