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>> The music of Toronto’s John Kameel
Farah reaches far and wide

MAKING CONNECTIONS: John Kameel Farah

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

“After silence,” the writer Aldous Huxley famously remarked, “that which comes closest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” That space between the concrete and the utterly abstract is one that Toronto-based musician and artist John Kameel Farah has, perhaps quixotically, challenged himself to chart.

His work—for instance, the material on his debut CD Creation—speaks of the ancient past and unperceivable future, the micro and the macro, antibodies and heavenly bodies and astral bodies. “It’s so many things connecting to each other,” Farah explains, “like a gigantic Venn diagram, but 3D somehow, where everything is somehow still, in an optical illusion, containing each other.”

The same can be said of the actual sonic components of Farah’s music, which is grounded in his extensive classical training (he won the Glenn Gould Composition Scholarship twice, and later studies with Terry Riley) yet informed by Middle Eastern ideas, the improvisation of jazz, the hypermodernism of electronica and the possibilities of avant-garde experimentalism. If your eyes are glazing over, know this—it’s also highly accessible and unpretentious, and unlikely yet inspired collaborations are par for the course (a gifted visual artist himself, Farah has recently worked extensively with photographer Eamon MacMahon, whose visuals will accompany Farah’s performance, shared with Sam Shalabi, this weekend). His mission, it would seem, is seeking out engaging new ground as his academically venerated resources gradually petrify.

“The more I read history, the more I realize that every new civilization or empire or movement that comes about, from the beginning of recorded history, is always fresh and breaks with the old patterns. Of course, then it becomes stale and rigid, and unable to adapt, and assumes the same superstructure of what came before it. There’s a period of quivering freshness that’s there for a while, and then it’s hijacked or becomes solely, paranoidly jealous of maintaining its power, and there ceases to be any movement forward.

“That’s what happens in music, and this is coming from someone who revels in 16th-century keyboard music, but I try to look for what was moving forward in it. At the same time, I’m not out to just do something new, because that’s the Achilles heel of modern classical music. It’s become obsessed with newness for its own sake, rather than doing something that really achieves a different state of mind.”

Often tailoring his performances quite specifically, Farah has been opening minds all over, from the Om Festival out in the woods to the Edward Said National Conservatory in Ramallah, from tiny hipster cafés to the Great Pyramid in Cholula, Mexico. The latter was a collaboration with astronomer John Dubinski, for whose gobsmacking galactic imagery Farah created an equally awe-inspiring score (go to www.galaxydynamics.org to take a gander).

“I think of my music more in the context of civilization, rather than just purely music. I always try to look to the largest scale that my brain, my capacity, can comprehend. I mean, I would even look at the parameters of galaxies as limiting, because that’s the largest physical and time context that we can think of. But the emotional is an infinite dimension to go into, and that’s the whole purpose of music, for me. Even if you’re doing something intellectually, it’s to affect you, in the end, emotionally.”

With Sam Shalabi at Casa del Popolo
on Saturday, July 28, 9 p.m., $6