Faradena Afifi / Steve Beresford / Paul Khimasia Morgan
Bee Reiki
UK DISCUS MUSIC DISCUS 173CD (2024)
Contemporary improvised music from the UK recorded in 2022. Faradena Afifi is a new name to me, but it’s an understatement to say she’s a breath of fresh air in the culture of free improvisation. With her background, her interests and activities, she’s opening up a lot of spaces; she describes herself as neuro-divergent, comes from mixed Afghan-British heritage, and applies her T’ai Chi and music skills in a healing context, operating in that specialist area that can help people with learning difficulties or with brain injuries. In this practice, she overlaps with Dave Knott of Seattle, another life-long improviser who attests to the healing properties of music. Faradena Afifi was also founder of The Noisy Women Present, a platform which not only redresses gender balance inequalities in the genre of improvised music, but aims to provide a space for diversity and inclusivity.
All of these benign qualities, along with her faith in the power of nature and birdsong, are in evidence in her contributions (viola, violin and voice) to these eight improvisations, where the spirit of Maggie Nicols, one of her personal mentors, acts as an audible guide. Afifi’s work shines here, given a respectful and delicate framework by the contributions of Steve Beresford – a founding father of the London Musicians Collective – on piano, electronics, and toys, plus of course the low-key guitar-body and electronics minimalism of Paul Khimasia Morgan. Bee Reiki apparently started out as Zoom meetings, when Beresford and Morgan met up online during lockdown; they went from talking about the pandemic and discussing the grim prospects for live improvised music, and moved on to attempting to create improvised duos online. The technology let them down for all sorts of reasons, introducing glitches and drop-outs galore. It perhaps might have been interesting if they’d attempted to restage these unwanted technological errors on this session, but instead it went in another direction. You’ll be glad it did. (18/04/2024)