Saint Abdullah, Eomac & Rebecca Salvadori present: A Forbidden Distance

Presenting their brand new project called 'A Forbidden Distance', Iranian-Canadian brothers Mohammad and Mehdi Mehrabani-Yeganeh (aka Saint Abdullah), Irish producer and sound designer Ian McDonnell (aka Eomac), and Italian-Australian video artist and filmmaker Rebecca Salvadori will collaborate on an audio-visual experience that analyses the fragmentary collective and individual experience of stories.

With a stunningly varied sprawl of releases on labels such as Important Records, PTP, Room40 and Psychic Liberation, Saint Abdullah have spent the last few years analysing the sonic signature of Shia Islam and abstracting it with psychedelic blots of ambient music, jazz, hip-hop and dub. In 2022, they joined forces with Eomac on 'Patience of a Traitor' for Nicolas Jaar's Other People imprint, following it up a year later with the acclaimed 'Chasing Stateless' on Planet Mu and juxtaposing micro-edited samples of Middle Eastern life with intricate, powdery polyrhythmic beats.

Owner of the Eotrax label, McDonnell cut his teeth working alongside Dara Smith as one half of Lakker before branching out as Eomac a few years later. And although his solo productions are often indebted to club music, taking inspiration from 2-step, techno, dubstep and hip-hop, he disrupts these frameworks with advanced experimental sound design techniques and a deep sense of introspection. That aspect was never more evident than on 2021's 'Cracks', a warped dancefloor meditation filled with rubbery beats, pulverised samples and thoughtful political observations.

Over the last 15 years, London-based Salvadori has used her passion for experimental music to feed her daring experimental film work, amalgamating documentary with video art. She's part of the international curatorial team of Bern's Norient Festival, and has travelled the world examining different aspects of club music. From 2017 to 2020, she put together 'Rave Trilogy', linking electronic music in Sheffield and London with work made in Morocco's Agafay Desert, and last year, Salvadori reflected on the nature of friendship and music with 'Messengers'.

Commissioned by TIMES* – the Independent Movement for Electronic Scenes.

*TIMES (The Independent Movement for Electronic Scenes) is a cooperation project that gathers 10 festivals for original music and visual arts’ creations. Besides sharing curations (artists and speakers) and TIMES’ original creations, the cooperation aims at working together for a better respect of both people and planet in the music sector. TIMES is a collaboration between Arty Farty/Nuits sonores (FR), Berlin Atonal (DE), Elevate (AT), Insomnia (NO), Le Guess Who? (NL), Semibreve (PT), Reworks (GR), Sónar (ES), Terraforma (IT), Unsound (PL) and our audiovisual partner Creative Broadcast (RO). This cooperation is built on the previous project We are Europe (2014-2020). Co-funded by European Union.