Farida Amadou / Jesper Nordberg

Farida Amadou (b.1989) is a self taught bass player based in Liège, Belgium. The electric bass is her main instrument since 2011. In 2013, she has started to play a lot of different musical genres, including blues, jazz and hip-hop. The same year, she had a big interest on improvised music when she met L’Oeil Kollectif members and started to play with percusionnist/ drummer Tom Malmendier. Nystagmus duo was born in late 2014.

Since 2014, she has performed with many musicians all over Europe: Linda Sharrock, Mario Rechtern, Balasz Pandi, Karl H. Bjora, Jasper Stadhouders, Onno Govaert, Eve Risser, Morgane Carnet, Philippe Lemoine, Timothée Quost, Julien Desprez, Olivier Benoit, Anil Eraslan, Mette Rasmussen, Basile Naudet, Chris Pitsiokos, Alex Ward, Thursthon Moore, etc.

End of 2017, Farida Amadou has joined the punk/noise band ‘COCAINE PISS’. A few months later, Cocaine Piss recorded their album « Passionate and Tragic » at Electrical Audio Studios in Chicago, with Steve Albini. After two years in the band, Farida decided to leave the band (early 2019). In May 2018, she has started a new duo project with the drummer based in London, Steve Noble, including trio collaborations with Alex Ward on clarinet, Chris Pitsiokos on saxophone, ex Sonic Youth’s guitarist Thurston Moore on guitar and recently with the free jazz pioneer Peter Brötzmann.

Farida Amadou was also part of the OORSTOF series (curated by SoundInMotion – Antwerp) project with Ken Vandermark and his band MARKER. For the second part on the year 2019, Farida Amadou has focused on her solo performance, and experimented different collaboration simultaneously. She started playing duo with Floris Vanhoof (modular synth), another duo with Pavel Tchikov (guitar). Amadou and Tchikov released a tape called ‘Mal de terre’ on the Chicago based label trouble in Minds records on November 2021. Later in 2021, commissioned by Europalia, Farida created a sound installation with the support of Overtoon, QO2 and ateliers claus. 2022 will be a year of touring and new album making.

—

Jesper Nordberg is a young double bass player, based in Malmö, SE and Copenhagen, DK, where he has studied at the Rhythmic Music Conservatory. He has worked with a number of prominent European jazz musicians, such as Jesper Zeuthen (DK), Tomasz Dabrowski (PL) and Michala Østergaard Nielsen (DK). With a big tone and characteristic feel for rhythmical changes and displacements, he has established himself as a individual voice at the jazz scenes of Copenhagen and Malmö. He takes big interest in folk music from the Balkans, and has collaborated with musicians from Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia and Romania.

On his debut solo album, Jesper manifests an aesthetic concept based on physicality, intuition and melodic poetry. The improvisations breath, sometimes powerful, sometimes fragile, and morphs in an organic way between different moods and conditions. The eclectic music gives the listener associations to South-East European folklore, Swedish vocal tradition, 60’s avant garde jazz and expressionist classical music.