Kharfasha

Low-fi orchestra of speakers

artwork: Menna Hesham

Kharfasha is a low-fi version of an acousmonium, made of old, crappy loudspeakers, car woofers and megaphones.
The idea was to repurpose old or cheap audio devices and play with the space in combination with the peculiar timbre and color of each speaker.
The aesthetic of this experiment focuses on the imperfections, on the crackles, the buzzes and the distorsion, more than on the “fidelity” and quality of the audio. The idea is to reflect on how the spatial and the technical aspects can influence the experience of sound, and be considered as complementary categories worthy to be explored, when composing music.
For this, I was deeply inspired by the experience I had at the mawlids and dhikrs in Egypt, during the last two years. In this context, the low-fi audio equipment deployed has brought specific characteristics to sound – heavy saturation,
feedbacks, whistles, crackles – that have become part of the aesthetic of that music, together with strong reverberation and delay.

The diffusion was hosted at UG social, Cairo (Egypt).